Friday, June 18, 2010

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Harriett Springer

The "First Look" series of books were written by Millicent E. Selsam with occasional coauthors. Harriett Springer provided the illustrations for a number of the titles in the series, including 1982's A First Look at Dinosaurs.

A First Look at Dinosaurs
Whoever first owned this book had a case of the scribblies.

Theropod Line-up
A line up of theropods.

Duckbill Heads
Duckbill headshots.

Stegosaurus and Kentrosaurus
Spot the typo!

I haven't been able to find any good information about Springer, though according to the above link Selsam worked with Asimov on his "How Did We Find Out" series of science texts for young readers. The only one of those titles I've found is How Did We Find Out About Atoms?. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for the dinosaur entry in the series.

3 comments:

  1. Another beautiful old book. The nostalgia hit with these is quite big!
    These images remind me of the National Geographic illustrations from August 1978 with art by Roy Andersen.
    I have still got a copy of a brilliant book you might want to feature: 'Sea Monsters of Long Ago' by Millicent E. Selsam, illustrations by John Hamberger. This was a fantastic book that made prehistoric sea monsters truly scary... and accurate too!

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  2. If you can scan in any of that book without damaging the spine, I'd love to feature it. Let me know if you get the chance to do it. If you're a flickr user, you can add them to the Vintage Dinosaur Art pool I started, or I can add them myself if you send them to me. The more images the better. Hopefully it will provide these illustrators a bit of visibility!

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  3. As I remember Azimov's books for Walker, or at least some of them, were illustrated by David Wool. David, Harriett, and I lived in rent controlled apartments in the same building in Manhattan's East Twenties.

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