Sunday 8 August 2010

Car Boot Book Fest.

I went to Fontwell Car Boot Sale today.
I had £2.50 in my pocket and intended getting as many things as I could carry back to the car.
On arriving and wandering down the first row I passed a stack of real rubbish owned by a guy loudly encouraging people to take anything they wanted for free.

I wrestled myself through to the stack of stuff and found these books:
Flights Into The Future was published in 1948.
It's a mix of speculative discussions about the possibility of manned space flight and S/F fiction stories of the time.
It's hilarious and I intend serialising a couple of the stories with illustration here very soon.

Hobbies New Annual must date from around the same period.
Here are some of the stand-out projects:

VII:      Transparent Mysteries
XI:       A Home Cinema Projector
XVII:   Chemical Amusements
XIX:    X-Ray Photographs At Home
XXIII: Home-made Fireworks

I'll be posting all the above here in the coming weeks.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have similar.
In one of them it tells you...
"How to make a killing jar for butterflies" (complete with a warning not to breath the fumes oneself!)
Other hobbies of the time included "Collecting the eggs of wild birds" and "Constructing a wireless receiver". This came with the advice to stay legal by applying for a radio reception licence: "while you await a reply from the Postmaster General you can gather the parts necessary for your set."

Orlando.

P. Tash said...

Nice finds there OSM, well spotted that man!

I shall look forward to reading your excerpts in the near future :-)

Anonymous said...

It's been bugging me why the name F.J. Camm is so familiar so I looked him up on Wikipedia. Of course! He started Practical Wireless magazine among others. After blowing the dust off my shelf of ham radio books, I find I have one of his - A Beginners Guide to Radio printed in 1959. The page showing electronic component symbols used in circuit diagrams has some very exotic looking thermionic valves, but there's no transistor!

Orlando.