Title – Piccolo Explorer Books - Mysteries - Ghosts
Authors – Words by David Lambert. Illustrations by Harry Bishop
Publisher - Pan Books.
Format - soft back
Year - 1981
Original Cost – 0.75p
I think these kinds of books were made just for staring at!
I've got a small selection of the Piccolo Explorer series but being as I'm on a bit of a supernatural curve at the minute, what with rereading my Hellblazer comics, this seemed like the best one to start with.
I was around 13 when I got this and if I read it at the time I don't remember a single word or story. Picture-wise though, they are all still in there; tattooed on the brain.
The best sections for me now, as an adult, are the last two: Ghost Hunting and What Ghosts Are. You can clearly hear the author and the publisher washing their hands of all responsibilities for any childhood nightmares by being very level headed and skeptical about the whole idea of Ghosts even being a real thing anyway. Its an excellent example of having your cake and eating it, especially after 10 double page spreads of cinematic sinisterness. But they knew what dark doors they opened up for us and we loved them for it then and now
This is one of those books that you probably got rid of when you turned into cool teenager or a serious young adult. But when you've grown past all that, you find yourself seeking them out again because the images have haunted the back of your childhood memories for the intervening decades. Looking though its pages again now is to be instantly transported back to when you were that wide-eyed child and both excited and scared at the possibility of your own encounter with something from beyond the grave.
There was only you and those pictures and you looked at them for so long that you traveled into them... and they into you.
Brilliant Brilliant stuff.
Steve
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