Saturday, April 25, 2015

Pictorial Puppetry

In the late 1960s I used to have a weekly children's partwork magazine called Pictorial Knowledge. I recently came across my collection of them and thought this issue might be of interest to collectors of cult tv memorabilia. Pictorial Knowledge was a junior educational magazine covering pretty much everything it could, and one of the articles in this 1969 issue was on puppets. 

The Scott Tracy cover photo was a little misleading if anyone was expecting an article on Gerry Anderson, but the feature inside did include a couple of production shots. Too bad they refer to "Captain Scarlet of Thunderbirds" in the text. The article is quite lightweight but informative enough for the young readers it was intended for. Here it is...




Incidentally, you may have noticed that the cover price of 3/6d (17 and a half pence) was incredibly expensive for a 24 page magazine in 1969, when the average price of comics was 7d (3p) and the more in-depth Look and Learn was 1/6d (7 and a half pence). My parents were certainly not well off (we lived in a council house, my dad lost his job through ill health at this time, and my mum was only working part time) so I think my aunt must have bought it for me every week. At any rate, I lost interest in the mag after a year or so and switched to Look and Learn. Although that was mainly for the Trigan Empire comic strip I must admit.  

6 comments:

  1. This is interesting, because in the early 60's my parents used to buy one for me, but mine was called just "Knowledge". I was fascinated in learning, I only had the one issue of L&L, then when Knowledge came out I chose that instead. I had the full set, but in later years dissected them for school projects! My parents had figured on them helping me out with my homework in later years

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  2. I seem to remember 'Knowledge'. I think that's the mag that teachers encouraged us to buy, but I may be thinking of something else.

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    1. After it finished there was another one called "Understanding Science". I had the first issue, but didn't stick with it.

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  3. I remember one called All About Science. I had the first couple of issues.

    I have a stack of various partworks from that era. Perhaps I should post some samples here? Not comics, but might be of historical interest.

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    1. Yes please to that from me! There's no harm in taking a step sidewards!
      It all recaptures our youth!.
      Someone was once selling all the issues of Knowledge individually on EBay at inflated prices. Too rich for me, but the covers brought back memories!

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  4. I'll sort it out sometime. Hopefully they'll be of interest to everyone, not just nostalgics.

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