June and School Friend Book of Heroines 1970

I picked this up yesterday for £2. Published by IPC Magazines in 1969. The price is still in at 10’6. June and School Friend were girls’ comics.

Joan of Arc is the main story – told in comic-strip form and taking up 24 pages spread through the book.

There are loads of inspiring stories of female derring do, self sacrifice and adventure. Including Edith Cavell, Queen Zenobia, Anna Leonowens (she of The King and I), Grace Bussell (Australian shipwreck rescuer), Gertrude Bell, Flora MacDonald and many others.

Here’s Violette Szabo – another long comic strip.

 

Gladys Aylward. This is the story the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman is based on.

 

This is Grace Darling.

 

Suffragettes.

 

And someone I hadn’t heard of – Louise Sutherland – who cycled around the world solo in the 1950s.

Advertisement

More Alice in Wonderland themed books

Alice-themed books

Today I picked up two Alice in Wonderland -themed books.

The first is Toys from Alice in Wonderland by Margaret Hutchings with Doris Cook. It was published in 1979 by Mills & Boon. It contains a selection of toys based on the original illustrations. There are wonderful felt Red and White Queens in their chess-piece guise, a Rocking-Horse-Fly and a collection of ‘thimble toys’ using some of the animals from the pool of tears (Mouse, eaglet, Dodo, etc). Most of them are more models for display, rather than toys for playing with, but you can make an Alice with an extending neck made out of lolly sticks.

The second book is The Other Alice – The Story of Alice Liddell and Alice in Wonderland by Christina Björk and Inga-Karin Eriksson, translated from Swedish and published in (American) English by R&S Books in 1993. This is a fascinating illustrated book about Charles Dodgson, the Liddell family and the writing of the Alice books. The story is told mainly in narrative form, but with excursions into how to make a handkerchief rabbit (complete with diagrams), a spread on Dodgson’s photographs and what happened to everyone after Alice.