Comic Cuts — 4 February 2022

I should know by now, but every time I try to guesstimate how long something is going to take, I should immediately double the time and then add another day. I started the week with incredibly good intentions to get the scanning I mentioned last week out of the way. I could, I thought knock the whole thing out on Monday, and check over everything on Tuesday and do any final touches.

By the end of Monday I was about a quarter of the way through the job after spending a chunk of the day answering mail, shuffling some large files off onto external hard drives to give myself some work space, and generally larking about. Tuesday was slightly better, although one of the books I was scanning required a lot more work than I had hoped. On Wednesday I actually managed to finish one of the books, checked and double-checked... only two more to sign off, which I did on Thursday.

Four days slog, not two of laid back tinkering and relaxing reading. It's a good job I had something to hand that kept me entertained.

The Look and Learn Pictorial Museum is a huge, 450-page A4 hardcover with a delightful dust-jacket from a chromolithograph published with the Christmas number of Pick-Me-Up in 1892. It's a good example of the unexpected kind of image that the Look and Learn Picture Library has tucked away in its locker. The book contains 5,000 images, roughly 11 per page, randomly selected and presented, so you will never know what might appear next with each turn of the page.

Editor and owner of the Picture Library, Laurence Heyworth, uses his introduction to discuss the founding the the company, its aims, and the aims of the book, firstly to promote the Picture Library by giving a taste of the over 500,000 images it holds, but also to give the reader a visual grab bag that can be enjoyed just for the delight of looking at beautiful artwork. Winnowing down from half a million to a few thousand meant taking some serious decisions, and something as seemingly simple as getting the artwork to fit the format with the minimum of cropping, which required a newly written algorithm to lay out the 1,344 columns that make up the book.

In practice, it means that each page has some unlikely juxtapositions that are always random and unexpected. To pick just one spread (pages 218-219): two men look over at the Boy's Own magazine he is reading (an image by John Hassall I recognise from the paperback cover of E. S. Turner's Boys Will Be Boys), a teddy bear from Teddy Bear, The Borrowers illustrated by Philip Mendoza, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from Look and Learn, portraits of Nostradamus, Elizabeth Siddal and Rossetti, paintings of the Battle of Blenheim, Evangeline, Greek dancers, kittens, Nineveh (by Ron Embleton), a Christening party, a tree surgeon, a fallow deer, chrysanthemums and a feast for a group of young chimney sweeps. There are also a couple of bizarre cartoons, one of two be-hatted artist manikins shaking hands and one of clothing making its way upstairs.

Every page has its own surprises and it's the kind of book, beautifully produced, that you can dip into at any time, drink in the delights and put down nearby, ready for another look later. I've had a copy sat next to me for a couple of days now and I'm entertained every time I glance into its treasures.

Look and Learn Pictorial Museum chosen by Laurence Heyworth
Look and Learn ISBN 978-095507722-7, 1 February 2022, 448pp, £60.00. Available via Book Palace.