Your House is on Fire and your Children all Gone

In those dark days before the internet became ubiquitous – when only the mightiest sultans, emperors and corporate zillionaires had ready access to WebCrawler and Infoseek – finding out stuff was an onerous task. If the information wasn’t located in the musty family World Book set (a sort of shit, cloth bound, proto-internet that insinuated itself into every house in Ireland), or in the brittle and yellowing pages of the local dentist’s three ancient National Geographic(s), then one had little choice but to wallow (like a gormless, wailing pig-person) in wretched ignorance.

Actually, there was one other source. Ladybird. That iconic publisher of pocket-ish-sized storehouses of knowledge. Series 737 was a personal favourite of mine when I was a lad. Devoted Ladybird site “The Wee Web” explains its thrill-stuffed appeal:

Lots of interesting subjects were tackled in this series – the history of Bread and how it was made through the ages…

Cor! Tell me more!

But seriously, if it hadn’t been for Great Artists (Books 1-3) I’d have mortifyingly flunked Leaving Cert Art History.

Not only were they about “great art” (i.e. the art of old dead white guys), they contained great art. Like this lurid action shot of a mental Van Gogh stalking Paul Gauguin with a cut-throat razor.

Chuckle! What a character.