The Silver Pencil and other special books

I've had some marvellous parcels, these past few days. Ebay and Amazon Used and New have reunited me with a couple of childhood favourites - both from 1978 (the year of The Key to Time, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Grease, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the Battlestar Galactica novelisation...)

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a present from my Mam and step dad at Christmas that year, or maybe my birthday. It was after that tidal wave of excitement about Star Wars and all the follow-ons from that. This lavishly illustrated book offered a kind of context for my obsession with sf and showed me what a long and distinguished history the genre had - all of which had been sampled and referenced by George Lucas. Best thing about the book were the mind-blowing paintings. They were magnificently creepy: screaming egg-headed aliens in front of exploding stars. Weirdly shaped spaceships wheeling across gaudy skies. Barbarella types wrestling giant snakes in tar pits on distant moons. Lizard men landing their space ship at the site of the crucifixion. I don't think I read a single whole chapter from this whole (rather earnest and scholarly, it turns out) book. But I was transported by the pictures, every time I peeked inside. And the glimpses of stills from those Fifties films were formative, too - they are still the impetus behind my ongoing marathon (This Sunday night was for 'Tarantula!')

The other reunion came courtesy of this blogging habit, actually. Nick at 'A Pile of Leaves' did some googling 'in an idle moment', as he said - and actually found the book I mentioned the other day! When I wrote my piece about not remembering titles and author names of books loved in childhood - and lost forever. Well, 'The Captain Hook Affair' by Humphrey Carpenter was the book I borrowed several times from Newton Aycliffe library in the late Seventies and have never seen since - until this morning. It's the one about the silver pencil that can bring fictional characters to life. I'll report on it fully when I've reread it yet again!