I’m still sifting through the home library and TBR searching for books I can bear to part with. Yesterday I came across more of my childhood books.
Astronomy and its companion volume Exploring the planets, both by Iain Nicholson and published in 1970, taught me all I needed to know about the universe back when I was ten. Astronomy covered the history of the subject before moving onto the solar system and stars with the all important star charts for spotting constellations. Exploring the planets centred on the solar system, space exploration, eclipses, seasons and the like.
I loved these two books, and they were included in my play library which I previously blogged about here - both bear the scars of staple marks from the library inserts, but the thing that tickled me this time was the address I’d written inside the front cover of Astronomy …
Did you ever do that as a kid?
Of course, I could have gone a lot further and exploited my geographical knowledge too … England, Great Britain, UK, Europe, but I rather like that I kept to astronomical locations with added ‘ax’. The ‘not soil’ was obviously my little ho, ho joke. I didn’t do the same in the other book, it just has my earthbound address of the time, maybe once was enough!
Yes I have similar inscriptions in my childhood books from when I was around the same age although I think I left it at the Universe – I wasn’t as space-minded as you!
I also have one of those is a couple of books, but I usually did: Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe
Hi Alex, (nice blog by the way). ‘Known Universe’ – very exact. In mine, I even got them in the wrong order back then – and I turned out to be a scientist too!
Brilliant address!
Earth (not soil) – that’s classic!
I used to do exactly that – and someone’s now written a book based on the concept! See http://amzn.to/mK82Op
“Tim Radford attempts to answer them by drafting in a technique he first used as a school-boy, when he wrote his address in the inside front cover of his exercise book every term, starting with the house number, the street name, the town, and proceeding upwards through levels of scale – the hemisphere, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy – until he reached the final line, the universe itself.”
That reminds me I used to have a big grown-up picture book which went up and down in powers of ten to get the scale of everything.
The Tim Radford book review is here http://bit.ly/lqq7Kr
I know I have a book somewhere with my own version in it but can’t find it at the moment.
Thanks Tom. Sounds an intriguing book reading your review, even if he manages to shoot his theory in the foot (re Hastings).
I totally did that as well! Though it would go Solar System, and then Milky Way (makes sense, no?)
And most of my childhood books have big, clumsy numbers written on them as well ! (I had a play library as well!)
I did get that the wrong way round, didn’t I!
As I recall it, it was the setting up of the play library that was the most fun though – but twas ever thus. My daughter and I build and set up elaborate towns with all the Lego and Playmobil etc and then put them all away again – we’re past the role-playing aspect now…