Prehistoric Mammals Action Set

by Malcolm Whyte, Daniel Smith (Illustrator)

Paper pop-out book of 29 prehistoric mammals and accompanying diorama, with geologic timeline chart and prehistoric mammal dictionay. Published by Troubadour Press, a subsidiary of Price Stern Sloan, Inc.

24 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Malcolm Whyte is an author, editor, publisher, and founder of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Whyte lives in Marin County, California with his wife, author Karen Cross Whyte. He has produced nearly 200 books, 45 of which he has written or co-written. His taste is for unique, offbeat ideas with a sense of good humor and produced with an eye for color and beautiful graphics as represented by The Original Old Radio Game (possibly the world's first trivia book) from 1965 to Maxon: Art out of Chaos, FU (Fantagraphics Underground) Press, 2018.

(biography from wikipedia.org)

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had a box in a back corner of the closet in my old bedroom in my parents' house. The box has two or three paper diorama kits, which I was pretty crazy for as a kid but that don't really pop up in craft stores or museum gift shops or wherever you were able to get them twenty years ago.

As an adult I've learned that since most of the activity books these kits came from are out of print -- and if you do happen to have one, the relevant publisher information has long since been cut up to make an archeopteryx or a castle wall -- it's pretty hard to find out where these things came from, or where they went.

But due diligence (and a dissembling of an archeopteryx) persisted, and I discovered a treasure trove for paper diorama nerds: Troubador Press. This is a now-defunct publisher that made books that are so painfully amazing, it's really sad and sort of weird that they're not in print anymore. A man named Malcolm Whyte is attached to pretty much everything they put out, and Googling his name is a far more productive venture than the many creative spellings of "Troubadoure." (Really.)

Among their accomplishments are not one but FOUR dinosaur-type books, full of all the appropriate flora and fauna, and prepunched so you don't have to be some arts & crafts guru to put the things together. What's more, a good portion of the creatures in each set have parts that actually move, so your paper tyrannosaur can literally chow down on the unfortunate paper herbivores too slow to escape his die-cut maw.

"The Dinosaur Action Set" is what lies in a relatively solid state up in my closet (sans archeopteryx), and once I found a list of other Troubador book on the interwebs, I right away ordered "Zoo Animals #1" and "Prehistoric Mammals" -- because what my desk is really missing, more than a pencil jar, is prepunched battle between a Sabretooth Tiger and a Giant Ground Sloth (holy crap!) My bookcase is now covered with far more Cenozoic Era punch-outs than anyone could have foreseen (including -- seriously -- a functional paper tarpit,) and I have only just dug into the Africa exhibit of the paper zoo -- complete with chimps on swinging vines.

For 5 bucks and change you can find most any of these books online (provided you have some patience and a delicate touch with Google), and each one is sort of shocking in its level of quality and meticulous design. In addition to diorama books on dinosaurs, Native Americans and hot air balloons, there are coloring books, paper doll books (Kachina dolls, because regular paper dolls just won't do) and a series called "3-dimensional maze books."

Like, some of these things are so cool you apparently can't actually give them a title that makes sense. My heart hurts.

What I'm trying to say, kids, is that magic does exist... or at least it did until it went out of print.