Pets Album

by Maxwell Knight, B L Driscoll (Illustrator)

Unknown Binding

Reviews

[Andrew Ives · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Horniman's tea card 'Pets Album' from 1955 is nice enough, but falls some way short of the wonderful, later Brooke Bond albums. Maxwell Knight is clearly pretty expert in caring for most kinds of animals, so the variety of pets here is somewhat surprising to modern readers - there are dogs, cats, budgies, hamsters, parrots, ferrets, tortoises, tropical fish, even axolotls as one might expect, but foxes, red squirrels, flying squirrels, jays, natterjack toads, caterpillars, sticklebacks are a bit out of the ordinary. His recommendation to feed hedgehogs on milk seems wrong to me too. The captions are necessarily somewhat repetitive about fish tanks and cages, so not the most interesting read, although I didn't know stickleback males are 'quarrelsome', that female stick insects lay plenty of eggs without a male around or that jays make good, talkative pets. 3.25/5