Do you know?

More scans of nostalgic strangeness from old Ladybird books for children. See Part I for background information and the first set of images. These ones are from A First ‘Do You Know’ Book, 1971, and it will become obvious that they deal with the concept of largeness. Yes, there were Second and Third ‘Do You Know’ Books as well.

Illustration by Frank Humphris from 'A First Do You Know Book', 1971.

I could explain this image, but I think I’m just going to leave it here for you all to contemplate. All I’ll say is that this gentleman looks very dignified for somebody who’s probably not been able to see his own penis for the past ten years, not even in a mirror. Of course there’s also Mr Creosote.

Illustration by Frank Humphris, from 'A First Do You Know Book', 1971.

This is an inadvertent masterpiece of surrealism. Somehow an oil tanker has got itself irreversibly wedged along the Charing Cross Road side of Trafalgar Square, between the National Gallery and St.Martin-in-the-Field church… without disrupting traffic, even. How inconvenient, though! I hate it when that happens. On the plus side, Boris Johnson was standing on the east side of Trafalgar Square when the tanker arrived and now he’s nothing more than a vague red smear on the pavement. (Those unfamiliar with London can see the real and virtually unchanged location of this gentle catastrophe here.) The intention, incidentally, is to demonstrate the enormous size of an oil tanker circa 1971; a sensible enough idea even if the actual execution is bonkers. To go considerably darker it also evokes images of the devastation on the east coast of Japan after the tsunami in 2011, which really did leave huge seagoing vessels rammed through or marooned atop inland buildings. Or the scene in Jeunet and Caro’s brilliant Le cité des enfants perdu (AKA City of Lost Children), where the actions of a flea lead in short order to a gigantic ship ploughing into the city.