The joys of coloring books

Sometime around 1980, when I was still a wee tyke of just under the age of ten, my father discovered a little specialist curio toy store. Our big purchase there was a series of "castle blocks" vaguely LEGO-like toys made by some European company that really only allowed you to build castles. They were pretty cool. To this day, I've seen my grown brothers whip them out and construct something if my kids are around. It's still fun.

However, that store contributed more meaningfully to me via two oversized coloring books on solid poster-like paper published by Troubador Press. The first one was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album.

I was vaguely familiar with the game, having kinda sorta played a session or two with a friend of mine, but honestly it wasn't until I got this coloring book that the idea really clicked with me. Thanks to this coloring book, I also came up with a workable model for drawing dragons, a hobby that consumed me for many years as I sat bored in my elementary school and middle school classes.

The other book was Tales of Fantasy, so similarly themed. It started off talking about mythological characters and locations: Atlantis, Merlin, Siegfried, Odysseus, but thanks to this book I was also introduced for the first time to Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany and more, as well as becoming much more familiar with Lewis Carroll, Frank Baum, Edgar Allen Poe, etc. In some ways, my subsequent complete migration to fantasy as my genre poison of choice can be directly attributed to these two brilliant books.

Sadly, I colored all over my copies (I was pretty young, after all, and the idea that I'd one day wish I had these as collectibles hadn't even occured to me), read them until they fell apart and then threw them out. Turns out that these books now go for quite a bit of money on the used market, and this for copies that are in less than stellar condition. Still, if you have a hankering for that kind of thing, I can't recommend them enough. Here's a picture I nabbed from an ebay auction of the front and back covers: