Friday, January 20, 2012

Michael Berenstain - The Troll Book, 1980

Michael Berenstain - The Troll Book, 1980 From the son of the creators of the Berenstain Bears (Stan and Jan) Berenstain Bears, I stumbled onto this amazing children's book cover here. I hope to find good scans to share here in the future.

19 comments:

http://big-chief.tumblr.com/ said...

this book is wonderful

Anonymous said...

I still have this book from when I was a child - one of my favorites. Features the history of trolls, troll anatomy, troll society, troll folklore and much more. The cover features troll mountain where the King of the Trolls lives. Definitely worth picking up a copy if you can find it!

Colin Tedford said...

Had this as a kid, finally found it about a year ago after years of sporadic fruitless searching (didn't remember a lot about it, and "Trolls childrens book" isn't a very helpful search term). It's so good! I've been meaning to photo some pages & do a post about it - will send you the link if/when I do.

Colin Tedford said...

Also check out "Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls" by George Jonsen & John O'Brien, which I'd forgotten about until I saw a friend's copy a few months ago.

xredmenacex said...

Not sure where it is at the moment, but I have this book! Like anonymous above, I loved it as a kid and spent a lot of time looking at it.

Victor Von Dave said...

My brother and I used to spend hours staring at the illustrations in this book, and then tried to make our own versions. Absolutely fantastic. The cutaways of the troll king's castle (on the cover) are awesome, especially the grotto.

Aeron said...

If anyone who has this book would be willing to scan artwork from it for me, please contact me at evilenergy at yahoo dot com I'd love to see the inside of this thing to figure out if it's a particular book of trolls that I've been trying to hunt down for many years.

And funny of you to mention "Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls" Colin, it was upon rediscovering that book yesterday that led me to finding this troll book cover. I'd last seen it as a child and vividly remembered the frog with the chimney hat and all the fantastical Hieronymus Boschian details. It's on my to do list for Monster Brains, I've acquired a good assortment of high resolution scans from it but am still poking around for more.

DRAI said...

Dude, I was just trying to remember the name of this book about trolls that I used to love as a kid, and this is it. Are you Psychic?

Aeron said...

A psychic or a time traveler, depends who you ask.

Mr_Jellyfish said...

Wow, this is incredible! Must find this book

xredmenacex said...

I looked in vain for this book, in my boxes of old stuff. I'm sure I still have it but I can't seem to find it. If I come across it I will be in touch with some scans.

Colin Tedford said...

Aeron, all the enthusiasm in the thread makes me feel inspired to takes some pictures of the book (less boring for me than scanning), though not enough to do the whole thing. If you'd like to share what you remember about the book you're looking for, I can focus on possible matches.

I only remembered a few images from this book (the cover & a couple associated images including the grotto), but they really stuck with me. As soon as I got it, so many of the page turns revealed familiar images that I'd forgotten until seeing them again.

Somehow I entirely forgot "Favorite Tales" until I got a few pages into my friend's copy, and again it came flooding back with each page turn. What a weird feeling! Man, the artist put so much superfluous (but fantastic) detail into the simple Billy Goats Gruff story!

Aeron said...

Thank you Colin, while I'd appreciate good scans, I'm equally interested in just figuring out if this is a certain book.

So the one that I've been trying to find since last having the book as a child had incredibly detailed scenes of fantasy characters like trolls or goblins, often spread across a landscape with dozens of different things going on in each image. I'd liken it to Where's Waldo in the obsessive details. I can't remember for certain but I vaguely remember war scenes of trolls or goblin like characters trying to invade a city or castle walls?

Chris said...

Michael Berenstain is the son of the creators of the Berenstain Bears (Stan and Jan). He is also the artist for another very cool monster book from 80s, The Creature Catalog (1982).

xredmenacex said...

Still can't find the book but I did find this picture of me in a troll costume that this book inspired.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c1/xredmenacex/trollpic.jpg

(P.S. My mom is awesome as evidenced here by the fact that she made me this costume!)

kraken said...

it is currently available on ebay, if you want i can give you a link to the seller

Colin Tedford said...

Aeron, sounds like a different book to me (one I'd like to see!), but I'll send some pics anyway so you can get a sense of what is in the book.

Aeron said...

thanks!

af. said...

i know im coming late, but once i step in to this site i wont leave any time soon. thank you for this most amazing selection.