I still own my three absolute favorite books from childhood. The editions I have on my bookshelf are all Dutch translations, printed in 1993 when I was a nine-year old lad. Now that I'm a 41-year old senior citizen I'm happy to say they're still mostly holding together, despite my best efforts to read them to pieces.
Here are all three stacked on top of each other, immortalized in realtime 3D (meaning you can drag and zoom if you want):
🍫 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964). This is an oldschool edition, a reprint of the book's initial publication in the UK with illustrations by Faith Jaques. I believe this is the first real book I ever read from cover to cover.
The classically styled illustrations make this copy feel a lot different from mode modern editions like the Dahl books on my 10-year old's shelves. Those are all illustrated by Quentin Blake in his signature squiggly, light style — Jaques' drawings are weightier, warmer and more true to life.
I always liked the book's 1971 movie adaptation a lot, too — enough that this dumb computer commercial managed to bring a damn tear to my eyes a few years ago by using one of its songs.
🐲 The Neverending Story (Michael Ende, 1979). I vividly remember discovering this book at the library when I was seven or eight and staying at my grandparents' house in the summer, and tearing through it in a handful of evenings. When I open it now and read a page or two I almost feel myself back there, a boy reading a fantasy story about a boy reading a fantasy story, cosy by the stove while my grandparents are falling asleep watching television.
My copy is a paperback and it has some damage here and there, but it's still a beautiful object. Each of the twenty-six chapters opens with a neat full-page illustration by Roswitha Quadflieg that gives it the feel of an illuminated manuscript, and it's typeset in two colors: red for what happens in the real world and blue for Fantasia. This book rules.
🦕 Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton, 1989) is the only one of the three where I only read the book after seeing the movie, and it's the first book I read that was written for adults.
The island of Isla Nublar and its goings-on occupied a large chunk of my mind between the ages of nine and eleven: I was always watching the movie on VHS, playing out the story with my buddies at school, reading the novel, reading the comic book version, playing the Game Boy game, drawing my own maps, and trying to get better at drawing the dinosaurs. I think it took the purchase of our first home computer in 1996 to fully break the spell.
Today I loathe what the franchise has become, but I think I could still get excited about a reboot of the first movie that stays true to the novel: a slightly more grimy late 80's feel, bearded Alan Grant, Stegosaurus instead of Triceratops, the Costa Rican military bombing the island at the end. They'll never make that movie, but nobody can stop me from daydreaming about it.
Back to that scan at the top of this page. I made it in 2021 using photogrammetry, which is the process of taking a lot of pictures of something and gently applying math until they become a 3D model. I was pleased with the result and uploaded it to Sketchfab, with the option to download and freely use it.
Recently it occurred to me that I had put the model up with a license that required attribution — so if anyone has used my scan in their own projects I should be able to track it down! Turns out that a handful of people have done so in the past five years; here is a selection of what I could find.
It's really neat to see my books, which are some of my most personally meaningful and cherished belongings, show up in all these different contexts. Put there by people I've never met or interacted with — mostly students and aspiring creatives like I once was.
Hooray for sharing your stuff and the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license!