I grew up fairly obsessed with Usborne’s World of the Unknown series: UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters. Image the frenzy that awoke inside me a few years ago when I learned that there was a second series of three books, from the same period, with the same style and art direction called Supernatural Guides. Worse, imagine my frustration when I found that they command frankly ridiculous prices second hand. Three kid books at 50 bucks a pop? Nah. Even this, the all-in-one digest remained well over a hundred bucks for longer than I liked. Eventually I got it off Etsy for like 60, which, fine, OK, more than I wanted, but still a good buy.

Anyway, three constituent books: Vampires, Werewolves and Demons, then Haunted Houses, Ghosts and Spectres and finally Mysterious Powers & Strange Forces, all originally published in 1979. Nice of Usborne to arrange them in order of my interest. This collected edition, Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World, came out in 1990. Really love the world continents etched into the skull (someone used the skull for some knock-off toy packaging and the map aspect is a dead giveaway).

Vampires is my fave, naturally, though mostly for the demon section. Ghosts is solid and surprisingly doesn’t have much overlap with the World of the Unknown book. Powers is a potpourri of paranormal topics, including ESP, UFOs, Uri Gellar and so on. It’s fine, but I don’t have more than a passing interest in most of it.

As with World of the Unknown, there is an attempt to make these books “educational.” They are designed to maximize the delivery of trivia in an easy-to-read package, but I think between the selection of stories and the bloody artwork, these books are more intentionally lurid than the other series. Not a complaint, really! I love it. If my Usborne science books, produced in the same style, had even half the buckets of blood, I’d maybe be a scientist.