Special Selection title
12th Sept 1981 - No.38[ ]
replacing Unknown
to 15 Oct 1984 - No.42 >>[ ]
replaced by Unknown
Rowan's report
In the early 80's books were having a surge in popularity, with programmes like 'The Book Tower' with Tom Baker, helping this along nicely. Look-in took advantage of this, and introduced their own item in the comic, to please all the bookworms out there.
Book reviews had already appeared sporadically within Stewpot's Newsdesk, but this was a much more dedicated feature.
Called Special Selection, It was a sort of advertisement really, it gave readers a section of a book which was popular, or about a popular subject, and was basically saying, this is a very good read, here's a taster to whet you're appetite.
The features were many and varied, from sections of stories, quotes form biographies, pictorial stuff too about all sorts of subjects, like recipe books, In this case a recipe or three would feature and include the pictures from the step by step instructions, and also real literary fare like poetry.
There were fun ones too, amongst them, 'Could Do Better' by Patrick Dickinson, featured quotes from famous peoples school reports, see Rowan Atkinson's (left).
There were lots of creative ones, like the aforementioned cookery, but there were also paper modelling, magic tricks amongst others.
Factual stuff provided lots of interest, biographies, behind the scenes of TV and Film, natural history, were all featured.
Talking of Film and TV, there were plenty of related items, from fiction based stuff, to biographies, tie-in's etc.
All in all a very interesting feature, and for someone not big on reading books, to say I liked it a lot is saying something.