Tintin

[S. aureus]

I really must read Tintin again one of these years. I was lucky that my local public library in South Wales when I was growing up had a shelf full of both Tintin and Asterix, all of which I devoured...

Both of the smaller local libraries that we went to growing up were similar, and my sisters and I spent many hours reading and re-reading the Tintins and Asterixes while my mother browsed the crime shelves. I think one of my happiest childhood memories, really. We went to the library a lot growing up - the two smaller local ones, the big central one and the mobile one were all visited frequently.
Nowadays when I take my kids to the library all they want to do is play on the computers, which I find quite irritating as I'd rather that they actually look at the books and all, but I suppose I'm just a grumpy old man stuck in the past.

[Benjm]

When I read The Calculus Affair as a kid I had never seen a slim Rhine/hock wine bottle like the one Tintin and Haddock share with Professor Topolino. Forty years later I still immediately think of the scene whenever I come across one of those bottles. I have stayed at the Hotel Cornavin in Geneva but unfortunately it had been demolished and replaced with a modern building between the book being written and my visit, so the Tintin factor was much reduced apart from a display cabinet in the lobby.

The Tintin boutique in Brussels usually contrives to be closed whenever I visit the city. One time that it wasn't, after a visit for the 2010 Tour de France, I bought a 15 inch high resin statue of the fetish from The Broken Ear. It weighs about six kilograms and by the time it was wrapped up the parcel was the size of a rabbit hutch, which I then had to lug across the city, onto the Eurostar and all the way home. Did they stock this item at the Floral Street shop a twenty minute tube ride from where we live? I'd prefer not to talk about that.

[Patrick Thistle]

The first Tintin book I ever had as a kid was The Red Sea Sharks. No one ever mentions it but I still really like it.

Apologies to Flynnie but I haven't read King Ottokar's Sceptre for probably 30 years at least. It's one I didn't own and so didn't regularly re-read.

[Benjm]

There used to be a great diorama set of the raft from The Red Sea Sharks. I didn't get it but it was a thing of beauty.

[Benjm]

Here it is. It's maybe not as good as it looked in the shop. Well done me for not getting carried away in the moment.

[ursus arctos]

The shop in Bruxelles noted above does bespoke versions of these (in addition to the full line of pre-made ones).

It was fortunate that I wasn't awash in disposable income when I lived there.

A detailed description of the different versions of The Black Island.

[Patrick Thistle]

Cheers Ursus, that was really interesting

[Flynnie]

By the way, having mentioned it above -- the Tintin TV series is on Netflix. Certainly in the UK, possibly worldwide.

As I hinted, I'd highly recommend it.

[Chris1963]

The first Tintin book I ever had as a kid was The Red Sea Sharks. No one ever mentions it but I still really like it.

Interestingly, the French editions of this this one were titled 'Coke en Stock' which refers to a codename for slaves in the book.

'The Broken Ear' (a literal translation of the original French title L' Oreille Cassee) is Der Arumbaya Fetisch in Germany.

I was a big fan of the Tintin books when young. I remember spending one afternoon (probably in 1974) in Blackwells bookshop in Oxford looking at the French language editions and wondering why Le Lotus Bleu and Tintin en Amerique were not available in English.

On a family holiday to Paris in 1976, I saw, for the first time, a copy of Tintin au Congo in a bookstall in the Gare du Nord and when I started looking through the pages, the old woman who was running the shop shouted angrily at me to go away!

[Patrick Thistle]

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