L Ashwell Wood’s Two Worlds Of Wonder

L Ashwell Wood’s Two Worlds Of Wonder

By Jeremy Briggs

For some time now Bear Alley has been running pages from Look and Learn’s sibling title World Of Wonder. This was a colourful educational magazine edited by Bob Bartholomew that was published weekly by IPC Magazines and ran for 258 issues between 1970 and 1975.

One of the artists featured in World of Wonder was L Ashwell Wood who painted cutaways for the title in the style he used for his then contemporary Inside Information series of children’s books, a style which was less detailed than the style he had used in Eagle comic. These cutaways in World Of Wonder are the last known published works by Wood before he passed away in 1973.

However this was not the first magazine entitled World Of Wonder that Wood had worked for.

An earlier World Of Wonder was published by IPC’s predecessor company Amalgamated Press (AP). This was also a weekly educational magazine, edited by Charles Ray, which was published as a part-work over 52 issues between 1932 and 1933 under the title of The World of Wonder with the rather grand subtitle of “10,000 Things Every Child Should Know”. Due to the printing capabilities of the day this was a black and white magazine with a cover which each issue used the same limited colour image. This cover was designed to be completely removed to allow the interior of the part-work magazine to be bound like a book either at a local bindery or by sending the full set of magazines off to AP themselves.

This publisher’s binding was available either for the complete set of 52 issues bound as one volume or as two volumes of 26 issues each and to get it readers had to send their magazines to somewhere with a very familiar name - the real Bear Alley.

Wood also provided cutaways for this version World Of Wonder signing them either as ‘LW’ or as ‘L Wood’ rather than his “L Ashwell Wood” of later years. While he had provided some simple cutaways to the weekly story paper The Modern Boy in 1930 and 1931, The World Of Wonder was the first title in which Wood regularly illustrated the type of intricately detailed cutaways that he would become known for in Modern Wonder in the late 1930s and Eagle in the 1950s and 1960s.

The earliest signed cutaway by Wood that appears in The World Of Wonder is a two page black and white cutaway/exploded diagram of an industrial electricity generator in issue 14 from February 1933 that is signed ‘LW’.

Remarkably some of Wood’s original pencils for these 1930s cutaways still survive including this one of what was, even then, an old-fashioned municipal gasholder.

Once complete as a 52 week part-work of 1460 pages, The World of Wonder was published as two books of some 700 pages each by AP subsidiary the Educational Book Company although, confusingly the first book was labelled as Volumes 1 and 2 while the second book was Volumes 3 and 4. These books were reprinted several times over the years including one updated edition with references to nuclear power stations that would have been unheard of in the 1930s.

Once its year’s run was complete World Of Wonder continued into a second series, simply dubbed New Series, that ran for 26 weeks. The orange tones of the original series cover were replaced by yellow for this second series with a similar image of two children surveying the wonders of the world in front of them.

When this second series concluded in 1934 editor Charles Ray moved onto a similar though more historical based 52 issue part-work entitled The Romance Of The Nation taking many of his World Of Wonder artists, including Wood, with him.

Wood’s illustrations continued on in Amalgamated Press publications until he moved over to Odhams in 1937 and their colourful educational weekly Modern Wonder which was a 1930s equivalent of Look and Learn’s other 1970s sibling magazine, Speed and Power, a magazine which has also been covered here on Bear Alley.

The Odhams Reference Books of L. Ashwell Wood

The Odhams Reference Books of L. Ashwell Wood

by Jeremy Briggs

Eagle cutaway artist Leslie Ashwell Wood began his career in publishing with Amalgamated Press in the late 1920s and by the 1930s he was providing diagrammatic and cutaway illustrations to a selection of AP’s weekly titles including weekly part-works like The World Of Wonder and The Romance Of The Nation which were later compiled and published as books. By 1937 he then moved to Odhams with the Look and Learn style weekly magazine Modern Wonder (which was renamed Modern Wonders and then Modern World later in its run). Modern World (as it was then) was cancelled due to the wartime paper shortages of early 1941 which also forced DC Thomson to cancel their humour comic The Magic and boy’s adventure comic The Skipper. However during the war, as well as providing artwork for the Ministry Of Information, L Ashwell Wood also provided illustrations for Odhams books, work which continued throughout the rest of the decade and only seems to have come to an end when he became the main cutaway artist for Hulton's new weekly comic, Eagle, in 1950, and which, ten years later, would become an Odhams title.

The original list of these books dates back to an early issue of the Eagle Society’s Eagle Times fanzine when Barry King listed the majority of the black and white reference books along with the numbers of Wood cutaways in each - some have many, others have only a few. Without Barry's initial article there would have been no starting place for this list and, while Steve Holland here on Bear Alley and myself in Eagle Times have updated that initial list over the years as more information was come to light, this version of the listing is the most complete yet.

These Odhams books can be hard to define as they cover such a wide range of topics. The majority are the little black and white adult reference books that include Britain’s Merchant Navy which regularly turns up in eBay or ABE searches for Wood as it is the only one of these to credit him on its title page. It is worth pointing out that Wood is not the only cutaway artist in most of the books as work by artists such as L. G. Goodwin and R. Barnard Way appears in them as well. However recent research shows that he also worked on a set of junior books, the annual-size Children’s Wonder Book In Colour series, which combined fictional text stories and comic strips with factual information in a highly illustrated format. Wood provided all the illustrations for one chapter on a technological theme for each of these books some in painted black and white colour and some, as the book titles suggest, in colour.

All these books originally had illustrated dust wrappers, few of which have survived intact down the years. The dust wrapper illustrations included here are of highly variable quality as they have been culled from many different sources. For those books that I have not yet found images of the dustwrapers, I have included an image of the title page.

This list deliberately does not include the Eagle spin-off books published by Odhams that include Wood’s work as these were normally black and white reprints of the cutaways published in the weekly comic. However it is quite possible that there were more non-Eagle books published by Odhams that feature Wood than are included in this list, so if you know of any Odhams books with his artwork in them that are not included here then please leave a comment.

(The photo of L Ashwell Wood at the head of this feature is from Eagle Volume 11 Number 7, dated 13 February 1960, and shows him at the wheel of the tugboat Stackgarth which he illustrated as the cutaway in Volume 11 Number 20, dated 14 May 1960, under the title 'Tugs For Milford Haven'.)

Britain's Wonderful Fighting Forces by Captain Ellison Hawks RA
"The book that will give you confidence in Victory"
London, Odhams Press, 1940

Advert for Britain's Wonderful Fighting Forces in Armchair Science magazine vol. 13 no. 1, June 1940, published by Odhams Press. "This month Armchair Science invites every reader to accept the greatest and most marvelous War Book the world has ever known."

Britain's Modern Army
“An authoritative account of the daily life of a modern soldier and of the work, weapons and machines of the Army”
London, Odhams Press, 1942

Britain's Wonderful Air Force, edited by Air Commodore P F M Fellowes DSO
Foreward by Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portal KCB, DSO, MC
London, Odhams Press, 1942. 

Britain's Glorious Navy, edited by Admiral Sir Reginald H S Bacon KCB, KCVO, DSO
Foreword by Admiral Sir Edward R G R Evans KCB, DSO, LLD
London, Odhams Press, 1943

Britain's Merchant Nav, edited by Sir Archibald Hurd
“With more than forty explanatory drawings specially prepared by L Ashwell Wood”
London, Odhams Press, 1944

The Secrets of Other People's Jobs
“The story of Great Britain's industries and the workers who man the machines”
London, Odhams Press, 1944.

Warfare Today
“How modern battles are planned and fought on land, at sea and in the air”
Joint Editors:
Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon KCB, KCVO, DSO
Major-General J F C Fuller CB, CBE, DSO
Air Marshal Sir Patrick Playfair KBE, CB, CVO, MC
London, Odhams Press, 1944

Railways, Ships And Aeroplanes Illustrated
“Their construction and working fully described in words and pictures”
Railways by Cecil J. Allen MInstT, AILocoE, FRSA
Ships by J V Stone (with the assistance of the editor of Shipbuilding And Shiping Record)
Aeroplanes by Captain Norman Macmillan MC, AFC, AFRAeS, FSRA
London, Odhams Press, 1945.

Miracles Of Invention And Discovery
“What modern life owes to progress in science and engineering. The story of invention and discovery vividly described and illustrated.”
London, Odhams Press, 1945

The Children’s Wonder Book In Colour
London, Odhams Press, 1946

The World's Railways And How They Work
“illustrated with numerous photographs and specially drawn maps and piuctures”
London, Odhams Press, 1947

Physical Science: Man’s Conquest Of Matter And Space (The New Educational Library)
“A general course in astronomy, chemistry, heat, light, sound, mechanics, electricity, wireless and television”
The New Educational Library advisory editor Lord Gorell CBE, MC, MA
London, Odhams Press, 1948

The Children’s Wonder Book In Colour Number 2
London, Odhams Press, 1948

The Children’s Wonder Book In Colour Number 3
London, Odhams Press, 1949

The Complete Book Of Motor-cars, Railways, Ships and Aeroplanes
“The fully illustrated story of power and speed in modern transport”
London, Odhams Press, 1949

The World's Airways and How They Work
Forward by Sir William P Hildred CB, OBE, MA (Director General, International Air Transport Association)
Editorial Advisers Captain J W G James OBE (Flight manager and Chief Pilot, British European Airways Corporation) and John Stroud
London, Odhams Press, 1950

Odhams History of the Second World War
Editor H. C. O'Neill
London, Odhams Press, 2 volumes, 1951

(* Originally published  16 September 2013; updated 22 February 2014)

L. Ashwell Wood: Behind the Scenes part 6

L ASHWELL WOOD’S SPACE SHUTTLE PART 2

by Jeremy Briggs

The previous part of this article on L Ashwell Wood’s cutaway of a space shuttle design from the 1970 Inside Information On Space Travel book covered the original art painted by Wood. This time we will look at the real life designs of the space shuttle from the time period that would have influenced his painting.

Inside Information On Space Travel was published by Benwig Books in 1970 as part of a series of factual information books for children. Each book featured a series of colour cutaways plus several black and white illustrations all painted by Wood who also wrote the books.

The Space Travel book featured the then current Apollo lunar landings and looked to the immediate future with the illustration of the Skylab space station, which was the next step for the NASA space programme, on its front cover. It also included illustrations of two different types of future space shuttle, a cargo carrying shuttle in the “To Space Stations And Back” illustration and a passenger carrying shuttle in “What Of The Future?” So where did the ideas for these illustrations come from?

Firstly a quick history lesson: in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were many concepts for the post-Apollo method of getting astronauts into Earth orbit. The overriding factor in these was affordability and the main concept to help make orbital flight cheaper was to reuse the flight vehicle rather than effectively throw it away each time as had been done with rockets up to that point. This reusability requirement saw many American aerospace companies put forward designs for a reusable shuttle that would return to Earth and land like an aeroplane no matter how it took off. In general those designs began with two different aeroplane-like craft, the smaller one piggy-backed on the larger one so that the larger one could carry the smaller one up to a great altitude before the smaller one separated and went the rest of the way to Earth orbit. This would eventually evolve into the smaller craft being launched on rocket boosters to get into space which was the genesis of the craft that became NASA’s Space Shuttle.

One of the designs for this latter concept came from Grumman who produced this picture to illustrate their concept for a shuttle that carried satellites and astronauts into Earth orbit. Despite the angled wings this concept is very similar to the NASA Orbiter Vehicle that actually flew with main engines at the rear and a payload bay for transporting satellites into space. If we take this Grumman image and flip it to show a direct comparison with Wood’s shuttle, there can be little doubt that this then is the image he used as the basis for his cutaway.

Wood’s painting has two further space vehicles, a mini-shuttle and a space station. Taking the space station first and despite the then construction of NASA’s Skylab station, which was launched in 1973, there were many designs for larger space stations also coming from the various aerospace companies. Most of these designs showed a modular approach based in part, like Skylab itself, on the legacy of the Apollo programme. This illustration from North American Rockwell shows two shuttles docked at an Earth orbiting station.

While Wood’s original artwork for his space station is actually less than half an inch across, and the shadow effect around it shows that it was originally slightly larger, it bears more than enough of a resemblance to the North America Rockwell station in both its design and orientation that there is a high probability that Wood used this image to base his own station painting on.

The space shuttle design used in this station painting is much closer than the Grumman design to the final version of the Space Shuttle that NASA actually flew, which is not surprising as North American Rockwell became Rockwell International who were the aerospace company that designed and built all of NASA’s Orbiter Vehicles. One of the other North American Rockwell illustrations for this concept shuttle, which they called DC-3, shows the shuttle in orbit launching a satellite with a space station in the background.

In this illustration the satellite being deployed from the shuttle’s payload bay is elongated with a rounded nose, engines at the rear and ‘wings’, which would actually be solar arrays, mounted on the top rear of the main body. It also has a stand mounted radio antenna mounted above and about half way along the main body. By flipping this illustration of the DC-3 satellite launch and focussing on the satellite and the space station in the background again there is a good probability that Wood used this image to base his own on, realigning it to the orientation of the satellite in the Grumman image.

The difference here is that the DC-3 illustration is of a satellite and Wood’s is of a mini-shuttle. I suspect that L Ashwell Wood confused the slightly earlier shuttle concepts of two different manned space craft attached to each other, with the bigger one carrying the smaller up far enough that it could then go the rest of the way into orbit, with this later design of a single space craft boosted into orbit by other means that would then be able to deploy satellites. There does not seem to have been any real world design concepts whereby the smaller craft was carried into space enclosed within the larger one as Wood illustrates. It does however make for an interesting illustration to spark a child’s imagination.

The other shuttle illustration in the Inside Information on Space Travel book is for a passenger carrying ‘space liner’, a shuttle sized vehicle able to carry many passengers from Earth to an orbiting space station. This Lockheed design for such a vehicle, called Starclipper, is a similar design concept to the Grumman shuttle with its main engines at the rear and angled wings. The Starclipper also has two jet engines attached to the top of the main body which protrude rather like antenna. It wasn’t unusual of shuttle concepts at the time to include jet engines to allow the shuttle to be manoeuvred in the atmosphere as it came in to land on a runway. Indeed the DC-3 design above has over wing boxes that were intended to house its jet engines.

By realigning the Starclipper image into the same orientation as Wood’s space liner we can see that this then is where he got his design of a space liner from. The irony here of course is that an artist so well known for his own cutaways used a cutaway produced by Lockheed to produce a non-cutaway illustration of his own.

While some may consider that these illustrations show that he was copying the designs of others, they really show that Wood was researching these shuttle design concepts just as he would have researched the real vehicles of his other illustrations and, as such, was not short changing his child readers with the fantasy spaceships that other artists created.

Having researched the shuttle designs for these illustrations it is just a pity that L Ashwell Wood died in 1973 and so did not get to see a real shuttle fly into space.

REFERENCES:
Grumman Shuttle.
North American Rockwell DC-3 and Space Station.

Lockheed Starclipper.

L. Ashwell Wood: Behind the Scenes part 5

L ASHWELL WOOD’S SPACE SHUTTLE PART 1

by Jeremy Briggs

L Ashwell Wood is best known for his 600+ cutaway illustrations produced for Eagle comic between 1950 and 1969 but the last series that he was associated with was the Inside Information series of children’s books published by Benwig between 1969 and 1971. These have been covered before on Bear Alley when Steve was trying to tie-up the biographical details of Wood himself and when Richard Sheaf proved the existence of the final four books in the series by providing scans of their covers.

Inside Information On Military Aircraft (1969 – SBN 901-798 096)
Inside Information On Modern Ships (1969 – SBN 901-798 07x)
Inside Information On Trains Today (1969 – SBN 901-798 088)
Inside Information On Civil Aircraft (1969 – SBN 901-798 061)

Inside Information On Space Travel (1970 – SBN 901-798 150)
Inside Information On Naval Ships (1970 – SBN 901-798 126)
Inside Information On Racing Cars (1970 – SBN 901-798 142)
Inside Information On Hovercraft (1970 – SBN 901-798 134))

Inside Information On Exploring Under the Sea (1971? – SBN 901-798 31 2)
Inside Information On Famous Steam Trains (1971? – SBN 901-798 32 0)
Inside Information On World Car Speed Records (1971? – SBN 901-798 33 9)
Inside Information On Tanks and Armoured Cars (1971? – SBN 901-798 34 7)

These 8 x 6 inch landscape format hardback books were aimed at children and were all written and illustrated by Wood who was also the owner of the company. Each book has 8 single page colour cutaways and 1 two page centrespread colour cutaway, plus 3 black and white illustrations, all newly produced for each book with one of the single colour pages being reused for the cover. The books were published in three batches of four as can be seen from the dates given and the first batch of four titles were also released in softcover under the same Standard Book Numbers with a generic cover design. Indeed some of the hardback versions of the first four books are softcover books with the hardback glued onto the softcover, while others were printed as hardbacks.

A selection of the illustrations for these books have recently come to light and with the recent ending of NASA’s Space Shuttle programme it seems appropriate that we use the L Ashwell Wood’s version of a space shuttle entitled “To Space Stations And Back” from Inside Information On Space Travel as an example of his work from this series of books.

This illustration shows a pair of manned spacecraft, a larger shuttle style vehicle designed to take its cargo into space and an additional smaller vehicle designed to take people from the main craft to a distance space station.

The original art for this spacecraft, which is painted on Fineline Drawing Board, is approximately 12 x 9 inches with the final printed version of the image being approximately 7.5 x 5 inches, so the original artwork is not quite the “half up” that Wood used for his Eagle centrespreads. Perhaps the most striking thing about this original is the brightness of the colours in comparison to the printed version, especially for the space background which is a strong purple colour rather than the blue of the book. The reason for this may be down to the technical limitations of reproducing the dark colours of a space background given the printing capabilities that were being used in 1970. Indeed artist Mike Noble had problems with reproductions of his space backgrounds when he was painting the Fireball XL5 comic strip in TV Century 21 comic in 1965. As he related in this interview on The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History website, Noble had to use Prussian Blue for space backgrounds due to the infrared cameras that photographed the art for printing picking up any colour of paint that had any black mixed into it and printing that colour as black or grey no matter what colour it appeared to the naked eye.

In addition to the shuttle and mini-shuttle the image also includes an Earth-orbiting space station. While the painted station is less than half an inch across on the original art, as can be seen by the shadow-like lines in this close up, Wood obviously had decided that his original version of it was too big and had reduced the size of it, perhaps to give the impression that it was further away from the shuttle and the Earth.

As we know from his Eagle work, Wood painted the full illustration first and then the number circles were added afterwards with the numbers going on last. Looking at the original artwork used for this page we therefore see the white number circles added on top of the artwork. While this artwork has no attached notes giving the key to the numbers that would be added to the circles, it does have a semi-transparent overlay of tracing paper onto which those numbers have been written in pencil.

There is little in the way of writing on the art board itself although Wood does title the image as Space Shuttle-Ship as well as including his stylised signature.

This signature is unusual for two reasons; firstly it is not on the printed version of the image, suggesting that it was added after publication when the art had been returned to him from the printers, and secondly it is in biro. Wood normally painted this style of signature, of a capital lettered Ashwell above Wood with a large L to the left, on his paintings while his hand written signature was in more normal day-to-day joined-up script. Looking in more detail at this signature you can just make out the ruled pencil lines that he used to keep the heights of the letters consistent.

No one has seen the original artwork without the white numbers circles on it since before the book was published in 1970 and few, perhaps only Wood’s wife Florence, would even have seen it then. However with the use of modern technology it is possible to Photoshop the white circles out and provide an impression of what the original image looked like in its full glory before they were added.

L Ashwell Wood would not live to see a real shuttle spacecraft fly. He died in 1973, four years before Shuttle Enterprise glided from the back of its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft for the first time and some eight years before Shuttle Columbia blasted off from the Kennedy Space Centre into space.

The second part of this article will show the real world designs that L Ashwell Wood based this spacecraft on.

(* With thanks to Richard Sheaf.)