PART TWO Of The COMPLETE DENNIS The MENACE BOOK COVER GALLERY...

Images copyright D.C. THOMSON & Co., Ltd

Okay, peeps, here's what you've been waiting for - even more captivating covers from the DENNIS The MENACE Books for you to salivate and sigh over, while you try to contain your envy that they're mine and not yours.  (Whaddya mean, you've all got a set?  And in much better condition?  Rats!  Can't a guy revel in the joy of his possessions without you spoiling it for him?  Ah, well!)

As you'll know, where the back cover is the exact same as the front, I haven't bothered showing it - no point, is there?  Anyway, as your own copies are doubtless stored in burglar-proof, air-tight safes, I'll let  you cop a gander at mine - just to remind you what they look like.

Be sure to return for Part Three - or GNASHER will come 'round to your house and bite you on the bum!

This was the first brand-new Dennis book I ever purchased.  I bought them all as they were
issued from that point on, acquiring older ones whenever the opportunity presented itself

The first 'full' colour book (except for flesh tones in interior strips).  No books issued for 1980 or '82

 

One glance at this cracking wintry scene conjures up images of the view from my bedroom
window (in another house) of a similar snow-covered winter wonderland in 1985 & '86

'ERE NOW - I DON'T WANT NONE OF YOUR SAUCE!

Oo-er!  You saucy thing

I was foraging around in the back of one of my kitchen cupboards earlier tonight when I rediscovered this old sauce bottle.  I can remember when we first got it, back in the late 1960s or early '70s (or maybe I'm only recalling when I first noticed it, rather than when it was first purchased), and it was still in regular use up until a few years ago.

Criv-ites will be all too aware of how 'obsessed' I am with items and their associations, and this is a perfect example of my predilection for waxing lyrical and profound over the most trivial of things.  One glance at this sauce bottle instantly transports me over 40 years into the past, and I'm once again sitting at our long-gone dining table - on the very chair (one of four, two surviving) that I'm perched on as I type this.

'My' old back garden in 1988 - over 16 years after we'd moved

Through the window (replaced with double-glazing around 24 years ago) of my former home, I gaze upon my back garden, and I'm once more a callow youth, with no notion that I would ever live anywhere else but that house.  There is a comfort that comes from the familiar, and long-owned objects (even a humble condiment container) provide a gateway to earlier times that I experience with such clarity that it feels like the present rather than the past.

Is there something that you still possess from decades back which acts as a conduit to an earlier, fondly-recalled time in your life, before you got old and the shadows lengthened?  If so, I'm all ears (as Mister Spock would say) - and you know where the comments section is!