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What is the first Tintin book you ever owned?

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De Insula Nigra
Member
#1 · Posted: 16 Jun 2011 01:51
Yesterday was an exciting day in my life - I got my first Tintin book! My sister, who has collected twelve of the books over the past year, ordered Tintin in Tibet for my birthday, and it arrived yesterday. :-)

What is the first Tintin book you ever owned? Did you get it for a birthday or a holiday? Do you have an interesting story behind it? What edition was it, and do you still own it?
Skapti og Skafti
Member
#2 · Posted: 16 Jun 2011 16:25
I got my first copy as a christmas gift in 1995, when I was 6 years old. It was Tintin and the picaros, or Tinni og Pikkarónarnir in Icelandic. I sometimes wonder how it is still in mint condition as I must have read it hundreds of times.
Ayesha
Member
#3 · Posted: 17 Jun 2011 20:28
My first book was The Castafiore Emerald. I got it for my birthday from one of my friends. I had been borrowing their books for a little while before they got me the book, so I was thrilled to get a Tintin book of my own. It started my collection of twelve (so far) that my sister De Insula Nigra mentioned above.
robbo
Member
#4 · Posted: 18 Jun 2011 01:43
There's nothing like having your own copies - I started off reading Tintin when I was about 5, I can still picture some frames from Shooting Star, and reading it in bed then progressing to the breakfast table. My uncle worked in a library and brought home a bag of discarded books every week including Tintin books with cloth covers hiding the image, and I read them when I stayed over at my cousin's. My uncle thought it was fine to read at the table which I thought was a great freedom at the time.

The first album I owned, with a cloth spine, was Destination Moon; and I still have it!

mat
jock123
Moderator
#5 · Posted: 18 Jun 2011 09:23
The Red Sea Sharks. I'd never been able to afford a Tintin book of my own, and had had to get them from the library; then I saw an advert in Whizzer & Chips (my comic of choice - I was a Chip-ite, for those who remember that all important choice of Whizz-kid or Chip-ite...) that the books were coming out in in paperback, at the excitingly affordable price of 35p!
That the advert was illustrated with the vignette from the cover of Red Sea Sharks was a big influence on my choice, but it was also a book I had not read (or even been aware of, as I recall), so the die was cast.
On my first ever visit to London, on my Easter holidays in 1974, I bought Red Sea Sharks in the book department of Hamley's in Regent Street with some of my holiday money; with the rest, I also bought a rather good kite... :-)
Balthazar
Moderator
#6 · Posted: 18 Jun 2011 13:10
jock123:
...Whizzer & Chips (my comic of choice - I was a Chip-ite, for those who remember that all important choice of Whizz-kid or Chip-ite...)...

I vaguely remember there being a distinction, and vaguely remember that this was because Whizzer & Chips was formed from a merger of two separate comics (like Tiger and Speed was, I think) whose old readers were keen to maintain their identities. But that could be totally wrong! We never got Whizzer & Chips at home (we got The Dandy) but there were a lot of issues in our classroom's drawer full of old comics that people had brought in, which we were sometimes allowed to read in wet break times. (That memory has just bought back the smell of our damp portacabin classroom.)

I think our first Tintin book was a hardback copy of The Secret of the Unicorn my dad brought home for me and my siblings to share. I've got some memory of it not being a new copy, but can't remember where he said he'd bought it. I think it caught his eye because he remembered reading Tintin in The Eagle as a boy. I also remember seeing the Belvison serial of The Crab with the Golden Claws on TV during a school summer holiday and then seeing the paperback in a shop in our nearest town, and being allowed to buy it, again jointly owning it with at least one of my siblings, I think. (The town didn't have a bookshop, so some newsagent or giftshop must have been stocking it because of the TV serial being on.) I can't quite recall which of these incidents came first, but both would be in the mid-1970s.

After that, me and my older brother and sister would buy Tintin books on trips to Bristol, the nearest place with a proper bookshop. I think we'd be taken there when we'd been given book tokens for brithday or Christmas presesnts. Not all the books had been translated then, and maybe they didn't always have all the titles in stock anyway, so there was always the anticipation that when we got to the bookshop there'd be some we hadn't seen before. It seemed to take ages for America and Blue Lotus to come out in English (and Congo never did during my childhood), and by then we'd worked out from the endpaper character portraits in our hardbacks that there must be books we were missing set in America, China/Japan and Africa. Also, I found the bookshop sometimes had the original French versions of America and Blue Lotus in a French language Tintin section of the shop, which really whetted my appetite for the English translations to come out! (Neither my knowledge of French nor my finances were sufficient for me to consider buying the French versions!)

All this anticipation gave me a reccuring dream, which I've had since then and throughout my adult life, of going into a bookshop and finding new Tintin books I didn't know existed (and which don't exist in real life, of course). I always wake up just before I can buy them and read them properly, and the details of what the books consist of quickly fade!
mct16
Member
#7 · Posted: 18 Jun 2011 14:25
I think my first one was a hardback edition of the English version of "Flight 714". I remember it because half the pages were missing!!!! There was a huge gap between the scene with Tintin and Spalding outside the phone booth and Alan meeting Rastapopoulos as he runs uncontrollably down a hill and straight into a tree.

The missing pages were of course due to yours truly. People ought to know better than to give such books to toddlers.

I remember my mother and I visiting the WHSmith in Paris and me going to a lot of trouble in persuading her to buy me the paperback edition of "Flight 714": "But you already have it," she pointed out, "But pages are missing", I complained. It took some hard bargaining but she was finally persuaded.

Living in Paris at the time, it was only natural to acquire a Tintin collection, though since we also went frequently to London I've ended up with half my collection in English and the other half in French: one moment I'm reading "Destination Moon", the next moment its sequel "On a marche sur la lune".
cigee
Member
#8 · Posted: 19 Jun 2011 00:48
Balthazar:
All this anticipation gave me a reccuring dream, which I've had since then and throughout my adult life, of going into a bookshop and finding new Tintin books I didn't know existed (and which don't exist in real life, of course).

I'm glad I'm not the only one having those dreams!

My first book was "Tintin en Amérique". It was a birthday gift from my godparents when I was 8 or 9. I still have it, but now when I reread "Amérique", I usually read the black and white version.
number1fan
Member
#9 · Posted: 21 Jun 2011 17:05
The Black Island.
Action Potential
Member
#10 · Posted: 2 Jul 2011 15:10
My first Tintin book (and the first time that I had ever heard of Tintin) was a copy of The Crab with the Golden Claws. It had been a copy that good friends of the family passed down to us kids when I was 11. I don't have it now but i'd like to think that some other child would thoroughly enjoy it after finding the treasure that it was in an op-shop or the like.

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