Crestwood House Monsters

Well, I mentioned the Crestwood House books a couple of posts ago... well it was these beauties that gave me my love of the movies- prior to actually seeing any of these films.

The first wave of these titles, as seen on the back of one of the books, was King Kong, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, and Mad Scientists.

Heavily illustrated with black and white photographs, these books tell the stories of the movies and then supplement them with information about the sequels and behind the scenes production stories.

Later sets included The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and- as seen in the second picture- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of the 1932  Bela Lugosi Universal movie, which is... an odd choice for a children's book.

The covers were distictively orange (someone's even made t-shirts of them).  They fade into yellow but some schools had them rebound into sturdier, but less attractive volumes- see the brown Draculas in the pictures, as well as The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets Wolfman.

This is my collection so far- I've picked them up at library fairs and thrift stores and trained Igor to keep an eye out for them in our travels.

For years, I thought I was the only person who remembered these outside of a small circle I'd been lucky to meet- and then came the internet.
Cinemassacre has a great video about them here.
Branded in the 80s deconstructs the Frankenstein volume here, and Titans, Terrors and Toys does a nice quick overview here.