#Booky100Keepers Day 73: The wonderful world of Usborne Non-Fiction Books

by admin July 15, 2020

There's a lot to be said for the excitement that seeing a simple multicoloured balloon on the cover of a book can invoke.

Both my wife and I have "Keepers" from our own childhoods from Usborne's amazing selection of non-fiction books and we were delighted that they were still going strong when C first began to show a huge interest in non-fiction titles.

For me as a kid, it was always Usborne books that showed how things worked, the internal workings of machinery, or even how our weather systems worked.

My wife always liked the science stuff, in particular Usborne's amazing books about our bodies, from our brains to our bums.

As we began to gather newer books for C, we realised that Usborne had branched out quite a lot into fiction (including publishing some of the best middle grade stuff on the planet) but we were always drawn back to their non-fiction books, with high production values, stunning artwork and photography, and a ton of facts and interesting information crammed into each one.

So let's take a look at a few, starting with the one in the header of this article.

"The World of the Unknown: Ghosts" was republished last year after a hugely successful kickstarter campaign (which we enthusiastically took part in). These books were like catnip as a kid, nestling in the school library and always the books I made a complete bee-line for (as well as ghosts there were books about strange creatures and UFOs - things I was (and still am) obsessed with as a kid). After the campaign finished and the book reached eager hands, we were delighted to find we were actually in it!

Nestling in the back of the book, a quote about how affecting this book was on me as a kid. Being in a book you've held in such reverence for so long? Heck of an achievement and one of our proudest moments on the blog for sure.

The book itself still sends chills down my spine. Little Miss was fairly dismissive but I still caught her reading it on the sly plenty of times so she obviously found more of interest in there than she was letting on. With a mixture of gloriously grisly illustrations and 'real photos' of Ghosts, it has lost none of its charm at all.

"How Your Body Works" with awesome illustrations by Colin King is another family fave and one we've kept since we first nabbed a copy. This is the sort of thing that Usborne excel at, producing a book that shows the inner workings of our own bodies, the fascinating way that all the component parts fit together to make us who we are, and allow us to do the amazing things we are capable of doing.

It's a mark of the books that they speak in a language that's easily digestible by kids, yet doesn't talk down to them at all, making these absolutely perfect for use in school as well as at home (and I've lost count of the number of times our Usborne books have been hauled off the shelves for reference use with homework).

The family's passion for all things spacey is also well catered for.

Usborne's amazing range of books about space exploration, our solar system and beyond are always a draw - ranging from brilliant books for early years to get kids enthusiastic about rockets and spacecraft, astronauts and space stations, through to their titles for older kids that work for such a wide range of ages that they'll last you years.

"The Official Astronauts Handbook" by blog fave Louie Stowell, with a foreword by Tim Peake was a huge fave of ours too (mostly due to the girls being totally obsessed with Tim. We first got to know Louie from her work on various Usborne titles but she talks about and writes about Space with such a huge amount of expertise and knowledge that this book has been a real highlight of our blogging decade.

And of course Usborne cater for our other family obsession - art!