Whitman Punchout Book

The Punchout Book is a sort of combination book and toy, with eight large heavy board pages filled with figures and objects to punchout ('natch).  

Each page also contains a drawing of the completed scene.  A total of five scenes can be made with the punchouts, although some of the characters appear in multiple scenes.

Surprisingly it is uncommon to find partial books.  Presumably if someone started punching out the figures, they just kept going.  Individual figures and sets are sometimes found and it is fun to put them together.

This copy is a Western file copy.

Whitman Sticker Fun

As mentioned on the cover, the Sticker Fun is a stencil and coloring book - with a twist.  The interior of the book is designed as a coloring book, with lots of line drawings of scenes from the film to color.  But interspersed with the coloring pages are full pages of gummed stickers to cut out and apply to some of the scenes.  At the front and back of the book are full pages of bright orange stencils to punch out and use to make your own pages to color.

Given that the purpose of the book was to cut out and use both the stickers and the stencils, finding complete copies is very difficult.  Add to that the tendency of complete sticker pages to adhere to the coloring page behind it makes it doubly difficult to find.  If a copy is found with intact and uncut stickers, it is advised to place a sheet of wax paper between the sticker page and the coloring page to prevent them from sticking together.

This copy is a Western file copy.

Whitman Paint Book

Stock #2167-25, this copy is a Western file copy.  While this is called a paint book, today we would call this a coloring book.  I guess children in the 1950s used watercolors more than crayons.  

When I began collecting, this book was pretty much ever-present; you would find these at nearly every show and it seemed copies were quite plentiful.  The reason for this became clear when I found a complete copy of the 1974 campaign book offering these as part of the merchandise for the 1974 release.  

Western must have printed a boatload of these in 1951 to have them still available 23 years later.

Whitman Book Section First Draft Finished!

 Damn.  That took WAY longer than I wanted.  But it is done.  Here are some stats:

• 13 titles
• 16 countries
• 56 editions

Not looking forward to revisions on this section.  Now on to the rest books.

Whitman Stationary Set

During the time of the original release for Alice (and for many other Disney films too), a lot of items were made under the auspices of any of the subsidiaries of the Western Publishing.  This includes Whitman, Golden Press, Sandpiper Press, Dell, and probably more that I'm not aware of.  There is also a link to Simon & Schuster that we'll go into in another post.  This item, the Alice in Wonderland Stationary Set, was made by Whitman.

This set (stock number 2054-25) consists of 18 sheets of illustrated paper (in red ink no less) with 12 envelopes.

The illustrate folder is what really sets this item apart, with beautiful graphics of the garden of live flowers on the inside (including an ultra close-up of a rocking horsefly), and tea party graphics on the outside.

The paper consists of three different designs, including my favorite the Caterpillar.

In the 1990s these were not too difficult to find, but as time has worn on it has become more scarce, as with pretty much everything else.  Finding a complete set with the correct number of sheets and envelopes is now quite difficult.