EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 16 © 2016 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

78 Whenever I look at an illustration from an old Chums story paper or annual, I see myself as a five-year-old boy sitting comfortably in a deep armchair in front of a crackling fire, totally immersed in a large red-covered volume that had once belonged to my uncle. This vast tome was the Chums Annual for 1936/7 and it was packed with adventure stories of all kinds. I wasn’t able actually to read the stories: it was the illustrations that kept me enthralled, particularly those for a pirate story called ‘Ghosts of the Spanish Main’. Those drawings, so full of dynamic action and imbued with such a strange atmosphere, transported me to a thrilling world of spectral Cecil Glossop Over half a century before audiences were thrilling to the exploits of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, the pages of UK boys' papers were filled with equally lurid piratical adventures as David Ashford reveals. ABOVE & FACING PAGE: The bulk of Glossop's output was created for a UK boy's adventure story paper titled Chums . All these examples were produced in the early 1930s.