Crestwood House Monster Series Books
The book begins with a summation of the events in the first Universal Frankenstein movie, along with some really gorgeous still photos (Forrest J. Ackerman actually provided photos for the Crestwood series) including this one of Fritz terrifying the monster with a torch.
Crestwood House Monster Series Books
The Wolf Man and Dracula books were my favorites as these were also my favorite movie monsters. I must have checked out these books a hundred times. Dracula uses the familiar visage of Bela Lugosi as its cover, but for some reason, The Wolf Man eschews a picture of the more famous Lon Chaney Jr version of the monster for that of Henry Hull in the lesser known Werewolf of London. Anyway, the Wolf Man covers the titular Wolf Man movie with Lon Chaney, the Hull starring Werewolf of London as well as quick looks at I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Frankenstein vs Wolf Man, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein. Lon Chaney starred as the Wolf Man in both those last two pictures.
I have eight of the orginal Monster series orange back library books by Crestwood House. They are all in very good used read conditon. If any one out there is interested in any of them 1. It came from outer space. 2. Godzilla 3. The invisible man 4. Dracula 5. The Phantom of the Opera 6. The Mumy 7. Fankenstein 8 The Wolf Man. Please email me at patandgreg@roadrunner.com. I can mail by media rate mail in USA only.
These books introduced me to many of the classic monsters that I grew to love over the years. Their focus was primarily on the legendary Universal Monsters, but they also covered a few other monsters such as Godzilla and the Blob.
Did you read any of these books while growing up? Were they your first introduction to any classic monsters? Let me know in the comments. Also, if you are interested, I found a PDF version of the Godzilla book available at archive.org. Click here to read the book absolutely free!
Anthony Romero: I'm talking with James Rolfe, creator of the popular show The Angry Video Game Nerd and self-confessed Godzilla fan. We will be discussing both aspects about Godzilla and also regarding some of the Toho games he has covered.So to start: How did you first become a fan of Godzilla?James Rolfe: There were a series of books in the late 70's or early 80's, the Crestwood House series, about all the classic monsters. I saw the Godzilla book in my school library when I was young. They had B&W stills from the movies, and were written very simply, with brief synopsis' and inaccurate information, such as King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) having two different endings (one where Godzilla wins, one where Kong wins). I thought that was true until the advent of the internet. Here's a video I did on the Crestwood House series.
Romero: Oddly enough, regardless of the frustrations Godzilla: Monster of Monsters might have caused a younger me, I credit that game as being one of the prime factors for why I started Toho Kingdom. I was immensely curious who the heck Gezora and Moguera were, which led to a surprising amount of research at every library I could find that carried books on monsters. You touch on this fact in the episode, that almost no American Godzilla fan would know who these characters were back in the late 1980's. So I'm just curious if you can go into more depth there: that as a kid did you think these might be characters created just for the game, or that they might have been routed in other films? Rolfe: Yeah it seemed odd at first. The only thing specific that comes to mind is The Mysterians (1957) and how it's overlooked. A good Toho film to come back to often.
80s kids will fondly recall a great series of books from Crestwood House called the Monster Series. The series was written by Julian May using her pen name of Ian Thorne, and each book was dedicated to a different movie monster. There were a few different incarnations and similar series throughout the late 70s and 80s, with day-glo colors, as well as two posters, a bookmark, and six read-along cassette tapes. The series began with six titles and grew to at least 15 before disappearing into nostalgia.