A little bit of Spitfire

A small flip book called Spitfire, published by the Imperial War Museum, has just been added to the OP collection at shelfmark OP5.210.11/50. It gives the reader (or flipper!) the chance to see aerial footage of the celebrated British fighter aircraft.

The Museum's Film and Video Archive holds some 20,000 hours of moving image material, much of which is from the Second World War. This includes British documentaries, newsreels and training films, including the 1944 aircraft recognition film Spitfires, part of which is featured in the flip book.
This publication is a simple concept and shows how books can still compete with digital media. Fans of the Spitfire F.21 plane can view a piece of aviation history in their hands without batteries!

(Photo credit: www.clevelandpeople.com)

Scrimp and Save

As well as the little piece I did for Discover NLS on "make do and mend" (on page 9, entitled "Three publications intended for hard times"), I noticed that the Imperial War Museum had done something similar with their "Top Tips for Hard Times" on their website. They also have Tweets from "Mrs Sew-and-Sew"!

One illustration that couldn't be fitted into the Discover NLS article is the one featured here, which was meant to show that ‘growing your own’ added to the war effort by lessening the need to import food, therefore freeing up ships to load cargoes of weapons and other wartime essentials instead. This is in the publication Food from the garden. The other 2 publications featured are "Make Do and Mend and Wise eating in wartime.