I’ve talked about several Troubador books so far: The Official AD&D Coloring Album (1979), the Science Fiction Anthology (1974), Tales of Fantasy (1975), and Space WARP (1978).
According to Wikipedia, artist-designer Malcolm Whyte “founded Troubador Press in 1959 as a job printer and designer/printer of greetings cards.” The San Francisco company published its first book—The Fat Cat Coloring and Limerick Book—in 1967.
Troubador continued to target the booming counterculture, specializing in intricately illustrated children’s educational books and alternative cookbooks. More esoteric material followed. Dennis Redmond illustrated the psychedelic Zodiac Coloring Book above, and the weirdest item in the company’s canon, The Occult Coloring Book (1971), was illustrated by Japanese-American Gompers Saijo, who was interned with his family in Pomona and Wyoming during World War II.
It’s easy to bash the hippies today, but credit where credit is due: they’re the ones who embraced and cultivated the kind of cerebral sci-fi that led to Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they’re the ones who pulled The Lord of the Rings into popular culture. “Frodo Lives!” was an enduring hippie meme before anyone else knew where Middle Earth was.
(Images via eBay, Etsy, and the Countercultural Books Wiki)
2 Warps to Neptune