Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea - Part 4

Welcome to my fourth and final post on the history of the 1985 weekly collection Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea, published in Spain by Urbión and in Argentina by Hyspamérica, and distributed in Peru by Riguse. Here I'll be showing you some of the additional materials which were included in the collection.

Let's start with the huge folder which came with the release of the first two issues from the collection. First, here's the front cover, which I've had to scan in three parts due to its size:

And this is the back cover, similarly scanned in three separate parts:

Sorry for the scratches on this one, but it's been sitting at the top of my shelf, where it's been rubbing against all my books whenever I take them out of the shelf or put them back in it... still, for something I bought 40 years ago, it's in a pretty decent shape.

And this is the inside of the folder, after opening it:

And the reason for that oversized folder, as you may have noticed already, was the inclusion of a cardboard model of the Calypso for cutting, gluing and assembling, which came in 4 sheets, shown here, and also scanned in three parts each:

As you can see, I've kept it unbuilt all these years on the shelf...

Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea - Part 3

Continuing on this third post (out of four) with the history of the collection "Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea", published in Spain by Urbión and in Argentina by Hyspamérica, and distributed in Peru by Riguse, this time I'm showing you first how the prices increased in Peru during that time, when inflation was rampant since 1985 and finally reached an insane rate by 1990. Remember how in one of my previous posts I called your attention to the price tag from the Monterrey department store, which indicated 22.90 Intis for one of the earliest releases in the collection? Well, in late 1987 I attended the Ricardo Palma book fair (which is held every year, usually in the Miraflores district of Lima) and at Riguse's booth, I bought some back issues I was missing (or maybe issues in advance which hadn't made it to the stores yet):

As you can see, by then the price had almost doubled already, at 38 Intis. I returned a couple of times over the next days, to buy a few more issues and the covers for binding volumes 1 and 2 both of Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea, as I had mentioned in my last post:

The price for the binding covers was roughly twice that of an issue, at 70 Intis, and as I mentioned previously, those were the only ones I managed to get for several years. I kept buying the weekly (or bi-weekly) regular releases at the department store for the next months. Then, in mid-1989, I went to the International Book Fair in Lima (which is held every year around that time of the year), and bought 2 more issues there at Riguse's booth:

By then the price had already increased more than tenfold, up to 5100 Intis per issue, as you can see. And then, at the end of the year, I went to the Ricardo Palma Book Fair again,and bought several more issues over a few days:

Now the price had more than double once again, this time reaching the sum of 12300 Intis per issue. But wait until you see what happened a year later, when in late 1990 I returned to the Ricardo Plama Book Fair for a couple more issues to complete the collection:

As you can see, the price had skyrocketed to ONE MILLION Intis per issue at that time! That's how bad the hyperinflation in Peru had become by 1990. In order to simplify the paperwork, prices began to be expressed in the imaginary currency of "Inti-millón" to keep them short, and later, in 1991, the Nuevo Sol (New Sol) was finally introduced, which was equivalent to 1 million Intis and has remained a stable currency ever since, thanks to the new Constitution from 1993, which among other things granted autonomy to the Central Bank, preventing it form being controlled by the government and forced to print money at will.

Finally, here's also a leaflet I got from Riguse back then:

I went a few times to Riguse's warehouse in the district of Barranco; it was huge, with large piles of issues from different collections spread around over wooden pallets on the floor, and the main offices upstairs. Sadly, they closed down a few years ago, much to the chagrin of local collectors, since they used to offer the most interesting collections in the market. Among the ones listed at the time, aside from Secrets of the Sea and Wild Nature (whose binding covers, as I told before, I had to use instead of the covers I couldn't find enough of for Secrets of the Sea), you can see Science Fiction (full name, Biblioteca de Ciencia Ficción, or Library of Science Fiction), a collection of 100 pocket books in a softcover edition. with titles from different well-known authors, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Pierre Boulle, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Harlan Ellison, James Blish, Alfred Bester, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Theodore Sturgeon, Paul Anderson, Harry Harrison, and many more. Unfortunately, I couldn't collect all of them, though I still managed to get over 20. Eventually, I'll write another post about that collection...

Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea - Part 2

As I had mentioned in the previous post, the issues of both Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea, which were released by Urbión for Spain and by Hyspamérica for Latin America, were meant to be bound together into 12 volumes (6 for each) consisting of 22 issues each, for a total of 264 pages (each issue being just 12 pages long), for which the corresponding hard covers were also sold, at a price higher than the one for each issue (roughly, twice as much). I got the covers for volumes 1 and 2 of both Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea in late 1987, at the booth of Importaciones Riguse S.A. (the Peruvian distributor for the collection) in the Ricardo Palma book fair, which is held every year. They were the cover version released by Hyspamérica, and unfortunately, for several years, those were the only ones I got, until I went searching downtown at bookstores which held old inventories, where I could find the covers for volume 4 of both, this time in the version released by Urbión. Sadly, those were all they had, so for volumes 3, 5 and 6 I had to buy a duplicate of volume 4 of The Secrets of the Sea, and 5 other covers for a different encyclopedia ("naturaleza salvaje", or "Wild Nature") also released by Urbión, which had a similar size. Here are the instruction sheets which came with the covers for Volumes 1, 2 and 4:

And these are the enclosed sheets which came with the collection's releases at the times the covers were meant to be on sale:

As you can see, the covers for Volume 1 of The Encyclopedia of the Sea were meant to come out at the same time as release 22 of the collection; the ones for Volume 2 of Cousteau's Travels, at the same time as release 33; the ones for Volume 3 of the Encyclopedia, together with release 66; the ones for Volume 5 of the Encyclopedia, with release 110; and the ones for Volume 6 of the Encyclopedia, with release 132, the final one of the collection. It's easy to infer from that that the ones for Volumes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the Travels were released together with releases 11, 55, 77, 99 and 121, respectively, while the ones for Volumes 2 and 4 of the Encyclopedia came out with releases 44 and 88...

You may have also noticed how the enclosed sheets got smaller by the time the covers for Volumes 5 and 6 were released (being just the size of the squares on the upper right corners of the previous ones, which occupied a whole page), and at the same time, the price for the covers was increased in Spain from 300 pesetas for Volume 3 to 370 pesetas for Volumes 5 and 6. And if you look at the instruction sheets, the enclosed material for binding the volumes were also reduced, from 8 guard pages to just 4...

Cousteau's Secrets of the Sea - Part 1

Back in 1985, the Spanish publisher Ediciones Urbión, S.A. began releasing a collection on newsstands titled "Los secretos del mar" ("Secrets of the Sea") under license from The Cousteau Society and Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, S.p.A. of Italy, consisting of a total of 132 weekly releases, each one including one issue of "Los viajes de Cousteau" ("Cousteau's Travels") and one issue of "La enciclopedia del mar" ("Encyclopedia of the Sea"), plus a number of photographic slides varying between 2 and 4, making a total of 280, everything packed together inside a plastic bag and with an additional cover sheet. For Latin America, Argentine publisher Hyspamérica - Argentina Ediciones, S.A. was the publisher, and the distribution in Peru was handled by Importaciones Riguse S.A., starting in late 1985 or 1986, though it took longer to be completed, until 1990. Having been a fan of Jacques Yves Cousteau since I was a child, I couldn't let it pass, of course, and I bought each issue regularly at the Monterrey department stores near my home...

The first release bundled together 2 issues, plus 4 photographic slides, a large folder, and a cardboard model of the Calypso for assembling, plus a foldable brochure describing the collection, whose front and back covers are shown below:

Upon opening it, you got these other two pages:

And when it was completely unfolded, this is what you got:

The issues were meant to be bound together into 12 volumes of 22 issues each, six corresponding to Cousteau's Travels and the other six to The Encyclopedia of the Sea. Later, in 1993, Ediciones Folio, S.A. of Spain reissued the collection, this time as 36 bound volumes of bnetween 80 and 100 pages each, released bi-weekly, the first 18 ones corresponding to the Encyclopedia of the Sea and the other 18 ones to Cousteau's Travels. They dropped the photographic slides altogether, and instead bundled a total of 25 VHS tapes with some of the releases. I bought the first one out of curiosity, but upon looking at the contents, I realized they were the same as the 1985 release, though in a different order. I kept the VHS tape only and donated the bound volume to the church.