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.

Since the cover sheets for the original collection were unique, I decided to scan them (front and back) for preservation, as apparently, the 1993 Folio release is more wiely known that he 1985 Urbión release. Here are the cover sheets for the first 44 releases (which comprised Volumes 1 and 2 of both Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea):

Looking at these first 44 cover sheets, there are quite a few things worth noticing. First, for the first two releases, the backside just described how the collection was organized; then, from release 3, it included brief descriptions of what the issues on the following release were going to be about. Then, on release 18, we got some collectable stamps for an album titled "Barcos del mundo" ("Ships of the World"), which Urbión released in Spain but Hyspamérica didn't release in Argentina, hence the stamp saying "NO VÁLIDO PARA ARGENTINA" ("NOT VALID FOR ARGENTINA") in the middle of the page. The stamps appeared until release 36, with release 37 going back to describing the contents of the following issues again, while including a note mentioning the end of the stamps.

 

Second, if you look at the backside of release 26, you'll see I used the price label from Monterrey to patch a small rip on it: that label shows the original price of the collection, which was of 22.90 Intis (the Inti was the currency which replaced the previous Sol de Oro in Peru during the last months of Fernando Belaúnde Terry's second presidential period from 1980 to 1985; one Inti was equivalent to 1000 Soles de Oro, since inflation had already started to rise at the time, and it would become worse over the following years).

Third, you can see how, up to release 16, the cover sheet included both the publishers' names (Hyspamérica from Buenos Aires, Argentina and Urbión from Madrid, Spain) on an horizontal band at the bottom; from release 17 on, the band was removed and the names were moved to the upper section, right below the title of the collection. Releases 26, 33 and 35 only feature the name "Urbión" in a different typeface, and no details on the backside, hinting at those ones having been imported from Spain rather than from Argentina.

Finally, releases 33 and 35 feature a barcode on the front, which had just began to be used in Spain by law, while the other releases from 32 to 44 replaced that barcode with the logos of both Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea, something which was most likely done by Hyspamérica on the reprints meant for distribution throughout Latin America.

On the next post we will continue looking at the following set of cover sheets, from release 45 to 88 (covering volumes 3 and 4 of both Cousteau's Travels and The Encyclopedia of the Sea), as well as some of the enclosed sheets which were included when the covers for the bound volumes were made available...