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...
Now we go back to the cover sheets included with each release of the collection, continuing from release 45 up to release 88, which made Volumes 3 and 4:
Here we can see how cover sheets 45, 50, 52, 54 and 58 all have the Spanish bar code and omit the name of the publishers implying they're the Urbión releases and not the Hyspamérica ones, only for issue 59 (which is the Hyspamérica version) and the following to drop the logos and the barcode altogether, with releases 60, 61, 62, and the rest from 64 to 88 belonging to the Urbión version again.
In the next post, we'll finally look at the remaining 44 cover sheets, plus some additional material belonging to Importaciones Riguse...
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