SOLVED. Non-fiction Children's book series from 50s/60s

[Jasomac]

I'm trying to identify a series of books I read as a child in my grandmother's house, they belonged to my father or his siblings as children. I don't know who they were purchased for and my dad was the middle of 5 so they could be from the 1950s or 60s. They were non-fiction books with topics of interest to adolescents or teenagers, possibly boys specifically or I might have just skipped the ones aimed at girls. I remember several of the titles but they were so generic that searching for them doesn't help: Spies, Daniel Boone, Submarines.

I know there were a number of different ones, my grandmother had at least a dozen and there could have been more, I can picture them quite clearly. Small, hardcover books with the titles on the spine in a variety of pastel colors with no cover illustrations. I'd recognize one of the series immediately if I saw it but image searches of period books haven't turned anything up. I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction to track some of these down.

[Capn]

Hi Jasomac,

USA, right? Otherwise, I'd have taken a stab at the Ladybird series (UK), although I'd be surprised if Daniel Boone was covered! XD

"Landmark Books" might be the series? Has Daniel Boone, Submarines, the FBI..
https://www.goodreads.com/series/2775...
i.e. ,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmar... - they have had several reprints, editions, etc.

Landmark Books was a children's book series published by Random House from 1950 to 1970, featuring stories of significant people and events in American history written by popular authors at the time. The series expanded in 1953 to include world history as a sub-series called World Landmark Books, and a second sub-series of larger-format books illustrated with color artwork or black and white photographs was introduced in the 1960s as Landmark Giant, which would continue releasing new titles beyond the end of the main series until 1974. Select titles from the American and World series were reissued in paperback from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

A nice blog post listing them:
https://forgottenstoriesweb.wordpress...
& another:
https://oldscrolls.wordpress.com/2012...
- apparently the dust jackets went AWOL pretty quickly! :)

[Jasomac]

This is a great start, thank you. Yes, this would have been in the US.

I looked through the list of titles and, with the exception of Daniel Boone and maybe The Texas Rangers, I didn't see anything familiar (although many of these individuals and topics were covered).

Appearance-wise they looked most similar to that FBI book without it's dust jacket, though with even less ornamentation (though it's possible I just don't remember). The color is spot on for the colors of the books

I didn't think they had dust jackets because they all looked the same but I suppose they could have lost all of them.

Is it possible they came from some sort of subscription, a book-a-month kind of deal? They lived on a farm in a rural area and neither she nor my grandfather had much education. It seems like the kind of thing my grandmother would do to get some books in the house and get her kids (mostly boys) to read and get some education.

[Jasomac]

Found them! I hadn't thought about the subscription idea before and the information above made me think they were probably 50s rather than 60s so I did a search using that and found a picture that matched. They are the Real Book About series, I found a list of them (linked below) which has all the titles I remembered and few I thought I did.

https://www.librarything.com/nseries/...

It appears they did have dust jackets, at least some versions or editions did. I think they were a "book-a-month" type thing, they published about 10 a year and 3 of the books I remember were even sequential from 1953-1954. I'm going to try and learn more about them then see if I can track down some copies.

[Capn]

Oh, well done!

Some Goodreads trackables:
The Real Book About Daniel Boone
The Real Book about Spies
The real book about submarines/The Real Book About Submarines/The Real Book About Submarines