The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time (Orbis Publishing, 1980) was a mammoth 153 issue exploration of everything weird, occult or suspicious.

Issue 1 came with this genuinely terrifying flexidisc of electronic communications with the dead: https://youtu.be/QRGZQ8H2-0A ">https://youtu.be/QRGZQ8H2-...

Discovery (Marshall Cavendish, 1988) was a partwork school encyclopaedia that would make your kids care about history through a mix of model making, audio casettes and massive pictures. Launched just before CD-ROMs became popular it was like Encarta 95 without the screen glare.

Murder Casebook (Marshall Cavendish, 1989) was another mammoth partwork: 153 weekly instalments of famous murders. Unlike other partworks you could just collect the issues you were interested in, as each covered a different killer. It was a handy crime writer’s sourcebook.

Dinosaurs (Orbis publications, 1993) was probably the best selling partwork ever – over 1.5 million issues by some accounts. It’s also the longest-lived: reissued in 1995 the content still turns up in other publications. Dinosaur facts never really date!

Will partworks ever die out? Probably not. People like collecting things and a few pounds each week for the pleasure of a handsome leatherette-bound collection on your bookshelf is a joy for many. Who needs the internet when you have these beauties?

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