BOOKS

DOWNLOADS

• Index     > Theme Tunes     > Educational Songs     > Cassettes & Radio • Video Clips     > The Boy From Space     > Cloud Burst     > The King's Dragon     > Sky Hunter     > Dark Towers     > Badger Girl     > Geordie Racer     > Sky Hunter II     > Earth Warp • Books • Wallpaper • Websites     > Website Cheats

LOOK AND READ

• Home     > Stories Index     > Downloads     > Trivia     > Schedules     > Schools TV     > Links     > Site Admin (incl. Site Map)

• Email • Discussion Forum • Guestbook • Help Out Site maintained by Ben Clarke (Sorry, I can't provide videos or any other materials, so please don't write to ask!)

(How to get more recent story books - at the bottom of the page)


Every Look and Read story was produced as both a television serial and a story book, aka pupils' pamphlet.

These pamphlets made available for teachers to buy at the time, but ever since the original airings of the stories, they have become impossible-to-find collectors items, until you happen upon a whole bunch of them at a car boot sale.

The pamphlets were always considered "invaluable for proper use of the broadcasts", since they provide the reading for kids to do after being enthused by the TV programmes. As the classic old Look and Reads are now being repeated for us all to enjoy, but without any support material, it seems like it would be nice to make the books available again for people to use.

This page has complete recreations of the pupil's pamphlets in PDF format, for viewing on a computer or printing out your own copies. The recreations have the same pictures and layout as the printed books, but all the writing is converted to text instead of just being images of the original writing. This means you could select the text in the computer, copy it into another program and do all sorts of interesting educational things with it.

The pupils' pamphlets were reprinted every year that the story was broadcast, often with slight differences in the print quality - for instance, the first printing of the Cloud Burst book was done in a horrible murky green that was hard to tell apart from the black bits, but it was changed to a much brighter shade for later reprints - as well as necessary changes to the small print, copyright dates and code numbers. Obviously, only one 'version' of each book is presented here.

As with everything else on this site, they are listed in chronological order.

---

Len and the River Mob

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to Len and the River Mob contains the full story, a map of the locations and some little exercises to do at the end of most chapters.

The is from the first printing in 1967 for the broadcast in Spring 1968. It's printed in a sort of lime green and black. It contains rather a silly error on page 26, which is detailed on the Len and the River Mob page. You could always correct it if you wanted with Adobe Acrobat or some other editor.

The book is written by Roy Brown (the TV script was written by Leonard Kingston), with Andrée Molyneux and Joyce M. Morris. The illustrations are by James Hunt. The book is copyright ©BBC 1967-1972, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.98Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









The Boy From Space

The original 48-page pupil's pamphlet to The Boy From Space from the 1970s. The story here is told by a third-person narrator, and includes various langauge exercises to do at the end of each chapter - several of which involve translating backwards writing.

From the 1972 printing, in black and various shades of blue. There are illustrations throughout - completely different from the pictures in the 1980s edition of this book. You can download the 80s edition to compare, further down this page.

The book is written by Richard Carpenter, with Claire Chovil and Joyce M. Morris. The illustrations are by Bernard Blatch. The book is copyright ©BBC 1971-1973, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [2.22Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Joe and the Sheep Rustlers

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to Joe and the Sheep Rustlers contains the complete story as recounted by Joe himself.

From the 1975 printing for use with the broadcast in Spring 1976, the story's last broadcast before the amazing 2003 revival. Printed in dark red and black, with monochrome photographs throughout.

The book is written by Leonard Kingston, with Andrée Molyneux and Joyce M. Morris. There is no credit for the photographer. The book is copyright ©BBC 1973-1976, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.37Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Cloud Burst

The 48-page pupils' pamphlet to Cloud Burst, with the story told in turns by four of the characters as well as the writer himself.

From the 1975 printing, in green and black, but with the earlier murky colouring problem fixed. In fact the green was quite a bit brighter than this scanned version suggests.

The book is written by Richard Carpenter, with Sue Weeks and Joyce M. Morris, with illustrations by Trevor Ridley. The book is copyright ©BBC 1974-1977, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.71Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









The King's Dragon

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to The King's Dragon, containing the story being told by the Hastings Times editor Jack Dunbar, with comic-strip style drawings and some newspaper clippings and things.

From the original 1976 printing, to accompany the broadcast in Spring 1977. The pamphlet is printed in black and white, like a newspaper - even to the extent of having a Hastings Times masthead on the cover and chapter titles (literally) ripped from the headlines. There's some big splashes of red on the front and back covers.

The book is written by Richard Carpenter, with Sue Weeks and Joyce M. Morris. The illustrations are by Dennis Reader. The book is copyright ©BBC 1977-81, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.24Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Sky Hunter

The 48 page pupil's pamphlet to the original Sky Hunter, with the story being told by a third-person narrator, plus towards the end the special section "Tom's Story" which wasn't dramatised for TV.

From the original 1978 printing in black and white, plus pale blue on the cover. Obviously I was doing something wrong with my scanner, because all the illustrations in this version come out almost as pure black-and-white rather than the broad shades of gray from the original book. So you lose a bit of detail in the pictures, but I would imagine they might print better like this.
This will hopefully be particularly useful for Tom's Story about his run-in with Cat Mary before the story proper began, which begins on page 34. This bit of the story was not filmed for the TV version (the presenter tells viewers that they can read about it in the book) and was completely left out of the book accompanying Sky Hunter II in the 1990s.

The book is written by Leonard Kingston, with Roger Tonge and Mary Hoffman. The illustrations are by Mark Peppé. The book is copyright ©BBC 1978-1982, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.31Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









The Boy From Space

The 48-page pupils' pamphlet to The Boy From Space New Edition (ie. 1980s version). It has the complete story, told by Helen in the past, plus some little science facts at the end of each chapter.

This is from the 1983 printing, it's basically printed in black and white, with a special splash of blue on the cover. You can also download the original 1970s version of the book, further up this page, to compare the two editions.

The book is written by Richard Carpenter, with Claire Chovil and Mary Hoffman, and Neil Ardley wrote the sciency bits. The illustrations are by Alan Burton. The book is copyright ©BBC 1971-1985, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [2.43Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Dark Towers

The 48-page pupils' pamphlet to Dark Towers, including the full story illustrated by photographs and pictures, and the ground plan of Dark Towers on the back cover.

This is from the 1983 printing, nicely printed in black and white and a sort of 'bluescale' (rather than grayscale) to make the photos look nice and crisp. The ground plan on the back doesn't actually come out too well in this version because the resolution of the picture is too low to see the details. Erm, sorry.

The book is written by Andrew Davies, with Sue Weeks and Mary Hoffman. The photographs are by Barry Boxall, and the ground plan by Hugh Ribbons. The book is copyright ©BBC 1981-1987, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.65Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Fair Ground!

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to Fair Ground!, with the whole story told by an anonymous narrator and lushly illustrated with two-tone watercolour pictures.

From the original 1983 printing, printed in blue and red with the writing all in blue, and illustrations in both colours all the way through.

The book is written by Christopher Russell, with Sue Weeks and Mary Hoffman. The illustrations are by Martin Sailsbury. The book is copyright ©BBC 1983-1989, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [1.91Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Badger Girl

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to Badger Girl, which has the story illustrated by photos and diagrams from the dramatised version, and a map of all the locations on the back cover.

This is from the 1988 printing, it is printed in black, pale green and a light brown colour. The pages of the original book were entirely coloured brown; partly in order to make printing easier and partly because of the limitations of the PDF format, all the pages in this reproduction are white, and therefore some of the pictures have had to be (rather clumsily) edited, and you also loose the impact of the occasional white areas in the original. You can see how the original pages looked in the thumbnails which are included in the document.

The book is written by Andrew Davies, with Susan Paton and Mary Hoffman. The book is copyright ©BBC 1984-1992, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [2.29Mb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Geordie Racer

The 48 page pupils' pamphlet to Geordie Racer, with the full story, photos from the TV version plus scraps of secret messages to read, and a handy Geordie dictionary on the back.

From the original 1987 printing for the spring 1988 transmission, the book is done entirely in black & white - this is why it's so much smaller than the other downloads on this page, monochrome pictures take up much less space than colour ones. The chapter titles in the original book were written in a brush font, the same as the 'Geordie Racer' title on the cover, but for this PDF version everything has been converted to 'standard' universal fonts - on Windows it will probably show up as a stretched up version of Times New Roman.

The book is written by Christopher Russell, with Sue Weeks and Mary Hoffman. The book is copyright ©BBC 1987-1994, and remains the property of the BBC.

Download PDF File [917kb]
Right-click and SAVE TARGET AS









Other Books

All the books available for download from this site are about 20 to 40 years old, and have been out of print for decades. They have been put up here simply because there is no other reasonable way to find them.

If you want to get hold of the newer Look and Read books, you'd do best to go direct to the BBC and try to buy originals. Original printed books are miles better than these amateurish PDF scans anyway.

Most of these books are no longer listed in BBC catalogues, but there's a good chance that they will still have some in stock if you ring them up and read out the order number. This has worked for me in the past, but please remember I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BBC, so they might just tell you to clear off or something. BBC Education contact details are in the Trivia section.

You could also try Trumedia Ltd (www.trumedia.co.uk), which is a reseller of schools resources, and MAY still have some old books in stock. If you're working for a school, try LEA resource centres, and see if local teaching colleges or universities have their own resource centres that'll let you in. If you're just an individual, why not try blagging your way into an official resource centre anyway.

Here is a list of the more recent L&R books. If they are available you'll have to buy them in packs of five, for around £10 to £15.

Through The Dragon's Eye	order no. 343788	(was still available in 2003)
Sky Hunter II	order no. 354399
Earth Warp	order no. 353996	(was still available in 2002)
Spywatch	order no. 372796	(was still available in 2003)
Captain Crimson	order no. 46237X	(was still available in 2003)
The Legend of the Lost Keys	order no. 460474	(still available through www.bbcschoolshop.com)
Zzaap and the Word Master	order no. 541040	(still available through www.bbcschoolshop.com)
Shadow Play	order no. 548509	(still available through www.bbcschoolshop.com)

Please let me know how you get on if you try getting books this way, especially if you have updated information about what is or is not still available to buy.

---

The content of these files is Copyright ©BBC and remains the property of the BBC.
The files themselves are all my own work, and while I obviously can't say they're copyright, I just wanted to let you know that I spent the time doing them.

Read and print .PDF files with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

this site  the web

THIS UNOFFICIAL WEBSITE HAS NO CONNECTION OF ANY KIND WITH LOOK AND READ OR WITH THE BBC. The Look and Read title and logo, as well as all related material, is copyright © BBC, 1967-2006. The official BBC Schools website is at www.bbc.co.uk/schools. Everything else on this website © Ben Clarke, 2000-2006. No malicious infringement of BBC copyrights is intended. Material featured at this site remains the property of the BBC or relevant copyright holders.