Look and Learn was a British weekly educational magazine for kids published between 1962 and 1982, running for over 1000 issues. It contained articles on a wide variety of topics, from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster. There was a long running SF strip, "The Trigan Empire", and serialized novels in comic form, such as Verne's "The First Men in the Moon".
There's a Look and Learn historical picture archive online, which has some great background on the magazine, but if you want the actual comics then you need to search places like eBay and Etsy.
I recently bought an electronic version of the entire run of comics from eBay UK, and I've been enjoying re-reading them; the historical material has hardly dated, and the artwork is wonderful.
One problem is searching for topics. The magazine scans are in CBR or CBZ format (a zipped collection of page images), so there's no simple search mechanism. Fortunately, the Look and Learn editors periodically published indicies in the magazine. I've scanned them in, cleaned up the text, and produced about 30 text files. These can be searched using any tool you like (e.g. grep), but I've put together three small Python programs to help.
Disclaimer: OCR can be inaccurate even with the best of input images. I've tried to correct all the errors, but it's a certainty that I've missed some. If you find any, please send me a quick e-mail and I'll update the material here. Thanks.
Search all of the indicies, using a regular expression pattern, printing the matching lines. A "-f" option includes the file name and line number of each match. A "-c" makes upper/lowercase significant in the regex; by default, case is ignored.
Some examples to try:
python searchLkLn.py "first men" python searchLkLn.py fung* python searchLkLn.py "Charles I+" python searchLkLn.py "Charles I+" -f python searchLkLn.py "(Thai)|(Siam)" python searchLkLn.py "Stamps" python searchLkLn.py "Stamps" | grep "Germa" python searchLkLn.py "Trigan" python searchLkLn.py "begins" python searchLkLn.py "Shark" # gives upper and lower case matches python searchLkLn.py "Shark" -c # now case matters
Some output:
> python searchLkLn.py "(Thai)|(Siam)" Siamese Cats: Jan, 27 1962 Thailand: Apr 28 1962; Oct 19 1963 Lenthail: Oct 3 1964 Thailand: Dec 19 1964 Siamese (Cat): July 31 1965 Siamese (Fighting Fish): Dec 18 1965 Thailand: Jan 8, Mar 26 1966 Siam (Pce. C.): Feb 11 1967 Siam (King of): Sep 23 1967 Siamese fighting fish: 28 Mar 1970 Siam, royal governess: 21 Aug 1976 Thailand: 16 Oct 1976 Thailand, Bronze Age: 20 Nov 1976 Thailand: 19 Mar 1977 Siam, king: 27 Feb 1982 Matches: 15
These scripts convert from a publication date to an issue number, and vice-versa. Some examples:
> python dateToIssue.py Enter a date (dd MMM yyyy or MMM dd yyyy): 24 Mar 1966 First issue that year was on 1 Jan 1966, no. 207 Not a publication date. Previous issue is 218 on 19 Mar 1966 > python issueToDate.py Enter an issue number: 367 First issue that year was on 4 Jan 1969, no. 364 The issue appeared on: 25 Jan 1969
After I completed this page, I received an e-mail from Laurence Heyworth, the Managing Director of the Look and Learn archive. He sent me three Excel files of indicies that were completed for the magazine some years ago which organize the data alphabetically, by titles, and by date (here they are as a single zip file (2.24 MB)).
The closest format to my scans is the date-ordered file, which I've converted to text and slightly edited -- datesLL.txt produces nearly the same search hits as my version. For example:
> egrep "(Thai|Siam)" datesLL.txt Siamese Cats: Jan 27 1962 Thailand: Apr 28 1962; Oct 19 1963 Thailand: Dec 19 1964 Siamese (Cat): Jul 31 1965 Siamese (Fighting Fish): Dec 18 1965 Thailand: Jan 8 1966; Mar 26 1966 Siam (Pce. C.): Feb 11 1967 Siam (King of): Sep 23 1967 Siamese fighting fish: Mar 28 1970 Siam, royal governess: Aug 21 1976 Thailand: Oct 16 1976