Buffalo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography Book

I have a friend who hates me talking about dragons. This started when I finally got a copy of ‘The Flight of Dragons’ by Peter Dickinson, having been a huge fan of the old Rankin Bass film (which it turned out had very little to do with the book). It’s one of my favourite books and I love the the absolutely stiff-lipped way the book entertains its notions of real dragons, presenting theory, evidence and rebuttal without ever giving the joke away.

I have also enjoyed a few unicorn books, ‘The Natural History of the Unicorn’ by Chris Lavers, and ‘The Lore of the Unicorn’ by Odell Shepard. Both these books are more about how the idea of the unicorn was created and disseminated and the beliefs surrounding them.

For this reason, I was very excited for a book that dealt with both these fascinating creatures and… I was really disappointed.

How pathetic were the dragons in this? The Dickinson style dragons had a whole complicated biology that allowed them to fly like blimps and breath fire when they burnt off the gas to land. This book had little dragons that flew like bats and larger dragons that either created mist or fire because they were filled with farting gas that needed expelling. This farting gas was due to their vegetarian diet and third stomach - vegetarian dragons? Yuck.

The dragons were also too clever. In the Dickinson books they were wily animals but in this they had religion and politics - which allowed the writers to make jokes about a dragon NATO and cold war.

Placing the dragons in the modern day (or at least 1980s) meant there were also gags about dragons being trained by the US military as germ bombs in Vietnam and the cause of a missile crisis. The wink was tipped on the first page by a footnote referencing the Piltdown Man - the lack of a straight face made the book pointless, there’s no fun in acknowledging the unreality of it.

The unicorn bit seemed to go through the motions, using the original Greek description of them, noting how they went from fierce beasts to magical beasts to Christian allegory. There were a few interesting points about how humans have used the idea of the unicorn rather than just letting them be. It was interesting but dealt with better in other unicorn books.

Mostly, this book either repeated stuff from other books or created something less interesting than other books. Where it did succeed was that the authors went into a little more detail into Chinese and Japanese understandings of dragons but it wasn’t enough to make this book feel like it was worth much to me.