I love books. I owned a bookstore, with my brothers, years ago yet my love for them goes back to my childhood; as does my love for all things Disney. So, when Disney Editions releases a wonderful collection of material from the Disney Archives, The Disney Keepsakes, you can bet that I am one happy camper.

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Blueprints of the Nautilus © Copyright Disney

Description

In The Disney Treasures, author Robert Tieman led readers on a tour through some of the highlights of Walt Disney’s career and company, from his early sketches and biography to the beginnings of his last projects at Walt Disney World and the building of an international audience for Mickey and friends.

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Mickey Mouse Club membership card © Copyright Disney

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© Copyright Disney

This second volume, The Disney Keepsakes, Tieman returns to the archives to fill in the history of Disney during Walt’s lifetime, fleshing out some of the early stories with more details and interesting side projects and also visiting fan favorites that were neglected in the first volume. Featuring more fascinating and never-before-seen removable facsimiles from the Archives, Volume II is arranged chronologically, as was The Disney Treasures, with each spread covering a different topic in the Disney story. Likewise, the design will capture the same sense of whimsy, fun, and elegance that the first volume did. Volume II is produced at the same specs as the first volume, but does not include a CD.

In these pages, long-adored characters like Minnie Mouse, Bambi and Dumbo and their films get due recognition, as do lesser-known but still cherished films like So Dear to My Heart and The Adventures of Ichabod Crane and Mr. Toad. The Disney Keepsakes features Disney’s ventures in radio, live-action and 3-D film productions as well as key moments in the development of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Throughout, gorgeous design, removable documents and Mr. Tieman’s engaging storytelling make the trip fascinating for anyone who loves the magic of Disney.

Wrapping it up

While I worked at Disney, our offices functioned as the archives for the East Coast. We had thousands of photographic slides and negatives for use with all of the production we were responsible for producing. Unfortunately most of the paper ephemera was kept out in California at the corporate archives under the great tutelage of Dave Smith. This is the first time I have been able to hold items, replicas, of some of the memorabilia kept in the archives that I had seen in photographs for years.

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