TERRY NATION'S DALEK ANNUAL (World Distributors 1975) Feared creations of copyright-receiver Terry Nation and ex-gratia payment-receiver Raymond Cusick (or, if you believe the series, Davros. Or maybe even Yarvelling. Delete where legally and intellectually appropriate), the moment of high fame for The Daleks and their obscure comic strip world of double threaded screws and the forbidden letter "j" has long since passed by the mid-1970s. Yet it was at precisely that moment that the nation's leading Christmas Cash-In Annual publishers decided to try and ride the waves of the ten year old Dalekmania boom, and wrapped the "malevolent mutants in metal casing" up in the same familiar mix of incomprehensible text stories and unrelated articles about anything to do with space that they had been applying to parent series "Doctor Who" for the previous decade. True to form, the end result appears to have very little to do with Daleks other than featuring them in the artwork, one article even detailing a special procedure for working out a telephone number from an address ("BUT RE-MEMBER", advises a helpful Dalek, "IT ON-LY WORKS ON THE ONES PRIN-TED HERE!"). Still, at least The Daleks made it to their own annual, a feat among "Doctor Who" characters that was only ever matched by latterday robot dog K9. The Artcurus Annual 1972? Somehow, I don't think so.

LSD (Capitol Records 1966) "Some of them chew the bark off trees!". Oh yes they do, according to this desperately concerned disc warning against the growing threat of hallucinogen ingestion. Hilariously over-the-top scare stories are here in their droves, including a bizarre suggestion that all Acid-influenced music sounds less like Country Joe And The Fish than it does lots of atonal saxaphones playing the odd note at random. More bizarre still is the wildly paranoid J. Edgar Hoover-style prediction that unless urgent action is taken, Acidheads will soon infiltrate key positions of power and bring polite society to its knees. Yes, I kind of like it now Skip Spence is in the Whitehouse, don't you? Ultimately, this well-meaning disc was utterly pointless and futile, as within a couple of years the only albums that would have been needed to convince youngsters that LSD was a bad idea were the legions of dull progressive rock albums clogging up record shop shelves.

YOU CAN DO THE CUBE by Patrick Bossert (Carousel Books 1982) Memorably dismissed by one contributor to this publication as being written by "some smartarse with gigs", the masterwork of young Mr. Bossert became the bane of many an early 1980s schoolchild's life, his proud visage beaming from the cover being an incessant reminder that he could indeed solve the Rubik's Cube whereas they, naturally, could not. And the book continued to haunt their lives, as there are always inevitably at least five copies in every second hand bookshop ever visited. The child cubemeister had the last laugh, though; he wisely invested his royalties in computers, and emerged at the end of the last century as a technological saviour armed with a self-created device capable of detecting the presence of the dreaded Millennium Bug. Sometimes, you really do start wishing that you had paid more attention in double maths.