Adrian still likes us to read him a good night story. We’ve left children’s books behind a while ago already. We just finished an old Estonian translation of Karel Čapek’s Nine Fairy Tales. I can make myself speak Swedish to my children when others are in the room, so as not to exclude anyone, but good night stories just have to be in Estonian.

We’ve run out of suitable books in Estonian. I usually buy piles of books every time we visit Estonia, but we’ve had to skip our annual trips for two summers in a row, so we had a bit of a book crisis. I’ve got a few boxes of children’s books we haven’t read yet, but we probably never will – Adrian has outgrown such stuff.

Luckily my mum still has many of our old books, some from her childhood, some from mine. I called her, and here’s what she lent us to read next: an old Estonian edition of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

In the Soviet planned economy, things had fixed prices. This book cost 7 roubles, according to a printed price on the rear cover. That was before the 1961 currency reform; book prices were in kopeks (1/100 of a rouble) when I was a child.

The front cover has a dramatic scene of a dinosaur threatening a man wielding a firebrand. Clearly drawn in a different era, when artists’ knowledge (along with everybody else’s knowledge) of dinosaur anatomy wasn’t what it is today. That dinosaur holds itself like a large human in a dinosaur costume. It will be interesting to look at more illustrations – and to see what kind of mental picture Sir Arthur had of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and other prehistoric creatures. I haven’t read this book for a good 30 years at least.