The Old West
The Old West is a series of books about the fundamental founding of the American Old West, published by Time-Life Books from 1973 through 1980. Each book focused on a different topic, such as cowboys, American Indians, gamblers and gunfighters. Each volume in the series is 240 pages long, and has many pictures and illustrations. They are bound in a padded imitation leather hardcover binding with the series name, title of the book, and publisher imprinted in gold on the spine of the book. The front cover of the book has a glued-on oval shaped  picture. Beneath the picture embossed in the faux leather is a set of cattle horns with a rising sun depicted between the horns. The outline of the cover is embossed with a rustic rope. The back cover is blank. The series was issued without a dust jacket. There are 27 volumes in the series, of which volume 27, the "Master Index", was executed as a stapled 65-page soft cover release, not featuring any illustrations: Overview. International editions. As an American-specific topic, this series was not widely translated into other languages, but two identically executed foreign-language editions were  released by the Amsterdam "Time-Life International BV" branch nonetheless; the 1978-1980 German-language "Der Wilde Westen" edition, which was shy of six volumes (seven when counting the "Master Index"), and the 1978-1981 French-language "Le Far West" edition, equally shy of six (or seven) volumes. That the series was partially translated into these two languages was not only due to the historical ties France and Germany had with the era in question, but also because the Western (genre) has never gone out of vogue in both countries, particularly in Germany where the popularity of the genre has  since the days of Karl May remained unabated, unlike in native US. Aside from these editions released by Time Life themselves, there were at least three additional, but far more obscure licensed international series editions known, all of them truncated; the oldest of these concerned the 1973-1974 Yugoslavian "Resnična zgodovina divjega zahoda" ("The true history of the Wild West"), which was licensed to Slovenian publisher Cankarjeva Založba. Being the most obscure of the three, the extent of this slightly differently executed hardcover edition is therefore not known. Like in France and Germany, the Western had been a popular genre  in Yugoslavia, before the outbreak of the wars that spelt the end of that nation. A ten-volume Japanese-language "Daiseibu monogatari" ("Large Western Story") edition is known to have been released by Tokyo-based publisher Taimuraihubukkusu in 1976, identical in exterior to the American source publications, but with Japanese-language interior texts. The third edition concerned the Swedish-language ten-volume "Wild West" release, published in 1984-85 by Swedish publisher Bokorama and likewise greatly resembling the American source publication. Other language territories were offered the opportunity to acquire the original American version via mail through their nearest Time  Life Books subsidiary, typically by series subscription.