COMING BACK INTO PRINT IN 2022
Dick Turpin; Among The Wreckers; or, Chosen Captain of a Lawless Band (1904) follows the adventures of a gang of scoundrels as they murder and plot against the government. This 24 paged text adventure was published at the end of 1904 in Brittan in a comic book sized format.
Issues of Dick Turpin are scarce today because the pulp paper that they were printed on self destructs over decades. That is especially the case here with issue No. 59. The pulp has become so delicate that touching it before it could be scanned caused it to flake, rip and disintegrate.
Page 4 before and after.
When most booksellers come across something in this condition they usually discard them, especially when the cover and first 6 pages were split in half. Luckily this reader escaped that fate!
Decades ago the spine was repaired with cellophane tape. If this had not been done this issue would not exist today because it was about the only thing left keeping the delicate book together!
The pages were so brittle that the book could not lay flat on the table top scanner without the pages literally breaking at the spine from the bend of being opened. The decision was made to disbound all 24 pages and covers to scan each individually at 600 dots per inch and saved as high resolution TIF files.
An example of ink halos printed around individual characters.
Every page and cover were digitally skew corrected, with rips and blemishes retouched. The pages that were torn in the middle were joined back together. Next, hours were put into fixing characters that were not printed clearly. Open spaces in some of the printed e, s, a, and so on characters were filled with ink. Others were had ink halos around them from the printing blocks not being cleaned. Page 5 had the most of this.
Page 5 showing ink botches before and after photoshopping. In order to fix this, characters were manually cleaned out with an eraser tool.
A small bit of text was missing from pages 3 and 4. Luckily it was found in the cellophane tape that kept the spine together.
Fortunately a small chunk of text missing from pages 3 and 4 were found tucked in the spine and edited back into those pages.
The end result of over thirty hours of work is twenty four pages with their readability restored. Not only that but this originally 6.5 by 9.75 inch comic book size is reprinted in the modern comic book format of 6.75 x 10.25 inches!