Documenting this book turned out to be a larger project that I anticipated it to be. As is turns out, I found 3 versions of the book from 1906. At first glance, they all seem to have the same illustrations and stories..... not so.
I first began by collecting pictures from an online source.
As I collected, I noticed that some of the pictures were in color while other seemed to be just done with black ink and pen. This didn't surprise me as I had learned about similar books of the time and the increased cost of publishing in color.
I was enchanted by Margaret Ely Webb's drawings and found a version to purchase on eBay. When I got my book I was surprised to find that ALL the illustrations were in color. I began to scan them and blend the best versions for the blog.
Somehow I purchased another version of the book which turned out to be in pristine condition and I began scanning better copies of some of the rougher versions from my first book. I then made the discovery that this version had different colored pictures.
As it turns out, you will see that I have included up to four different variations of some of the illustrations.
Scanning turned out to be interesting as some of the pictures that I thought were just black and white turned out to have light blue or yellow when scanned.
I scanned all the illustrations at 600dpi. I hope this does not cause the pictures to load too slowly on your computer. I wanted to scan them at high resolution so that other could use them as they seem fit.
It might look a little eclectic as they display in this blog. Most of the pages in the book are now a light sepia brown. With photo editing software I tried to clean them up and present them as close to their original color as possible. This made for quite the task as if I lighted the page color to show the true color, it often faded out to not show the lighter pale colors.
It is very common when scanning to have letter and printing from the previous page show through to the desired side. I was usually successful in lighten the scanned image to eliminate the unwanted printing but at the same time, it would lighten the desired image color. An interesting and challenging job to balance all the needed changes.
So, enjoy and let me know what you think and how you are using these beautiful illustrations.
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| My first purchased version. A copy in very poor condition. |
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| My second version in pristine condition. |
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