The Back Flap

First I want to thank all of you who have continued to drop by here even though it looks like nothing is happening. Since summer, a long series of events have kept me off-balance and scrambling for time. Without going into too much tedious detail, let me say that part of it had to do with the demise of my previous printer and the difficult decision to change from dye-based ink to pigment. That, and a house remodeling project that took entirely too long and which required me to keep track of a lot more details than I thought I would have to. In spite of all that I did manage to complete three of the four Metropolitan dust jackets, even though I’ve decided to hold one back so I can make it even better. More on that later

LONGER LASTING PRINTS
The printer issue is certainly worth writing about, since it involves a definite upgrade to the quality of output I can offer. My previous inkjet, an Epson 1280, offered very high resolution printing and the kind of brilliance and saturation of color that only dye inks, up to now, have been able to give. I was thrown into a quandary when it died because I was finding it harder to get paper of the size (17×22) and weight (7 mil) I’ve used for years that would work with dye-based ink. I was being forced to move to roll paper instead of sheets and my fear was that the curled paper would be difficult to flatten for shipping. Paper weight is an issue because more and more inkjet paper is only being offered in “photographic” and “art print” weights of 10 mil. and more. Those papers are too heavy, in my opinion, to work well as book jackets. Papers suitable for commercial digital printing are hard to come by in small quantities and are not rated for use with Epson printers.

After much research and back-and-forth, I decided to get an Epson R2880 which, though it used pigment inks and rolled paper, had the addition of a “Vivid Magenta” to liven up the reds occurring in many the jacket titles, and it purported to handle purples much better than previous pigment printers. i have to say that I’m very happy with the new printer and the new Epson UltraChrome K3 inks. The colors are richer and the ink is less prone to drying in the nozzles between print sessions. Resolution is higher than the 1280, but you probably won’t be able to tell that with the naked eye. I still prefer to print on sheets rather than use the roller attachment, so I’m hand-cutting whatever I need from the roll. I can still get two regular jackets from one 16.5×22 inch sheet.

The most important aspect of this is that now my jackets are all rated for even longer life, up to 108 years! This counts as archival in my book since most of the original McClurg dust jackets are showing color casts and shifts now that they’re in the 90- to 75-year range. You still have to protect your jackets from direct sunlight and scuffing, but that’s what Brodarts are for.

Of course I’ve never had a problem with the older jackets fading over the last 10 years, and I’ve never gotten complaints from any of my customers about it either. I’ve got them on my collection, in the front room which gets plenty of light, and they still look as good as the day I put them there. If anyone ever has a problem with fading or color shift on Recoverings dust jackets, he should contact me immediately and arrange an upgrade.

I’ll be posting again this afternoon about A Fighting Man of Mars and later about Tanar of Pellucidar, but I wanted to get something up this morning since those stories seem to be getting a bit long.

I’ve been diligently working on setting the type and finalizing the art on three of the Metropolitan jackets: “Tanar of Pellucidar,” “Tarzan at the Earth’s Core” and “A Fighting Man of Mars.” Most of the cleanup for the cover illustrations and titling has been done over the last year. Several reference copies were used to make up for the poor condition that these particular jackets seem to be in in some of the collections I’ve seen. For “Tarzan and the Lost Empire” I’ve got quite a bit more work to do so that won’t be ready for a couple of months. More on that below.

All three use wraparound illustrations and each one incorporates a mix of fonts on the flaps. The flaps are typical in that they promote the book the jacket is for on the front flap and the other Burroughs books from Metropolitan with review quotes on the back flap. As far as I can tell Metropolitan Books, New York, never published any other than the four Burroughs’ books. There was another Metropolitan Books in Portland Oregon, but they only published a few titles in 1934 and 1935. However, one of those had illustrations by Mahlon Blaine who ended up living in an apartment over Biblo and Tannen and doing illustrations for the Canaveral editions of ERB’s books in the 1960s. Small world, eh?

So here’s the typographic tally for the three of the four Metropolitan’s I’m finishing up:

•  TANAR (1929) uses Cloister Bold for the flap copy, with Cloister Bold Italic for the names of the newspapers in the review quotes on the back flap. Both flaps use Cooper Black in the titles mixed with Cloister italic for the prepositions “of” and “and.” “By Edgar Rice Burroughs” is set on  two lines on both flaps in Cloister Bold Italic and Cloister Bold. “Author of. . .” lines are set in either Lino De Vinnne or Old Style No. 21. These seem to be the only fonts which have the curved start of the stem on the lowercase p. Very noticeable in the review quotes is the use of what Mac McGrew calls “modern” quotes (I could also describe them as reversed close quotes or reversed apostrophes) where the left quote glyphs have stems hanging from the ball rather than coming up from the ball (reversed 9s instead of 6s). Cloister was designed with these in it’s metal form as available from Linotype, Monotype and ATF, but for some reason they’re not found in any of the digital versions. Not even the LTC version from P-22, usually so accurate in their designs. What a shame! I hope someone corrects this oversight some day soon. In the meantime I’ll just make my own adjustment.

•  TEC (1930) uses Bodoni for most of the text, with Poster Bodoni (or Ultra Bodoni) for the title promo on the front flap. The publisher’s name is set in Cooper Black on the bottom of the front flap. On the back flap there is a promotional paragraph about ERB, set in Bodoni italic, along with reviews for “Tanar of Pellucidar” and “Tarzan and the Lost Empire” set in Bodoni and Bodoni Italic. The titles of those books are set in Cooper Black as is the publisher’s name. Not a lot to remark about, typographically, on this jacket.

•  FMM (1931) uses an Old Style font for the text copy. All OS fonts are difficult to identify because of overall similarities and only slight variations. Combine that with the  variations from point size to point size of the metal types and you see the primary difficulty I’ve had with this project from the very beginning. However, one clue points to Linotype Old Style No. 1 as the likely font: the calligraphic g in the italic. This kind of g has a left-facing bowl and a tail that sweeps down to the left as we would expect in handwriting or lettering. Hence, “calligraphic.” Most of the OS faces have a “two-story” g in their italic fonts. There are a few other Old Style fonts that have this g but the final distinguishing mark is the lower case p which retains the starting of the bowl’s stroke on the left overlapping the stem. This is typical of the Caslons and different from some of the other Old Styles like De Vinne or Lino Number 21 which show the curved serif at the top of the stem itself. The titles of the books promoted on the front and back flaps are all in Cheltenham Bold, a display face often seen on the A.C. McClurg jackets as well. On the front flap “A Fighting Man of Mars” is set on three lines in all caps. On the back flap there are two promos: “TARZAN  at the Earth’s Core,” and “TANAR of Pellucidar,” with “Tarzan” and “Tanar” widely spaced in all caps to fill the column width. Under those title displays, the words “By Edgar Rice Burroughs,” in two lines, are set in what appears to be Caslon No. 3 Italic and Regular, respectively. At the bottom of each flap the publisher name and address, “Metropolitan Books, Inc., 150 Nassau Street, New York” is set on two lines in Caslon Bold Condensed, all caps, with the exception of the “nc” in “Inc.” which uses small caps.

Though “Tarzan and the Lost Empire” was the first book that Metropolitan published, in 1929, it is a different sort of animal than the other jackets in that it is all line art. A much more graphic treatment than the paintings we’re used to from J. Allen St. John at McClurg. Burroughs wanted Metropolitan to use St. John, but they had their own house artists and wanted to keep costs down. In doing a restoration of TLE I’m working on pulling out the line art and actually laying it over the color block so that it will have the cleanest possible look. I’ve had a chance to get acquainted with the art as it was printed by Grosset and Dunlap and, subsequently, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and getting a better idea of what might have happened with it in production. But that’s another story for a another time.

After I uploaded the new site two weeks ago, I asked a number of friends to look at it in various browsers to see whether there were any major problems. I went over to the local library and looked at it on their PCs and found that there were three issues with the browser they used. Turned out to be IE6. It took me most of the week (between other jobs) to get it cleaned up, and though it still doesn’t look as good in IE6 or 7 as it does on Firefox or Safari, at least everything is in the right place. I’ll have to see what other tweaks I can give it down the line. Let me know if you’re having any problems looking at the site.

This took a long time to get right, but I’m sure that it’s going to be worth it.

After telling you all that I was working on a redesign of the site, it just seemed like it was getting harder and harder to get it finished. I think I started on this back on ‘07 but there were a number of little problems that it took a while to figure out. Making the blog integrate with the site was a major one, but I think that’s pretty seamless now. You still have to remember to use your Back button or the “Recoverings Home” tab up top though. I couldn’t fully integrate the navigation of the site into this because there’s just too much back-end stuff going on here for me to attempt to design my own blog template. Maybe later.

I hope you’ll like the additions to the site such as the Art Prints, the Readings page and the Contact page. The latter is something I should have added a long time ago but wanted to wait until I could do a complete redesign.

You probably want to know if I’m going to finish any more dust jackets. In fact, I’ve finished the art restoration for TANAR, FIGHTING MAN and TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE, and will be working on setting the type as soon as I know this site is running well. I’ve almost completed the front cover restoration of GIRL FROM HOLLYWOOD but I need to do more work on the cover thumbnails on the back panel. As for TARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE, there’s more to do there yet. But I’ll keep you informed.

I plan to write something on here once a week for starters, but it might drop to once a month later. We’ll see how it goes and what I have to say.

This is just a start folks.