By Arthedain
Just popping in

Reproduction/Facsimile dust jackets

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 8:40:27 PM UTC

Not sure if this is in the correct thread, please by all means advise otherwise.

I am looking for anywhere reputable that does reproduction/facsimile dust jackets. I purchased separately and now have a full set of 1966 George Unwin & Allen Second Edition first impression volumes of “Fellowship of the Ring”, “The Two Towers” and “Return of the King” I struck lucky in that “Fellowship” has a genuine mint condition original dust jacket. Which leaves me now having to search for the other two jackets in a similar condition which seems unlikely. My only options are asking among the collectors here whether they know of a reputable seller of reproduction jackets for LoTR for that particular design. I’ve tried a dustjackets LLC and struck out.

My other option is to pay for the FoTR jacket to be scanned in and use photoshop to recreate the other jackets (I have the requisite fonts and measurements to do this)

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Stu

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 8:54:48 PM UTC

Personally, I'd scan the FoTR and then recreate the other two from photos and manual typesetting. Can be very time-consuming doing the textual elements of the flaps. When I have done it in the past I have also used photos found on the internet (and cropped/transformed as necessary) placed in transparent layers to help get the word spacing correct.

You might find someone who can scan the flaps (at a minimum), then it is easy.

The one thing I'd caution is that facsimile jackets are a nice stop-gap, but you always know you have a "fake" (and the resultant jackets aren't worth anything). They are great for when a jacket is going to be essentially impossible to access, though.

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Arthedain

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 9:07:55 PM UTC

From what I have seen the actual “blurb” is identical on the flaps front and back, for all three volumes. The only difference is the blocking on one front flap which may be to hide an incorrect title (my speculation of course).

It would be a case of creating a “blank” as in the book title areas between the black lines being photoshopped blank (sampling the grey colour to do it) and then creating a layer with the correctly italicised/sized and kerned text

Depending on how well it comes out if I go down that route I may make all the reproduction covers available.

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Arthedain

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 9:11:02 PM UTC

Having the entire FoTR jacket scanned in in the first instance and saved as a psd gives me a template to make any adjustments to.

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Stu

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 9:18:52 PM UTC

Arthedain wrote:
Having the entire FoTR jacket scanned in in the first instance and saved as a psd gives me a template to make any adjustments to.

Actually yes, I imagine the flaps are largely identical between volumes (I'm used to doing Hobbits mostly where this isn't the case from printing to printing).

With a full scan of volume one, you could easily do two and three in an hour or less.

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Stu

21 Aug, 2020
2020-8-21 9:22:59 PM UTC

I should mention, you will need to reduce the number of colours as you won't get a single grey colour out of the scan. The first thing I usually do on these kind of jackets is knock them down to the broadly the same number of colours as was used for the original printing. Also try and get a 600dpi scan.

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Reproduction/Facsimile dust jackets

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