All This and Heros too...

At the risk of repeating myself, I am posting a blog which I put up this morning over at  the Book Palace Blog concerning our forthcoming Heros the Spartan project. As many of you know, aside from my day job, I have been working on helping launch Illustrators Quarterly. As a brief aside, we now have the most amazing team of contributors who are all pooling their considerable talents to make this publication worthy of it's subject matter. But there is no getting around the fact that editing a publication such as Illustrators is a really full on job, so what I have attempted to do, with the aid of the team, is get issue 2 pretty well resolved way ahead of final copy date. I will be talking a bit more about Illustrators and the people behind it in the not too distant future. But on to Heros, which has also been occupying a lot of my time for the last few months. So ...

Let me fill you in on a few of the details, so you can get a handle on what is happening. Firstly and most importantly the format; the book is going to be the same size as our Wulf the Briton epic, so it's Gi-Normous, so that you can fully appreciate the artwork as Frank Bellamy intended it to be seen. Interestingly, Bellamy was such a perfectionist that he often worked on his strips the same size as they were reproduced, and never more than a quarter up, so he knew exactly how each pen line and brush stroke would reproduce. In addition and such was his professionalism, he reduced the number of bottles of colour Pelikan ink he worked with to ... 3, plus black. The reason being that Eric Bemrose who printed the Eagle would often have to retouch art which had colours that were proving unco-operative in repro and such work resulted in the publisher having a re-touching surcharge added to their bill. Bellamy's work NEVER incurred one of these charges.

So the good news is that, as with Wulf, you are getting the optimum best job we can deliver in terms of the pages being as Bellamy intended. There is one compromise we have had to make and that is that the book will not be presenting each double page spread on a single page. We fully explored the feasibility of such an approach, but we were left with two alternatives, one being a greatly reduced size for each Heros spread, the other being a book that would have to be bound along it's longer edge and would cost a fortune.

So in the end sanity prevailed, we went back and looked at the double page spread in our companion volume Wulf The Briton (there is one from Christmas 1959) and looked at the all important gutter. The wonderful thing about Prolong is the quality of their binding, the books are bound in signatures of four sheets and open out flat with no problem whatsoever, so in the end we decided that the answer to our problem was right under our noses. In addition the book will be much easier to handle and more of a reading experience. Plus it will greatly help in keeping the cost of this book down. So all in all we decided it was by far the best route to take.

Anyway and because I know you are keen to see something more substantive here are some before and after restorations plus...



The cover. Hope you like it.