Those Bradford Books

The Bradford Exchange has begun reissuing the fourteen Baum Oz books in facsimile editions. They are a bit pricey, but considering the limited sales potential, I think they are fairly priced. The closest any other publisher has come to facsimiles is Books of Wonder's hardcover series - though they never claimed to be true facsimiles. Please click on any of the images to enlarge them to look at the details.

The Bradford Edition

The Bradford books are handsomely produced - especially the stamped covers. But their reproduction of the color plates is sloppy and IMHO inept. Now some might say there isn't anything better out there, and I'd have to agree. But Bradford wasted a huge opportunity to do it right. Considering the money spent producing these volumes, it's a shame they didn't have a better graphic designer prepare the scans of the color plates.

For the sake of this critique I'll focus on a single plate from The Marvelous Land of Oz. I picked it at random. It shows Jellia Jamb serving as translator when Jack Pumpkinhead meets the Scarecrow. The Bradford printing is shown at left. At first glance it doesn't seem awful by any means.

The 1904 First Edition

In the original 1904 printing you can see there is some plate damage on the left hand side of the image, as well as that dark greenish blue edge. The original plates are also a little bit out of registration (the four printing plates for the different colors are not perfectly aligned). Now perhaps the Bradford Exchange, in their desire to create facsimiles, felt a need to reproduce the plates "out of register" as indeed they are in the original edition. But the Bradford image is even more out of register (than my copy anyway) and the throne, canopy, and Scarecrow are all much darker. The Bradford plate above is very grainy, too, probably from too much "sharpening" by their graphics person. Both images were scanned at 600 dpi with the same basic settings for this blog.  

But in my opinion the most disappointing difference between the two is the loss of all the detail in the original line art. Here is a close-up of Jellia Jamb's face. The original is on the left, the Bradford is on the right. These are both unadulterated scans from the two books.

It's just not good enough - and when one compares section by section, ALL of the color plates suffer from this problem of grainy, blobby, detail-less reproduction. Some of this loss of detail comes from the aforementioned poor registration of the Bradford printing. But if my basic scan above can capture the detail, then they should have been able to do so as well. Is Bradford deliberately not fixing things like bad registration because the first edition is also out of register? If that's the case, I wonder if we will get an ugly glue blob on page 221 of the Bradford edition of Ozma of Oz. The registration in Bradford's The Marvelous Land of Oz could have easily been fixed. Just to see if it were possible, I took my basic scan of the original plate above and attempted to bring the four colors into registration.

Please CLICK to enlarge!

It took me seven minutes of work, including scan time, to align the image - and my results would have been better still had I scanned it at 1200 dpi instead of 600. Personally I would prefer the color plates looked good rather than accurate. Sadly, Bradford's color plates are neither.

[A review of the Bradford Exchange edition of Ozma of Oz can be found here.]