When I need a break from my own writing projects, I sometimes practice my skills on public domain books, reprinting things that I want to have on my own bookshelf. One book I fixed up in 2021 turned out particularly well. Kindle Direct Publishing did not offer a hardback option at that time, but that has changed in the meanwhile, so I thought it would be nice to make a hardback available on Amazon. Unfortunately the document was five pages over the limit for hardback! Eventually I decided to remove five of the blank pages I had put in to make sure all the chapters started on the righthand side, when I had some spare time. Anyway, it's George Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin, printed in one volume with its sequel, The Princess and Curdie. It has a lot of pictures, too, collected from two or three separate public domain editions of each book--though I unfortunately had to make the colored ones grayscale because it's just not practical to print 550 pages in color. The new hardback edition can be found on Amazon here. What I want to show off on my blog, though, is a before-and-after comparison of the book covers.
When I realized that Maria L. Kirk had done pictures for both books, with illustrated covers, I wanted to reuse that art for my project. But the scans I could find were of book covers that weren't exactly in pristine condition. I think they were originally matching red covers with gold lettering and pictures done in black ink and white paint, but the white paint had rubbed off quite badly. The single scan I could find of that cover for The Princess and the Goblin had only a few traces of paint left, so in the end I had to copy a bit of paint texture from the other book cover to restore the image. And the red scratches all over Curdie and Irene and the birds looked simply ghastly. It was quite a lot of work to make that old artwork beautiful again, but I thought it was worth it. The picture above shows the covers as I found them, and the one below shows the images restored for the front and back of my combination volume. I chose to add teal to the color scheme, as Princess Irene's peacock-feather fan is more convincing in teal than in red.
