Before and After...My Book of the Church's Year

Oh ho, me hearties!  It's time once again for my favorite feature: Before-and-After!

This is the part of the show where we get to geek out over how fun it is to reproduce old books...!

Our latest subject is Enid Chadwick's delightful My Book of the Church's Year.

First of all, copies of this book are hard to come by, so our original isn't in as good a condition as I'd like.  So it's pretty obvious which is which, but nevertheless, we managed to match the European paper size and everything:

OK, sorry, we had to add the barcode...

We even reproduced the endsheets:

Now here's where it gets really fun...this book was printed back in 1948, and the colors were produced in a similar fashion to most comic books--a process called halftone printing, where dots of blue, red and yellow combine to make purple and green and orange.  This style of printing gives these older books a certain vintage feel, and we wanted to preserve that.

Sometimes this is difficult to do, because reprinting dots tends to make a wavy pattern in the dots that is really unpleasant.  So we did several tests before printing to see how the dots would fare, and found that we were able to accurately reprint them without giving any of you headaches.

So without further ado, here is the interior, before and after:

...and she's ready for her close-up...

And there you have it, folks!  This was a really fun project with a really wonderful book and I hope you all will enjoy it as much as we did!