#or just like the previous two months:

[doubletroubletag]

i got almost all the next month's updates sketched! i'm not doing the last one simply because i am feeling the burn out of composing these pages. (each have at least 6 pages, a good amount have the max 12!)

that said, these are all just sketched. i want to do it in this order: backgrounds -> lineart -> transcript. i got other projects i need to work on (winning hat and NightFell) so I can't really guarantee when Tag will start to update again.

[powerfulscribbles]

Hot take: Even though I love that he beat the Miquellallegations, pre-dlc Mohg was so much better and had a lot to go for in terms of power, potential and how conniving and dedicated he was to achieve his goal. I miss him.

Also the premises for a Lord of Blood ending were right there. It would've been an interesting alternative option where you as a player, not only as a Tarnished, are giving up both your role as main character and your quest to become Elden Lord, thus letting someone else seize that opportunity.

I understand Miquella's plan for godhood and the creation of a gentler world (which is still ultimately destined to fail if we intervene and avoid having our heart stolen by him), but it removed so much agency from Mohg in particular, in my opinion.

[asvidema]

i color coded the lyrics from A Little Crypted Love by Kriill because i'm insane about it. for hans and henry purposes

[supercantaloupe]

happy sleepover saturday

ummmm kind of looking forward to see what the next season looks like for vaopera— hoping for good stuff.

the bug is snug in a rug...

OH so i actually might have some insider info on that one. vaopera hasn't made a season announcement anywhere as far as i can tell but my friend claims to have the scoop, and given the level of detail he relayed to me i think it's reasonably credible. he says that next season will be la cenerentola, intelligence (by heggie and scheer, of moby dick fame), and aida. this is not confirmed in any official capacity yet, but, much to consider regardless

[ask meme]

[clowndensation]

we hired a new guy at work and his name is vincent btw. literally replacing me with some guy with the same exact name. and our email addresses are all just our first names and then @companywebsitename.com so if i ever WERE to come back, i'd be like. vincent1@companywebsitename.com. disrespectful.

[beneathsilverstars]

guys i think my depression meds are working

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[autismofficial]

some bobbles (+ two unfinished things)

[fingertipsmp3]

This is the spiritual successor to Four Seasons Landscaping. To me.

[sabrirene]

guys i actually slept through the night….

[lithariel]

Oh for fuck's sake, because I only just recently got a much better income, banks don't want to give me a loan since my account history says that the last few months/years I had little to no amount of money at all

Finally I have something of my own but it's not worth shit since I don't even have a fucking bed

[spearxwind]

.

[rahabs]

I just feel so. Gross. There's so many things I can do and yet I do nothing and feel like a complete waste of a human being, which makes me feel even more miserable, which means I have even more trouble with my creative endeavours.

[discoreptile]

As of yet unnamed game card art!

[teagrammy]

I’ve now had two students make callbacks to previous units, is this what success feels like??

[songtwo]

just found out my journalism IDOL HEROE ETC is 28 and was 25 (TWENTY FIVE) when he interviewed DAMON ALBARN which means i have TWO years to step up and interview damon…… the pressure’s never been higher……