#why whywhywhy

[dailypearldoodles]

WHY DOES TUMBLR HATE ME WHY DID IT POST THE UNEDITED VERSION OF THE DRAFT OH MY GOD

[naturalld]

.

[smalldicksantiago]

the fact that armand let louis, madeline and claudia be kidnapped so they could be tortured and subjected to the whims of a bunch of theater kids for killing the worst bisexual in history, one of which had literally nothing to do with the murder, is CRAZY. the fact that louis had to watch as his newly made fledging and daughter/sister being murdered by the worst vampire coven ever, only to have his lover watching from the sidelines knowing damn well he could've stopped this, is CRAZY. but the fact that louis de pointe du lac still stayed with armand for another 77 yrs after all of this is INSANE. don't fucking play with me wtf is going on

[dr-cameron]

folks, is it gay to check out ur boss while doing a house search of ur patient without their permission?

[carlyraejepsans]

saw your most recent post about really good fics that contain uncomfortable kinks and i immediately thought "ah, biscia must be reading the mpreg soriel fic" and almost left a reply talking about it but i stopped myself because i realized that would be an insane assumption to make. needless to say i felt so vindicated when i saw you link it in an earlier post.

like. HELLO?

HELLO???????

[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!💫

[r3d-m3dic]

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKKK???? NONONONO 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[alan-in-the-outernet]

Do you think that victim might find his surrender too easy? Clearly he must not be terrified enough if he's willing to give up on his own. And then decides the solution is to kidnap his kids once he's contained. Keeping this a secret from him of course so that it can be a surprise. They want him to suffer, and he clearly cares about these sticks. What better way to torment him than to make him responsible for the pain of the ones he cares about most? He can't know about their plan ahead of time because then he would try to escape. Now he'll feel extra awful about just letting himself be taken because that allows them to do this.

Oof... yeah, maybe. And then going out to try and kidnap the color gang... and if he succeeds...?

Him presenting them before the captured Alan... who has been put not in a box- because that wouldn't work on a huge human- but they'd had a relative guesstimate of his size, making a large building with cuffs to hold him against the wall, by his wrists, neck, and ankles... and all he could do is stare with wide, small eyes...

...And think...

He did this. He allowed this to happen. In trying to protect them, he put them in danger... and he can see their wide eyes staring back... and he can't move his head, but he can look away... the guilt weighing on him.

[booksandpaperss]

if elmax not romantic in canon why are there legitimate elmax-lumax parallels. if elmax not romantic in canon why are there legitimate elmax-lumax parallels. if elmax not romantic in canon why are there legitimate elmax-lumax parallels. if elmax not romantic in canon why are there legitimate elmax-lumax parallels. if elmax not romantic wh

[averagetmntfan]

bruh.

[bleauktopus]

owowowowo

[genderfluidsgetguns]

days since I

cut myself: 0

[elysiumcalled]

We had a painter come to paint the walls and ceiling in the kitchen today cause it’s been completely redone so someone tell me WHYTYYY he painted the COPPER PIPES?

[strqyr]

.....adam with red eyes tho.....

[luvmequmi]

I’m gonna become a girl whose only personality is being in love with a sweet boy

[dasloddl]

it's so hard not to lose hope but if we lose hope it's already over