Posted by Jon on August 05, 2003 at 13:26:08 from 199.128.91.76 user Jon.
In Reply to: Re: Towing Alongside was Re: Where's Wizard? posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on August 05, 2003 at 06:43:49:
This has come up before. I have an American first edition which shows a curved line coming off Goblin's starboard quarter and disappearing off the right edge of the page. SW is, if not unique, exceptional, in having a large number of borderless illustrations. My theory to account for this is that (to deal with wartime rationing?) the publishers wanted to make illustrations occupy as much of the page as possible, and that many of Ransome's original SW illustrations were cropped to occupy more of the page, but didn't have the borders drawn in. The original illustration would have included Wizard but left a large area of sky. The publishers cropped in on Goblin and, in the American first, neglected to remove the towline from the illustration.
I noticed that in the Amazon Publications Ransome the Artist SW received very short shrift. I assume this means that few, if any, of his original finished illustrations survived thus leaving this question very much up in the air.