Re: Illustration Error in Secret Water


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Posted by Jon on August 10, 1998 at 15:57:10:

In Reply to: Re: Illustration Error in Secret Water posted by Jon on July 29, 1998 at 15:04:26:

The picture in question is "On the Way to the Islands".

Interestingly, the painter for Wizard is visible in the 1940 MacMillan (first US) edition, and is missing from the 1957 Jonathan Cape printing. From this, I hypothesize that when the type was reset in 1947 that line was removed. As for why the dinghy isn't in the picture, Secret Water is the only one of Ransome's books which doesn't have edges to all the full-page illustrations. I suspect that the publisher decided to crop a number of the pictures (war-time printing guidelines?) from what AR had originally prepared to avoid fuss over large amounts of wasted paper, or just to give a better view of the crew of Goblin.
I can envision an original drawing of Goblin and Wizard approaching a long, low coastline which was cropped to just Goblin and rotated 90 degrees to fill more of the page; then when the new plates were prepared, someone unfamiliar with the original drawing deciding to remove the "extraneous" line. Is there, anywhere in Ransome's papers or at Jonathan Cape, a copy of the original drawing? I don't have a copy of Illustrating Arthur Ransome, so don't know if it might be in there.



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