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the-casio-mini · 4 years

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Hello, I love your blog! I wanted to ask what the safest way to scan older books/manga is. I ordered some old bunko Eroica novels but I'm afraid of damaging them. Biting my nails enough while they're in transit. Thanks!

Thank you! I love the Eroica bunko covers, they are fantastic. I re-bought the volumes in bunko for Emperor’s Waltz just to have a few.

I’ve got a weirdly long and indepth answer for you! I’m going to put this behind a cut, and I’m going to reply publicly, which I hope you don’t mind.

Bunkobon are super-great, because they usually collect more chapters than regular tankoubon volumes, and at a lower price. There are some caveats to scanning them, but mostly you just want to be vigilant about how tight or loose the book is when you open it - the harder the book is to open, the more likely you are to damage it. Bunko tend to be good about this, but sometimes you run across volumes which have bad glue, or lost the storage lottery.

I don’t have my Eroica volumes handy, so Der Freischutz is standing in. The one in the center is a bunko volume, compared in size to the Seven Seas tankoubon on the right and an oddball deluxe edition of Der Freischutz on the left. Bunko are tiny, which can sometimes be difficult to work with depending on the art.

I just reviewed a bunch of binding BS at work, so I’m thinking about it, and this is probably a little more detail than you’re looking for. But! Here’s a comparison for the binding used on all three, with the bunko in the center again. The oddball deluxe edition happens to be a hardcover, which is bound into signatures and stitched, and also very thin. This is the kind of book which is wonderful to scan. It’s extremely difficult to damage, and since it’s thin, you can mash it as flat as you need. Manga volumes almost never come out in hardcover (though there are many exceptions), but artbooks do. The other two have glued binding, which is harder to scan if you want to keep the book intact and also get nice clear scans.

The bunko in the center is the thickest. I like bunko paper better than the pulp paper used in tankoubon (like the one on the right). Bunko paper is thinner, so it’s not absolutely massive for being 300-400 pages. You may get some art bleedthrough because of the thin paper, but it’s not terrible in this one. Bunko also tend to have nice loose binding that makes them easy to read, and lets them take a lot of abuse from scanning if the glue is good. The binding on my copy is very flexible, and doesn’t feel tight or creaky when I open it. It’s also a printing from 2008, so it’s still fairly current. I’m going to be moderately rough with it when I scan.

The one on the right, the Seven Seas tankouban, has a pretty bad glue job with bubbling. That’s not unusual, but can indicate the glue is bad in the whole book, and not just the edge. The printing I have is from 1979, so it is quite old. Having said that, the book still feels pretty flexible, and isn’t creaky or stiff when I open it. It’s probably okay to open flat enough to scan, but I’d be picking images away from the gutter and at the edge of the page, so I wouldn’t have to press on the spine. I’d probably also only be comfortable scanning it a couple times. I might crease the spine even from gentle treatment, and I may also crack the glue and break the binding.

Here’s an example of the size difference between the pages in the bunko and deluxe version of Der Freischutz, which I’m now realizing isn’t great without the bottom of the image (it was hard to take one-handed). This makes it easy to see the difference in the gutter of the book - you can see the art creeps in pretty close to the spine on the bunko, which is going to make it a little harder to scan cleanly.

Unrelated - that deluxe edition has great paper. Still so bright after all these years! Most manga over 5-ish years old is going to be yellowed due to the cheap paper, so that’s to be expected when you start digging into the older stuff. Artbooks will do this too, though those usually start going after the twenty-year mark.

One last look at the deluxe edition. I used the lid of the scanner to flatten it, and pressed as hard as I could. The gutter in the center can easily be cropped out, if I want to use the whole page or sections of it, and doesn’t interfere with any of the art.

The same pages in the bunko. I’m using the edge of my scanner bed along the top edge of the pages to keep the book straight, so you can see it’s getting close to the art and words. For larger books, I usually use the fore-edge of the cover to keep the book straight, which give the art a little more room to breathe. My scanner setup makes that a lot harder with small books, and it’s harder still with a small paperback that’s very thick, but I’d recommend that. You can also see along the bottom that I wasn’t quite successful in keeping the whole thing straight the first try - that’s also harder with small books, but after the first few scans, you usually get the feel for how best to line it up.

When I scanned this one, I did not use the lid of the scanner, and instead pressed my thumb into the center of the spine in what I would call a “comfortable” amount of pressure. This part’s hard to describe! Here, I’m pressing hard enough that I’m optimistic about not creasing the spine, but hopeful that I’ll get a clear enough scan to use. The gutter shadow on this is pretty extreme, and depending on what you’re trying to get, possibly a no-go. If this was something I was posting here, I might grab the Klaus panels on the center of the left-hand page, cropping out the one closest to the gutter. It’s a shame to lose the first one from that sequence, but I’d possibly be damaging the book to do better. I could also use the landscape panels at the top of the right page, and crop them in a bit to get rid of the gutter blur at the edges.

This is a second scan with me pressing as hard as I can on the center of the spine with my palm. I will never do this with a paperback, because I’m always going to crease the spine, and I am also very likely to break the binding and cause the pages to fall out. But one or two creases in the spine is cosmetic, and usually easy to cover with the book jacket. If I’m doing this 20-30 times per book though, the cover will start to pull away from the binding and I’ll wind up with a pile of loose pages.

In this case, I was curious about how much pressure the bunko binding would take, and I was only doing the one scan, so I went for it! The book falls open to this page now, but the spine didn’t crease, and the pages don’t feel loose, so this book is very robust.

The book is thick enough that I’m still going to get that obvious gutter shadow, but I’d be okay with posting most any crop from this page to this site.

The gutter is still obvious in the Klaus panels, but it’s not... terrible, and the text is still fairly clear. If you were inclined, you could probably wipe it clean after scanning. It’s not straight though, which would drive me crazy, and would probably leave me to cropping only the left-hand panel to make it less obvious.

Shit!

The crooked scans are a Me problem, because my image editor is 20 years old and isn’t precise enough to rotate them well. The smaller the book/image, the more obvious it is when the scan isn’t Perfectly Straight. But you can see above that it’s less obvious in the context of the whole-page scan, or with certain types of crops.

One more caveat about art in the gutter - you get much less clear scans if the artist “bleeds” art into the spine of the book, especially with double-page illustrations. Aoike doesn’t do this a lot, so I don’t have an example for you, but you’ll see it some in the (formerly color) chapter title pages. There’s some art that bleeds into the spine of the bunko (unlike the neat panels on the pages above), but it’s pretty rare, and Aoike doesn’t really use double-page illustration in her chapters. I was going to post an example from Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas, but Hagio doesn’t do it either, or at least not in that work. The better example is early 90s CLAMP, especially X. There’s not a good way to snag that kind of thing without really damaging the book, but again, it shouldn’t come up much with Eroica.

#Really helpful info!#references #thank you so much!

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