Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

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Kenny Williams

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Oct 17, 2017, 12:42:38 AM10/17/17
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I'd like to work on Through the Looking-Glass next, if that one is free.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 19, 2017, 2:05:08 PM10/19/17
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Sure, that one's free. Please send me a Github URL as you get started, as usual.


There's a lot of verse in this one, but nothing that looks outrageously complex. There's a few strange formatting issues, like how to format sums (probably a <table> might work, but I'm open to suggestions). It seems that the big blocks of multiple asterisks are meant to be stylized <hr/>s, but you should confirm that in the print scans.


Have fun!


On 10/16/17 11:42 PM, Kenny Williams wrote:
I'd like to work on Through the Looking-Glass next, if that one is free.
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Kenny Williams

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Oct 20, 2017, 2:19:51 AM10/20/17
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The transcript doesn't have the original illustrations, but I'd like to include them. Would there be any issue with taking them from e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:John_Tenniel%27s_illustrations_of_Through_the_Looking-Glass_and_What_Alice_Found_There ?

Related note: I notice the SE edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland doesn't include them either. Would there be any objections to me sending a pull request to have them added to that as well?

Alex Cabal

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Oct 20, 2017, 5:42:52 PM10/20/17
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I used to be more enthusiastic about including images back when the project was brand-new. But over time I've gotten much less interested in the idea, with perhaps the narrow exceptions for literature of which the images are an integral part of the work. (For example, The Book of Wonder by Dunsany; he had the artist draw the illustrations *first*, and then he wrote the stories about those illustrations; or some Agatha Christie books, where the illustrations are floor plans of the murder scene.)


The problem is that a lot of books might have had different illustrators throughout the years, and since we only want to host one edition of any book we'd have to wind up picking a "best" illustrator, which is obviously a pretty subjective judgment. (In the Dunsany example, since the book was written around the images, there would never be a different set of illustrations for them.)


Then the process of including images themselves is error-prone and has poor ereader support.


Finally it can be hard to find high-res images of a lot of this stuff. For example in the link you sent, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:78hattas_tea.jpg is a mere ~500x400 compressed JPG with atrocious artifacting. I wouldn't want such low-quality scans in our ebooks, they just look crappy. If we did decide to do that, then you'd have to find high-res uncompressed PNGs or BMPs, and convert them to have a transparent canvas instead of a white one.


If you can make the argument that there are no other PD illustrations for Alice, that they're an integral part of the work, and if you can find very high-res scans and you're willing to go through the trouble to put them on a transparent canvas, then maybe, maybe, we could do it.

Timothy Walters

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Oct 20, 2017, 5:58:39 PM10/20/17
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FWIW, there was at least some influence from Tenniel on the text; the particular instance I remember is that Tenniel objected to drawing the Wasp in a Wig in the deleted chapter of Through the Looking Glass (although Carroll might well have pulled that chapter anyway).

I don't think that's enough to overrule your (very sensible) argument against including the illustrations, but it's an interesting data point.

Kenny Williams

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Oct 20, 2017, 6:29:00 PM10/20/17
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I understand your reasons and am willing to accept them, but I have found these:

http://www.gallery.oldbookart.com/main.php?g2_itemId=28299
http://www.gallery.oldbookart.com/main.php?g2_itemId=28019

If those are adequate I'll add them, but if you're still hesitant or indifferent I can look into adding them toward the end of the production to see if you feel they're worth doing so.

Kenny Williams

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Oct 20, 2017, 6:38:34 PM10/20/17
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Here's a better link for Looking-Glass illustrations: https://medium.com/alice-s-adventures-in-wonderland/sir-john-tenniel-s-classic-illustrations-of-alice-in-wonderland-2c3bbdca3a77 The few I looked at for Alice's Adventures were fairly decent size, but after going through more of them some of them are still a bit small. I'm not exactly sure how big they'd need to be.

Anyway, no matter. I'll start without worrying about the images for now.

Kenny Williams

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Oct 20, 2017, 11:39:08 PM10/20/17
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Alex Cabal

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Oct 21, 2017, 2:00:56 PM10/21/17
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I'm still pretty meh on those high-res scans... if you zoom in it looks like they ran it through some kind of strong edge-sharpener filter because all the curves have very jagged pixelated edges. I'm pretty unimpressed by the quality of those scans.

I don't have a good definition of "suitably high res" but the idea is that to support retina screens, the pics should be, at the very least, double size to accommodate being shrunk down 2x for retina. If we assume a reading area of 1024px wide then for full-page images that'd mean a minimum width of 2048px. Of course the higher the better, since we can always shrink images down to fit but we can't blow them back up.

Something I've been casually exploring for these kinds of B&W line cuttings is using a tracer like Inkscape to convert them to SVG. I haven't played around with that too much yet but it's an avenue to explore. That would solve the retina issue, and would make low-res images look much better; problem is SVG support for ereaders is very poor and we'd be converting to PNG during the build process anyway.

On 10/20/17 5:38 PM, Kenny Williams wrote:
Here's a better link for Looking-Glass illustrations: https://medium.com/alice-s-adventures-in-wonderland/sir-john-tenniel-s-classic-illustrations-of-alice-in-wonderland-2c3bbdca3a77 The few I looked at for Alice's Adventures were fairly decent size, but after going through more of them some of them are still a bit small. I'm not exactly sure how big they'd need to be.

Anyway, no matter. I'll start without worrying about the images for now.
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Alex Cabal

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Oct 21, 2017, 2:03:53 PM10/21/17
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These links look like they might be worse than the Wikipedia scans... for example http://www.gallery.oldbookart.com/main.php?g2_itemId=28417 says "Full size: 501x584" but the Wikimedia equivalent is 1023x1197: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/Alice_and_kitten.jpg/1023px-Alice_and_kitten.jpg

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Kenny Williams

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Oct 24, 2017, 11:25:20 PM10/24/17
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Alex Cabal

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Oct 25, 2017, 1:19:56 PM10/25/17
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That's a real pity, the "Studio Mirror" painting would have been perfect, but you're right they're not the same.

I wonder if colorizing the B&W scan from Hathi would be in the realm of possibility?  I don't have much experience with that.

I'd really like to use Studio Mirror if we could somehow colorize it to an acceptable level of quality, or find a scan of the specific copy of the painting in the book.

For "Las Meninas", I'm a little hesitant because that specific painting is important-with-a-capital-I in the art world and has a lot of historical and artistic baggage. For example Wikipedia says "Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history."  Which begs the question, is it appropriate to use one of the most important paintings in Western art history, for the cover of a fairly silly children's book?

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Kenny Williams

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Oct 25, 2017, 9:54:55 PM10/25/17
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I've no experience in that either, unfortunately. Do you know of any other regular contributors who know how who might be interested? Also, I'm not quite finished with the book so I've still some time before release to find an alternative (or continue looking for another page scan, though I've searched quite a bit already without any luck).

That's actually a concern I've had in general, whether it's appropriate to use well known paintings for covers. It's not as well of a fit for the book as I'd like it to be, anyway (the girl alone would be fine, but not with the surrounding people).

Jared Updike

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Oct 25, 2017, 11:32:58 PM10/25/17
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I can give the colorizing a go, using the other (very similar) painting as a color reference. The grayscale guy is a bit on the blurry side but I think it should do.

If the book title (black box with white text) is going to cover half of the girl(s) anyway, should I extend the painting on the bottom to account for this (esp. since it will just be more or less covered up by the box). For example, see the attached image:


Note this is just to demonstrate the shape and aspect ratio, not the final texture of the fill-in, etc. (As a side note a number of beautiful book covers have been partly ruined by this, when the subject is in the foreground / bottom third.)

  Jared.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 26, 2017, 2:08:48 PM10/26/17
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Yeah, I think that would look really good. Let us know how it goes!

Jared Updike

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Oct 26, 2017, 6:40:48 PM10/26/17
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Attached is the 1400x2100 image without book title box, and a few before and after images with book title boxes, with the color painting for reference. I learned some cool tricks while was working on this.

I am looking forward to reading the Jabberwocky and the Walrus and the Carpenter in their original context!

  Jared.
studio-mirror-colorized-1400-2100.jpg
before.jpg
after.jpg

Jared Updike

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Oct 26, 2017, 6:45:38 PM10/26/17
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Actually Google Groups totally recompressed my high quality JPEG, as I was worried it would do. Here is a link to a place to download the original higher-quality image (a little or 600KB)


  Jared.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 26, 2017, 6:47:24 PM10/26/17
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Hey that looks fantastic! Great work!

Can I make two small requests?

1. Can you smooth out the clone brush that you used to extend the canvas at the bottom? That way, if we later decide to change the box style or move it around, we'll have a clean bottom to work from.

2. Alice's right foot has a claw, and the shoe color is light grey vs the dark shadow which looks a touch off. Blending the color to be a darker black against the shadow, and cleaning up the claw with a clone brush, might be a subtle improvement.

Also, if possible you should save as a PNG so that it's a lossless file, in case we want to edit or update it later. That will be ./images/cover.source.png, and we'll do a direct jpg conversion for use as ./images/cover.jpg.

Again, really great work. I'm so happy we were able to use this image after all :)

Kenny Williams

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Oct 26, 2017, 6:50:41 PM10/26/17
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WOW. That's fantastic, thank you.

Do you still have a copy of the source image you took from the page scan, as well? If not I can extract it from the page scan myself.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 26, 2017, 6:57:27 PM10/26/17
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Re. well-known paintings for covers, yeah I've thought about that a little too. Generally I think that using extremely famous works would probably be inappropriate, only because people already have their own emotional and contextual predispostions to them. So for example using the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Starry Night for a cover would be too jarring, because they're part of the modern cultural lexicon.  But that doesn't mean we can't use other, lesser-known Van Goghs (and in fact we have, like in Secret Garden), and so on.


Like a lot of this stuff, it's an editorial call, a lot of it is shades of grey.

Jared Updike

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Oct 26, 2017, 7:32:53 PM10/26/17
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Here is the original screenshot I took of the image scan (I have super high resolution screen). It is 2.7 MB:

studio-mirror-original-scan.png

Jared Updike

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Oct 26, 2017, 8:15:43 PM10/26/17
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I cleaned up the bottom of the image to look more presentable. I fixed all the shoes to have a warmer color and cleaned up the boundaries on the bottom of the mirror.

Here is a link to the full sized PNG: (5.3 MB, over 2000 x 3000 pixels):


  Jared.

Kenny Williams

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Oct 28, 2017, 1:06:23 AM10/28/17
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Ready for review. Is there a guide to adding credit for someone who edited the cover art?

As for the art itself, I couldn't find a WP link for the painter, nor am I sure of the date it was painted (the version from the page scan, that is).

Alex Cabal

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Oct 29, 2017, 9:07:25 PM10/29/17
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You can include Jared as a contributor in the metadata with the MARC relator "clr" (which is "colorist")

On 10/28/17 12:06 AM, Kenny Williams wrote:
Ready for review. Is there a guide to adding credit for someone who edited the cover art?

As for the art itself, I couldn't find a WP link for the painter, nor am I sure of the date it was painted (the version from the page scan, that is).
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Kenny Williams

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Oct 30, 2017, 2:50:24 AM10/30/17
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Done.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 30, 2017, 7:05:42 PM10/30/17
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OK great. I've opened a few Github issues for you to review, please let me know when you're all done.

Kenny Williams

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Oct 30, 2017, 7:51:37 PM10/30/17
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All fixed. However, the reason I didn't use the margin auto trick was that when I tried it at first, neither SumatraPDF or MS Edge rendered it correctly (it shows to the left in both). I went ahead and made that change, and you can let me know if it works in your epub reader.

Alex Cabal

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Oct 30, 2017, 7:59:46 PM10/30/17
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Looks fine to me, not sure why it wouldn't work on Edge since margin: auto is the ancient way to center block-level elements.

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Kenny Williams

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Oct 30, 2017, 8:02:45 PM10/30/17
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Do a pull on the repo before releasing. I updated the page scan link (the one I originally used wasn't in the top results on Google Books anymore for some reason).

Alex Cabal

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Oct 30, 2017, 9:02:05 PM10/30/17
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This ebook was produced by Kenny Williams. Thanks Kenny!

Ebook URL:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/through-the-looking-glass

GitHub URL:
https://github.com/standardebooks/lewis-carroll_through-the-looking-glass


Alex Cabal

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Oct 30, 2017, 9:02:12 PM10/30/17
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Looks great, thanks!

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David Grigg

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Nov 6, 2018, 2:43:15 AM11/6/18
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Just to let you know that I'm currently working on the Tenniel illustrations for this, so that it matches Wonderland. I've scanned and vectorised all 52 of them, but will take a while to insert them and do the Loi.

I'm also proposing to add Carroll's "Authors Preface" with the chess game.

Alex Cabal

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Nov 6, 2018, 3:40:47 PM11/6/18
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I'm kind of meh on the preface, besides the very short notes on
pronunciation I think it's largely irrelevant.

David Grigg

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Nov 6, 2018, 4:54:35 PM11/6/18
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It would be a pity to lose the chess game, though.

Tim Walters

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:04:56 PM11/6/18
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+1. I'm not sure I've ever seen a printed edition without the preface.

> On Nov 6, 2018, at 1:54 PM, David Grigg <david...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It would be a pity to lose the chess game, though.
>
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Alex Cabal

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:22:59 PM11/6/18
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But is the chess game part of the preface? What is the print history of
that?

Tim Walters

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:33:11 PM11/6/18
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Here's a 1917 example:

https://archive.org/details/ThroughTheLookingGlass_201303/page/n9
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Alex Cabal

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:35:45 PM11/6/18
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Right... so the 1917 edition drops the 1896 preface but keeps the chess
problem, which (as I assumed) appears to be separate from the preface. I
think keeping the chess problem is just fine, but I think the preface
itself is 95% irrelevant contemporary publication ephemera.

David Grigg

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:38:53 PM11/6/18
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Ok, so I'll drop the Preface. But I want to keep the chess game (especially since I just spent a couple of hours formatting it!). But how does that get tagged semantically as front matter if not as 'preface'? 'introduction' 'preamble'?

Alex Cabal

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:41:11 PM11/6/18
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preamble might work, prologue might also work. I suppose it may
semantically be called a "preface" but I would not have assumed that it
was a single unit along with the written "author's preface".

Tim Walters

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Nov 6, 2018, 5:42:17 PM11/6/18
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My bad, I was lumping the two together.
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David Grigg

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Nov 10, 2018, 12:14:19 AM11/10/18
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I've finished with the illustrations and made a pull request.

I've created a couple of figure classes to try to get a more balanced look to the size of the illustrations, but iBooks among others ignore such CSS, it seems :-( 

Alex Cabal

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Nov 12, 2018, 7:02:00 PM11/12/18
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I'm running behind on things David but I'll try to look at this later this week :)

On 11/9/18 11:14 PM, David Grigg wrote:
I've finished with the illustrations and made a pull request.

I've created a couple of figure classes to try to get a more balanced look to the size of the illustrations, but iBooks among others ignore such CSS, it seems :-( 
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Alex Cabal

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Nov 20, 2018, 5:47:42 PM11/20/18
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OK, everything looks good and I've merged the changes. Really excellent work with the SVG scans. I made some minor tweaks to CSS and swapped out the `<table>` for two `<ol>`s in the preamble, but that's about it. I'm glad you made the point about mirrored text in the Jabberwocky poem as that hadn't crossed my mind. There isn't really a good Unicode equivalent for truly "mirrored" text (vs. simply reversing the text) so let's keep the image scan. Maybe in the far future we can revisit this and see if the situation has changed.

On 11/9/18 11:14 PM, David Grigg wrote:
I've finished with the illustrations and made a pull request.

I've created a couple of figure classes to try to get a more balanced look to the size of the illustrations, but iBooks among others ignore such CSS, it seems :-( 
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Alex Cabal

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Nov 20, 2018, 6:51:44 PM11/20/18
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BTW the SVGs in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland could use some cleanup
as well. They need high-level groups removed and the group transforms
applied to the child paths, plus removal of preserveAspectRatio. It
looks like the viewboxes are OK on all of them but I haven't
individually verified that.

Cleaning them up is on my to do list but I haven't had a chance to get
around to it. If you have some free time and are interested let me know!

On 11/6/18 1:43 AM, David Grigg wrote:

David Grigg

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Nov 20, 2018, 9:13:12 PM11/20/18
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Yes, no problem, I'll run them all through the same process.

Regards,

David
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