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| SM Copy of the Rubaiyat |
I'll keep this post short and to the point. I should make it clear that this post is really meant for the inhabitants of another blog.
It seems to me that our friends at the other blog are having some difficulty in grasping the issues associated with the recently 'discovered' copy of the Rubaiyat.
Could it be that I haven't given them enough in the way of hints and clues?
In the previous post, I described the copy that Dave put forward as being remarkably similar to the JW version and waited for, what I thought would be, the outcry from the another blog declaring that they had 'found the real problem', I was to be disappointed. More on this shortly.
Not only did I say that Dave's copy was remarkably similar, I had also described how I had used the JW copy and turned it into greyscale for comparison. Still no response.
I thought I'd give it another shot and posted a comment in Pete Bowes', tomsbytwo blog stating that I thought that Dave's book was a scan, that got a response, at least from Dave. But. sadly not the response I expected so let's go through it again.
On the right is the copy of Dave's book that he posted on an image sharing site. You can see the pages quite clearly and you can see it's wrongly cropped by virtue of the crescent moon to the top right, it's far too close to the top edge of the page. Printers are a funny lot, they like to do things precisely. You can also see the thread in two locations and there is too much space between them. You might also note that there are no 'crease marks' where the pages should have, at one time, met. But there is something else. Let's move on to the comparison image.In the image below you can see the JW version on the left, the SM original version as published in the SA press and finally the version presented by Dave on the right.
Now, what do you see? If you are still having some difficulty, let me help you. On the left is the JW version of the page, in the centre, is the SM version and to the right is the version presented by Dave. What is it about them that is surprising?
Got it yet?
Yes, that's right, they are all greyscale images including Dave's copy. The courage and friendship series to my knowledge was not printed in greyscale and especially not in a grey scale that so closely matched the JW version, a version that was originally in colour. SM's copy, when published wasn't in colour it was in greyscale because the press, at that time, didn't show coloured images.
Now you know why I think that Dave's version was scanned. I have to hand it to you Dave, you had them all convinced, especially when you pointed them back, not once but twice, to the original post on this blog where the comparison of all three as greyscale was first shown. It made me smile and I seriously appreciate the way it was done.