Harrock n roll Moderator
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#11 · Posted: 6 Jun 2020 09:43
Thank you superjm9. I've since seen the copy of the Le Petit Vingtième in question (issue no. 60, 25th December 1929) and I think I can now answer my own question about the odd number of pages, and indeed why it was left out of the book in the first place. [I'm not sure if this has been answered on the forums in the past, but to clear things up and for the sake of clarity, here it is...]
This particular issue had three pages; the 'missing' page appears on the right hand side and is in black and white, with the following two pages as a spread in colour (you were right about the Christmas edition, superjm9). This explains why it was left out of the book ("for no apparent reason", as it says in the Sundancer 1989 edition), which was to keep the integrity of the left hand/right hand flow of the spreads, with the cliffhangers and signatures on the right hand pages.
Of course, this then left a gap in the continuity of the story, but whoever made the decision when they came to publish the book (Hergé, Abbé Wallez or someone else at Le Vingtième Siècle?) must have felt this was better than losing the spreads and having an odd page at the end.
The Sundancer edition has reinserted the page into the story, but it's ended up on the left hand side, rather than on the right as it orginally appeared in Le Petit Vingtième.
Having it on the right would have meant inserting a blank page just before it, but I'm sure they weren't bothered by this and probably didn't think about the left hand/right hand integrity (the "for no apparent reason" statement in the foreword seems to bear this out).
Indeed, the numbering of the book is another can of worms.
The general rule of thumb of any book is to have even-numbered pages on the left and odd-numbered on the right. (I put documents together for a living and you wouldn't believe the amount of times I get asked to "add a page", so I'm used to having to explain that this can't be done for a printed document as it would throw all of the subsequent spreads out and leave an odd number of pages. It's even worse when you're producing a stapled document and having to explain that it needs to be divisble by four and that you would need to add a further three pages or leave one out... but I digress!)
This has made the Sundancer facsimile very confusing. It seems the only reason they bothered having numbers was to help the reader identify the 'missing' page.
It starts with the 'even pages left/odd pages right' numbering rule, but only up until page 97 after which, because of the addition of page 97a, we end up with odd pages on the left and even numbers on the right. The beginning of the book is very strange because it leaves the first (left hand) plate of the story un-numbered and starts the numbering on the second (right hand) plate at 1.
In fact, this means that page 97a is really plate 99!
The current modern edition of the book treats the cover of the book as page 1, so that the story begins on the left on page 4.
The other black and white facsimiles I own, both French and English, don't have any numbering, which is one way to get around this 'problem' of starting numbers on the left.
However, this can be a headache if one wants to refer to something, look something up or remember where you're up to (a bookmark can help!).
The English language b&w edition of The Blue Lotus actually messes the spreads up by starting the book with a single page on the right hand side, thus altering the flow thoughout the entire book, which is not how it should have been. But that's another story...!
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