Tintin Forums

Hi Ecto, I am actually selling Les Bijoux if you are interested on Catawiki https://www.catawiki.com/en/l/96297336 - planning to sell the others next as I have too many albums (100+ versions) and need the space...

These are very interesting, thanks for posting the pictures, Ender. Given the way the sticker has been placed by hand it makes you wonder how many of each title were produced. I can picture some poor office boy or girl in the Methuen offices with very tired hands, gumming them into dozens of copies... It's possible Casterman stuck them it at their offices of course, but far more likely Methuen I think.

Also, is there another way to authenticate them, given they are basically Casterman books with a paper sticker on the title page? (I'm not suggesting that any of the books mentioned are forgeries, by the way, in some kind of Black Island operation!)

Do any of them have the Methuen name gummed on to the covers?

Hi Harrock, from what I have seen so far the only way to differentiate those from the Casterman French version is just that old school paper band glued on title page (usually on the Casterman name).

So yes, you could probably "fake" them (with right paper and font though) but then I believe that the collector market for those is quite limited...

Ectoplasm just got all my copies so I guess he now has the largest collection due to their rarity (at least in good condition).

And probably indeed an office boy/girl job with Methuen ????

Just a little aside here - the process of inserting/ sticking in things like this is known in publishing as "tipping in", and book publishers will have had ready access to professional production staff to carry it out, rather than just assigning it to the works-experience student.

It started as a means of binding separate pages to the rest of a book by pasting it in close to the spine, but gradually came to include the addition of things such as a picture or engraving, or sometimes an errata sheet, noting a correction or corrections to a text.

I think the placing of the small colour picture onto the covers of the cloth-bound edition of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets sold at the Chelsea exhibition in 1989 may have been achieved by "tipping in".

Yes Harrock but in your example for Soviets '89 it was part of the original design of that (nice) edition. While in our case here it still sounds to me as a more "fix it" approach to make sure Methuen could manage those French copies as part of their catalog? (Hence the specific numbering).

Wish we had an ex-Methuen employee on hand to comment?

It was me, rather than Harrock making the point.
I'm not out to convince you; if you don't want to believe it, fine by me.
All I was saying though is that the situation of adding labels and other such stuff to already published books is far from unique to these Tintin books, to the extent that publishing houses and their printers were geared up to do such work at a moment's notice - there's no need to imagine a lone figure armed with scissors and a pot of paste, carrying out an ad hoc job, when it would have been just another day at the office for the skilled professionals who carried out tipping-in on a regualr basis.

Oh quite! My musing was rather tongue-in-cheek, and I apologise. I'm certain these were done professionally, by 'tipping in' as you say.

It's just that when I first saw the picture on Ender's sale it reminded me of my own days at a publishing house a long time ago. We used to stick various bits and pieces into books (I can't remember the specifics now) but it would have been for mock-ups for in-house use or book fairs. But we would have only made a few copies. Since these Methuen editions were likely for libraries, and possibly limited sale, they would have needed to produce a few hundred at least.

So, whilst it's amusing to imagine an intern (or even Michael Turner or Leslie L-C between translations) gumming catalogue numbers in, this most definitely would not have been the case!

I've now got a mental picture of Michael Turner battling with a recalcitrant slip of gummed paper, in the manner of Captain Haddock's struggle with the uncooperative sticking-plaster! ;-)