Tintin Forums

I have finally picked up a nice Methuen copy to complete my set of all three English translations of Red Rackham's Treasure. Forgive me for boasting, but I figured the Tintinologist crowd would appreciate this more than any of my local friends! Here they are, all first editions:

1959 Golden Press
1952 Casterman
1959 Methuen

Photo:
The three albums, side-by-side

Yep, as a Tintinologist, I'm duly impressed! (Even though I'm not a first-edition book collector myself.)

It's interesting how it's the Casterman edition that's the one where Hergé's parchment title box has been dropped in favour of that title band, which to me looks a good bit less classy, and less "Hergéan", if you see what I mean, even though Casterman were Hergé's own publishers and the ones with whom you'd think he had the closest design input.

Was this style of title band something Casterman was trying on their own French-language editions of this book (and other Tintin books) at this time, or just something they thought they needed to do for the British market?

Thanks, Balthazar. I don't know what inspired Casterman's cover redesign for the 1952 editions, but it certainly wasn't just for the British market. I've seen the same "medallion" design on French, Spanish, and Dutch editions from the same year.

Like you, I prefer the classic parchment title box of the other editions. And I'm also glad that Methuen's outstanding Cooper/Turner translations ultimately became the standard. But the Casterman book has its charms, like the list of promised upcoming titles on the back cover, including "The Crab with the Golden Nippers"! There are subtler differences, too. For example, the cropping and some of the colors of the front cover picture are different on the Casterman book (e.g. the background fish look purple instead of blue).

Am I correct in my assumption that these are the only three authorized English translations of this book? If there have been any other English versions (for example in Irish dialect), I'd like to know.

I'm pretty sure the parchment title background wasn't conceived of until after the 1952 editions. The original editions of Rackham had no background for the title (see this facsimile) which, it was thought, made the lettering difficult to read over the seaweed and fish on the cover. The coloured band on the 1952 "Médaillon" edition was probably an interim measure until Hergé came up with the parchment.

I am quite jealous!! You are right: we appreciate this much more than your non-Tintin friends…
Nice pic! Congrats also :)

Good point, Harrock n roll. Now that you mention it, all of the oldest editions I've seen lack a title box. Interestingly, the facsimile edition you linked to also appears to have the same front cover colors and cropping as my 1952 edition. Thanks for your responses and info.

Thanks for the knowledgeable clarification, Harrock, regarding the lack of any banner or parchment box behind the title on the original Casterman cover design. Presumably Hergé was aiming for simplicity by having no title box in the original design, but I suppose the way the black lettering gets mixed up in the black lines of the drawing could make it a little hard to read, especially for a young child unfamiliar with the title.

This info now makes me wonder if the parchment device may have been something that Hergé produced for the first Methuen edition, which was then adopted by Casterman for all subsequent editions (sort of in the same way in which the redrawn contents requested by Methuen for the Black Island and Land of Back Gold then became the standard versions in French editions too). But maybe there are Casterman French-language editions from the mid 1950s with the parchment device which pre-date the first Methuen (or Golden Press) editions.

These books of yours, Doug, don't only have slightly different cropping. That starfish near the bottom actually moves! It's beneath the tail of the fish in the Casterman edition, yet beneath what I believe biologists call the anal fin in the Methuen edition (and possibly in the Golden Press edition too, though your fingers are obscuring that bit of the picture). With the b/w line artwork being done on a separate sheet/plate from the colour, moving this starfish across the blank sand would have been an easy enough alteration to make.

Re the differences in colours, I wonder if Hergé's team actually painted an entirely new colour plate between these two versions (possibly at the same time they moving the starfish and/or adding the parchment title box), or if the difference in colours is just down to different printing set-ups, or differences in the way that certain coloured inks used by the different publishers' printers have or haven't faded over time.

That's a lot of inconclusive and uninformed speculation on my part, but I find it interesting!

Good eye, Balthazar! Yes, the starfish occupies the same spot on the Golden Press edition as on my Methuen (and Little Brown) copies, though it's partially obscured by the longer publisher's name on the GP copy.

Other areas of different coloration I've spotted include some of the seaweed in the background and the shading of the submarine canopy. On the Casterman edition, we also see more of the seabed, and it is clearly more brown in color.

I doubt that the color differences are due to fading or different printing materials, since there seems to be remarkable consistency of color between the various post-1952 editions. Also between my Casterman and Harrock n Roll's 1944 facsimile edition.

Yep, the picture shifts down in the later editions. Or to put it another way, the top and bottom crop-lines shift up. (There would probably have already been a few centimetres of spare drawing around the edges of the actual artwork to enable this. At least 5 mm extra all round is normal when an image is designed to "bleed off" the edges of any page, and as much as 30 millimetres extra all round is normal when the image is also to be wrapped round the edges of a hardback book's cover boards.)

Knowing the chronological order of these variations, my best educated guess to explain both the crop-line shift and the starfish shift is thus:

Because the title parchment device took up more space down the page than the earlier Casterman banner (or the original bannerless title), the artwork had to be shifted down in order to prevent the grey fish and the jellyfish getting lost underneath the parchment. But doing this would have caused the originally-positioned starfish to be snarled up in the publisher's name at the foot of the page, so they shifted the starfish leftwards to get it clear.