"Staking Tools and How To Use Them",
Kendrick & Davis 1910 163 pages hard cover, approximately 6" x 8" I recently purchased a somewhat battered copy of the original 1910 book by K&D titled "Staking Tools and How To Use Them" on eBay. The book has some moisture damage, but overall is intact. The cover is silver ink on dark blue buckram, in contrast to others I've seen (in pictures, at least) which are bound in brown buckram. Perhaps there were multiple printings or those other copies were rebound at some point. This copy appears to have the original binding. Although an abridged version of this book has been reprinted, I've never seen a freely available version of that abridged version, nor of the complete work. I wanted the complete book as an ebook, so I digitized all 163 pages. After going to all that trouble (I've probably got around 120 hours into the project), it made sense to share the results so others can benefit from the effort. |
On the sub-pages of this page linked in the menu above, I've posted two sets of high resolution (1200 dpi) scans.
One set comprises scans with the original brownish ink on creamy yellow paper intact. (At least I think it's creamy yellow paper. It might just be over a century of browning.) The color scans provide the highest fidelity to the look of the original book (including the variation in the page color). My hope is that in these scans, the beautiful detail of the (engraved?) (electrotyped?) staking tool illustrations will still be evident. The moisture damage I mentioned above resulted in some general wrinkling and staining as can be seen in the page at left. The moisture also caused some pink staining around some of the text and illustrations. Liberal application of Photoshop Color Replacer was required to remove the stains. |
The color scans aren't ideal for printing on a typical black and white laser printer or easy reading on-screen. For a general reference copy, high contrast black text and illustrations on a pure white page is what we want.
The second set of images posted on the sub-pages are those I converted to black and white in order to "bleach" the background. This was by far the most time consuming part of the project. Eliminating the background completely, keeping the text strong enough for easy reading, and separately maintaining the fine detail in the illustrations took some serious fiddling with the settings on various filters in Photoshop. This process was a bit trickier than usual because the hue of the ink and that of the paper are quite similar. |
Both Sets of scans are posted as JPEGS at the maximum quality level that will keep an individual page under the 10MB file size limit imposed by weebly.com. In testing I've found that, at a given file size, a 1200dpi image compressed at a lower JPEG quality gives a better result that a 300dpi image compressed at maximum JPEG quality.
For those visitors who simply wish to download the entire book for use as an ebook or to print, I've posted a PDF of all of the pages in one file on my DropBox site. Fair warning, though. The file is over 300MB so it will take a little while to download even on a high speed connection. Even at 600dpi and fairly aggressive JPEG compression, that's still about 2MB a page.
For those who want a full-text searchable version, use this link. The pages have been down-sampled to 600dpi, but the images still look pretty good. The text was processed using professional OCR tools and each page was manually edited to verify the OCR results. If you find any remaining mistakes, please let me know.
Enjoy!
For those visitors who simply wish to download the entire book for use as an ebook or to print, I've posted a PDF of all of the pages in one file on my DropBox site. Fair warning, though. The file is over 300MB so it will take a little while to download even on a high speed connection. Even at 600dpi and fairly aggressive JPEG compression, that's still about 2MB a page.
For those who want a full-text searchable version, use this link. The pages have been down-sampled to 600dpi, but the images still look pretty good. The text was processed using professional OCR tools and each page was manually edited to verify the OCR results. If you find any remaining mistakes, please let me know.
Enjoy!