Gordo Books

I found a website (https://gordocomics.com/) that had most of the comic strips for Gordo.  Gordo was a comic strip by Gustavo "Gus" Arriola from 1941 to 1985.  There were a number of printed compilations of the strip, including "Gordo's Critters", "Gordo's Cat", and "Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola".

The website mentions an unpublished collection "Gordo Redux".  

 

After corresponding with Jim Guida who put the website together, we thought we could use modern print-on-demand printing to get this unpublished collection into print, so he mailed me the proof that Arriola had put together.

When the package arrived, it had the proof for "Gordo Redux" but also another unpublished collection "Gordo Galore".

The proof books were 8.5 x 11 inch paper, bound with a plastic GBC binding spine.  The binding involves punching a series of rectangular holes along the edge of the paper and inserting a special piece of plastic to hold things together.

The first order of business was to remove the binder and then scan the pages.  The covers are in color, so they were scanned first and separately.  The pages themselve are printed on both sides.  We used our Canon Pixma TR7020a scanner driven by xsane on our Linux computer to do the scanning.  The Pixma has an automatic document feeder, which saved a lot of work.  We scanned them as "Gray" at 600 dots per inch (dpi) with an 8.5 by 11 inch paper in TIFF format.  We started with a file p000.tiff and increased the file name by +2 to scan the front (right hand side) of the pages, and then increased the file name by one, changed the increment to -2 and fed the pages back in to get the back (left hand side) of the pages.  That gives us files p000.tiff to p147.tiff for Redux and p000.tiff to p153.tiff for Galore.

As we were scanning the pages, we noticed a number of at least potential issues to be considered.

1. It looked like one page scanned at a slight angle (skew), so we will need to check the images for skew and if need be, rescan those pages by hand.

2. There were, of course, some completely blank pages.  These provide a clear representation showing that the rectangular holes for the GBC binding will need to be removed.  The image of the holes is faint, but clearly there.

On some of these otherwise blank pages, there seems to be some bleed thru of image from the page on the other side of the paper.

3. It appears that the proof copies we have were produced by a photocopying process.  Some of the pages, particularly for Galore seem to have horizontal stripes where the printing process fails in black areas.

4. It also seems that the back side (which would be the right hand pages) of the Galore printing is not as vibrant as the front sides.  The black is not as black and the white seems to have more of a touch of gray.  But at this point that is subjective, at best.

5. Also note that the GBC holes on this page got "close" to the actual image.  On some pages it appears to actually go thru the image.

6. There appears to be faint pencil writings on some pages.  This might be a date?

The scanning process went pretty well.  There was one instance where the ADF apparently fed two pages, instead of one, thru the scanner, and as a result one page was skipped.  That required me to stop the process, scan the missing page, move a bunch of files down two in the file naming scheme and restart the scanning.

The result is two large directories of TIFF files representing the two books at 600 dpi.  We can now start processing them to try to correct the known problems we listed above.  Once we have a full set of "clean" images, we can consider the problem of how to turn them into a PDF document.