BTB, you should do this more often.
I got my items last week, and I have to tell you that the
DMG, in spite of the pencil artwork, is in perhaps the nicest condition I have ever seen. Which is good, because my orange spine
DMG wasn't in great shape when I bought it last year.
What was really odd was that the
PHB and
DMG were originally owned by the same person, and the
DMG was in better shape, which tells me where this person's preferences lay (player). The
PHB was in really sad shape (knew this already), but it was easily one of the most shaken (book hinges loose) books I have ever come across. Not anymore. With a little glue, an X-acto knife, tweezers, and a lot of patience, the book's binding is just like new. Considering it was a 4th print with no value, the decision was easy. Just as easy a decision as the one which led me to put a
B1 that had been mangled by a stapler back together. Perhaps I should get into the business of repairing playing copies of AD&D books.
The thing that surprised me with that
PHB was how it was bound. I always thought that the pages of early printings of the original three books were bound with staples within the cover so they didn't pull apart. In doing a bit of research on textbook bindings, I found that this actually is sometimes the case, but not always. To my surprise, when I did the repairs on the
PHB, the pages were bound together with nylon thread, in a modified form of Japanese binding, instead of stapled like I thought, and definitely not smythe sewn, like my 1st print DDG.
As I mentioned before, I did a bit of research into the different types of hardcover bindings. You have smythe sewn binding, which is what my DDG uses, and you have adhesive casebound, which has the pages glued to bristol board and a backing fabric, the whole glued to the spine. Now, I know that when TSR revamped the art and went to the orange spines, they changed how they bound the books. Essentially, these were nothing more than paperbacks with hardcovers. The real question is, before going to the orange spines, which printings had the most durable bindings?
