Bee Book Repair

 I have a modest beekeeping library, and I recently ordered a number of British beekeeping books from a bookseller in England. It turned out that he was selling his father's books, as his father had recently passed away, and his father was a beekeeper and queen raiser for 40 years in Nottinghamshire. Which is basically very near to where my grandfather was born, who was a farmer in nearby Lincoln, and and left for Seattle in 1889 something. Its a nice coincidence and I asked for a picture from his son, who nicely sent me the one below. His father is the gentleman in the derby hat, looking very beekeeper-ly.

The  books I recieved are from the 1940s, and are super interesting. They come from a time when R.O. Manley (the first beekeeper in the U.K. to keep 1000 hives), was introducing American methods to British beekeeping, with great success. Had he used the British hives at the time, he would never been able to manage this many. In particular, if you have seen the well know W.C.S double wall hive- the one that looks like a little cute house- which I guess was very common- you'd wonder how they ever got to work with their bees at all. 

In any case, the books were well used, but in good shape, and with a few beat up (well loved) covers. I took it upon myself to see if I could reconstruct one of the more typical ones, Honey Production In the British Isles, which had a large part missing, and ha was torn and stained.  I used Photoshop, and AutoCAD, to rebuild it, piece by piece. All the larger letters were hand drawn and of a special typeface, so I had to reconstruct it by hand, and by stealing parts of letters from what I had. Like I could make a "P" out of part of the "B". Here's what I had:

And below, after lots of work, was the new cover, which I printed, and its looks pretty good in print. The color looks different in this image, as I had to adjust it to print correctly, but I was able to lift all the text, and set it on a clean (though sampled) background. I had to guess as to what the actual cover color was- and I could not find this book cover anywhere on the net to compare it to, so this was just a guess. Faber and Faber made beautiful book jackets and were famous for their covers, so it was fun to try to get this one back in shape. 

And another Manley before and after. :