The Magazine Project

flowersofnight · Apr 6, 2023

Here's something I've been experimenting with since getting in a proper book scanner: scanning old music magazines that are currently expensive and poorly-documented. Cover-to-cover, including all the text, ads, and features on bands that nobody cares about.
The rules for this thread, more or less: keep it to out-of-print black-and-white indies publications and if you post scans it should be your own work.

I'm interested in hearing some feedback on the format, resolution, etc.

Title	Date	150dpi	300dpi
Après Guerre Vol. 6	10/1994	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 10	9/1995	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 11	11/1995	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 22	10/1997	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 26	6/1998	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 27	8/1998	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 28	10/1998	Link	Link
Après Guerre Vol. 30	3/1999	Link	Link
FALL OF MIDSUMMER SNOW VOL. 1	1994	Link	Link
Imaginative vol. 7	1996	Link	Link
Imaginative vol. 8	8/1996	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 2	7/1994	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 3	11/1994	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 6	8/1995	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 7	12/1995	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 8	2/1996	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 9	7/1996	Link	Link
Imperfection vol. 10	8/1996	Link	Link
Malice Mizer - Gackt's Departure	c. 1999	Link	Link
Malice Mizer - "The Truth"	c. 1999	Link	Link
PRESS:aZ vol. 1	6/1994	Link	Link
QUARTER MAZE Vol. 1	1992	Link	Link
QUARTER MAZE Vol. 3	1993	Link	Link
QUARTER MAZE Vol. 4	1994	Link	Link
SWicH 14	Apr 1996	Link	Link
SWicH 20	Oct 1996	Link	Link
SWicH 21 (incomplete)	Nov 1996	Link	Link
SWicH 22	Dec 1996	Link	Link
SWicH 24	Feb 1997	Link	Link
SWicH 28	Aug/Sep 1997	Link	Link

Title	Date	150dpi	300dpi
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IV, No. 5	3/1935	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. V, No. 1 (incomplete)	3/1937	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. V, No. 2	6/1937	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 2	5/1966	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 3	9/1966	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 4	1/1967	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 5	5/1967	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 6	9/1967	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 7	1/1968	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 8	5/1968	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 16	1/1971	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 17	5/1971	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 18	9/1971	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 19	1/1972	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 20	5/1972	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. IX, No. 21	9/1972	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. X, No. 1	Spring 1973	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. X, No. 2	Summer 1973	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. X, No. 3	Autumn 1973	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. X, No. 4	Spring 1974	Link	Link
Gilbert and Sullivan Journal Vol. X, No. 5	Summer 1974	Link	Link
Metropolitan Opera - Samson	3/1986	Link

flowersofnight · Apr 6, 2023

Après Guerre Vol. 10 (9/1995)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/apresguerre10.pdf (147MB .pdf)
Bands as listed on the cover, plus there's a little announcement of Malice Mizer's revival with Gackt near the end.

I processed the inside pages as described here:
https://www.scapeforums.com/index.php?threads/the-a-v-thread.5955/page-10#post-340516
But I didn't "clean it up" any - if there's dirt or smudged ink on my copy, that's how I left it.

Cantavanda · Apr 7, 2023

Great!
I have a whole mountain of minikomi (these indies magazines) that need scanning, there's a few Pride of Mind appearances too, not sure if you have every single one of these!
I'll probably do these this summer, since I'm still busy scanning a lot of LAREINE and MALICE MIZER audio releases, and I have exams soon.

flowersofnight · Apr 8, 2023

Next up: does it ever bother you when people have infinite money for their own personal entertainment but then cheap out on you?
I picked up this copy of the libretto for Handel's "Samson" (see the downloads section) off of Ebay, but the guy just sent it in a plain old envelope and it arrived destroyed

So I scanned and restored it myself.

The icing on the cake is that they included their original tickets for a parterre box at the Met for $680 (that's about $1800 in today's money). Could've spent more than 5 cents mailing this to me, pal.

The file:
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/samson.pdf (7MB)
This is extensively restored and downsampled to 150dpi. Blank pages were omitted. I think the results came out fine.
Also see the downloads section: https://www.scapeforums.com/index.php?threads/g-f-handel-samson-metropolitan-opera-1986.6165/

flowersofnight · Apr 10, 2023

How about another red one?

FALL OF MIDSUMMER SNOW VOL. 1
This pamphlet produced by Kneuklid Romance dates roughly from mid-1994 and has features on the 3 bands that made up the tour (Kneuklid Romance, BAISER, Penicillin) and interviews between each Kneuklid Romance member and other musicians. Notably this features an early sighting of Kozi out of makeup and in his one true natural habitat: boozing with louts.
This is a valuable document since it's the only detailed look at Kneuklid Romance's members and activities around the time "LOVE SONG" was released - or at least the only one I've ever come across.

I think there might have been another volume of this produced by Penicillin, but I'm not sure.

I prepared this PDF at two resolutions, 300dpi and 150dpi. Take a look and see what you think - maybe 150dpi is fine overall?
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/midsummer.pdf (300dpi, 100MB)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/midsummer_150.pdf (150dpi, 25MB)

sanctum · Apr 10, 2023

flowersofnight wrote:
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/midsummer_150.pdf (150dpi, 25MB)

Getting a 404 on this one.

flowersofnight · Apr 10, 2023

Fixed now

flowersofnight · Apr 11, 2023

How about... I dunno, a green one next?

Après Guerre Vol. 10 (11/1995)
Featuring profiles on various guitarists (or GUITALISTS), including Malice Mizer and Kneuklid Romance, and a long interview with Pride of mind. A bit on Malice Mizer's early Gackt-era activities in the "BAND FRONT LINE NEWS" section.
And yes, one page was bound in upside-down ::meev::

I left that as-is.

https://www.prideofmind.com/data/apresguerre11.pdf (300dpi, 128MB .pdf)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/apresguerre11_150dpi.pdf (150dpi, 28MB .pdf)

Also:

Cantavanda wrote:
there's a few Pride of Mind appearances too, not sure if you have every single one of these!

If you have anything not listed here let me know:
https://www.prideofmind.com/interviews.php

cardy · Apr 17, 2023

flowersofnight wrote:
Here's something I've been experimenting with since getting in a proper book scanner: scanning old music magazines that are currently expensive and poorly-documented. Cover-to-cover, including all the text, ads, and features on bands that nobody cares about.
The rules for this thread, more or less: keep it to out-of-print black-and-white indies publications and if you post scans it should be your own work.

I'm interested in hearing some feedback on the format, resolution, etc.

I think this would be a great idea for this small world that we live in. There's some magazines existing on archive.org from one user and there was that live journal user who valiantly scanned a whole lot of magazines 15 years ago but besides that I feel like these magazines will get lost in time.

These past few years I started getting into collecting Fool's Mate and almost have every issue between 1983 and 1996 minus 10-15 I'm missing from 1990 to 96 or so. I also have the first 25-30 issues of Shoxx.

My main draw were the 1980's issues of Fool's Mate and the photography (I'm a hobbyist photographer) and I got the bulk of 1984-1990 in one lot a few years back. Flipping through them, I'm amazed at the things I see that only exist in there now. Reviews, ads for releases, stores promoting sales, interviews, and of course photographs. That latter part is a shame because there are some amazing photographs that never got reprinted again. Saori Tsuji was one such photographer who pretty much was the Visual Kei photographer for the magazine and she eventually released a photobook called 'Favorites'. She eventually went on some tours documenting Luna Sea in the mid 90's. A friend of mine asked her a few years back if she would ever sell prints and her response was "I can't do that unless I get permission from the artist". So for the most part, lots of amazing work is just gone to the world.

Anywho, for my own personal knowledge I might start indexing these Fool's Mates in text form via a spreadsheet to keep track of all the different bands that I'm particularly interested in. I could then easily search through issues for bands.
I have thought the next best move would be to scan them all and have them in digital form for myself and the rest of the world.

That all said, I can't even begin to think of the gargantuan task of scanning 1000's of pages. When Fool's Mate went all in with Visual kei in 1990, the issue sizes ballooned to about 200 pages or so.

Also, to my surprise, almost all of those 80's issues I got were seemingly untouched or kept in really good condition because the pages / edges are just perfectly sharp like the day they were released. The spines aren't even bent in any particular way which suggests it was never opened, or opened forcibly. So I'm actually reluntant to ever chop them up. I'd actually be more inclined to do so if they were already beat up.

I've thought of an inbetween solution of maybe filming them with a camera at 4K while I flip through each issue. Even that would take a good amount of time to achieve.

If anyone is in need of reference (article, interview, live report) in Fool's Mate from those years, let me know.

In terms of scanning suggestions, my general workflow is:

Epson V600 scanner
-48bit color
-Turn off all auto color corrections
-Scan at 900dpi (sometimes 600dpi for less important things, sometimes 1200dpi for smaller / more important things)
-Color Correct in Photoshop and then downconvert to 24bit
-Save as Tiff with LZW compression
-Convert Tiff files to jpeg with XNConvert.
-Keep files loose in a folder as jpegs so I can easily open them in Windows Explorer or a program without having to dig through a PDF or cbr file type archive.
-Backup to BDRs

If I ever did scan those magazines cover-to-cover. I'd probably just scan at 600dpi @ 24bit for speed and file size considerations. 300dpi just feels too little for me and when it comes to smaller books / articles sometimes having that higher resolution really lets you zoom in better to read text even if the photos start showing their moire patterns. Also I think the time difference between 300dpi vs 600 dpi is negligible .

The only part I would need to figure out is color correction at 24bit.
I just don't trust the default Epson scan color correct which only works when it does a preview scan which is a step I try to avoid. If you want it to color correct while scanning, it needs to preview first. So to scan at 24bit without color correction would incur some quality lose later if done manually or via batch form. The lose is probably invisible to most but on a technical level it's still there.

And what kind of book scanner do you have?

flowersofnight · Apr 17, 2023

cardy wrote:
And what kind of book scanner do you have?

I have this (and so can you):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/364174879092
So yeah, I'm absolutely not cutting up the magazines for this XD You can just lay them over the side and get almost all the way to the gutter.
I scanned "Imperfection" volume 3 last night but half the pages are no good because they have text printed right up to the gutter - will have to rescan.
For commercial magazines that it's easy to get more copies of, maybe it would make sense to cut them up and get a document scanner to just do them all automatically, but I'm not going to get into that.

cardy wrote:
300dpi just feels too little for me

I think it depends on the publication. These cheap indies rags I've been scanning were produced at fairly low resolution as it is - you can already see each individual halftone spot in the photos at 300dpi. Similarly they only had one color of ink so color depth doesn't matter - I save the inside pages as grayscale, and really a high-res 1-bit scan would probably be just as good.
As far as I'm concerned, for ミニコミ 300dpi is "museum quality" and 150dpi is "reading quality". I mean, it's not like these are the Dead Sea Scrolls and we're trying to tell what species of tree the paper was made from.

cardy wrote:
Color Correct in Photoshop

What kind of color correcting are you doing?
When I use the V600 I use a profile created from a Wolf Faust target (the higher versions of Silverfast will do this automatically for you) to get the colors in line, and then when I scan things I put a WhiBal white-balance card on the glass and use that to set the black/white points.
When I use the book scanner I only do the white balance since I'm mostly scanning grayscale anyway and I've been too lazy to mess with the manual process of calibrating on a target.

cardy wrote:
Save as Tiff with LZW compression

Any particular reason for TIFF? My scanners output TIFF by default but I recompress them to PNG and that saves about a third of the file size.

flowersofnight · Apr 19, 2023

Imperfection vol. 3 (11/1994)

Featuring a long interview with Malice Mizer. It discusses, among other things, what recording "memoire" was like. Someone should translate it.
Kozi and Yu~ki give their (supposed) ages in the profile here.
This magazine was printed oddly, with text right up to the gutter. Some of it is almost impossible to read even when you have it in your hands. I did the best I could without disbinding the pages - as it is, many of the pages have some distortion or shadows.

https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imperfection3.pdf (300dpi, 121MB PDF)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imperfection3_150dpi.pdf (150dpi, 25MB PDF)

flowersofnight · Apr 19, 2023

Imaginative vol. 8 (8/1996)
"Yeah, The Naked Dada Issue"

I wanted to do one without a difficult binding this time, so here we go. The highlights of this have been posted many times, but here's the full magazine.
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imaginative8.pdf (300dpi PDF, 93MB)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imaginative8_150dpi.pdf (150dpi PDF, 16MB)

Added an index to the first post too.

flowersofnight · Apr 22, 2023

Après Guerre Vol. 6 (10/1994)

Featuring handwritten profiles and discussion of "memoire" by Malice Mizer and an interview/live report on Pride of mind.
The "real names" Mana and Kozi give in these profiles seem to be obscure anime characters ::meev::

https://www.prideofmind.com/data/apresguerre6.pdf (300dpi, 218MB PDF)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/apresguerre6_150dpi.pdf (150dpi, 44MB PDF)

Oh yes, and:

cardy wrote:
If anyone is in need of reference (article, interview, live report) in Fool's Mate from those years, let me know.

Actually, if you've got a huge pile of 1980s Fool's Mates, I bet you have some P-MODEL and/or Susumu Hirasawa features. #59 and 97 have some, according to a YJ search, and probably a bunch of other issues do too. I make no representations about whether they're anything interesting.

flowersofnight · Apr 23, 2023

QUARTER MAZE Vol. 3 (1993)
Malice Mizer's probably-first interview

The release date of this magazine is unclear, but the interview with Malice Mizer took place sometime after Gaz quit on 3/15/1993 and before their live on 4/5. It's almost certainly their first interview.
You could win a signed hairspray from Tetsu by entering the magazine's contest, but it's too late now if you haven't already entered.

https://www.prideofmind.com/data/quartermaze3.pdf (300dpi, 215MB PDF)
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/quartermaze3_150dpi.pdf (150dpi, 44MB PDF)

cardy · Apr 24, 2023

flowersofnight wrote:
I have this (and so can you):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/364174879092
So yeah, I'm absolutely not cutting up the magazines for this XD You can just lay them over the side and get almost all the way to the gutter.
I scanned "Imperfection" volume 3 last night but half the pages are no good because they have text printed right up to the gutter - will have to rescan.
For commercial magazines that it's easy to get more copies of, maybe it would make sense to cut them up and get a document scanner to just do them all automatically, but I'm not going to get into that.

I think it depends on the publication. These cheap indies rags I've been scanning were produced at fairly low resolution as it is - you can already see each individual halftone spot in the photos at 300dpi. Similarly they only had one color of ink so color depth doesn't matter - I save the inside pages as grayscale, and really a high-res 1-bit scan would probably be just as good.
As far as I'm concerned, for ミニコミ 300dpi is "museum quality" and 150dpi is "reading quality". I mean, it's not like these are the Dead Sea Scrolls and we're trying to tell what species of tree the paper was made from.

What kind of color correcting are you doing?
When I use the V600 I use a profile created from a Wolf Faust target (the higher versions of Silverfast will do this automatically for you) to get the colors in line, and then when I scan things I put a WhiBal white-balance card on the glass and use that to set the black/white points.
When I use the book scanner I only do the white balance since I'm mostly scanning grayscale anyway and I've been too lazy to mess with the manual process of calibrating on a target.

Any particular reason for TIFF? My scanners output TIFF by default but I recompress them to PNG and that saves about a third of the file size.

That scanner looks interesting and when I loaded that ebay link again the last one was already sold.
I need to find someone in Germany that has this scanner. I wouldn't trust any scanner could make it from the US in shipping without potential damage to the glass or LED scanner portion.

I actually scanned a book of Fool's Mates photographs that was released in 1986 or so. I actually bought a second copy on the cheap and just cut it up. There's a good mix of popular acts from the west and lots of early-mid 80's indie bands from the Wechselbalg and Transrecords labels.

Fool's Mate - The Wild Documents
https://mega.nz/folder/dJI2FaIC#Eg1yHEFafKH2EukUWD3wSA

For color correction I usually use Photoshop curves and go into the 'options' settings and try out the different 'algorithms' settings to find one that looks the visually best but doesn't deviate so much from the original look. For example, that Fool's Mate photo book was slightly yellowed and while I can manually lower the yellow to reduce this...it's a very push-and-pull process which can be affected by my eyes and the lighting conditions near my dask (Daytime vs night, windows closed / open, what's on my second monitor as I'm correcting on my first one, etc).
I've calibrated my monitors with an i1 Display Pro but lighting conditions can throw off my eye and make me think the color / brightness is off when maybe it isn't.

Curves > options > algorithms actually does a really amazing job at recovering really orange/yellowed photographs and likewise I feel like it's able to better remove the yellow and skewed color of faded paper.

Never thought about a white balance card for my scanner. I probably should look into that.
I save my files as TIFF because I've been messing around in Photoshop since the mid 90's and it's sort of burned into my brain at this point to either use TIFF or PSD. I used to use the latter but found out a few years back that it's basically a TIFF compression scheme so felt it made sense to be more open source with TIFF. I consider PNG more of a delivery format even though it does support lossless encoding. Tiff has different compression schemes within it that probably achieves similar ratios to PNG.

flowersofnight · Apr 24, 2023

cardy wrote:
Never thought about a white balance card for my scanner.

Nobody has, the people at B&H were awestruck when I mentioned it XD
Part of it, I think, is that most people aren't using flatbed scanners with a lot of extra space to stick things in, they're just scanning A4 paper on A4 scanners.

cardy wrote:
it's able to better remove the yellow and skewed color of faded paper.

Of course then you get into the whole question of "what color was the paper originally" ::kozi::

On these monochrome scans I've been taking the easy answer and saying "The paper was pure white and the ink was whatever it was relative to the black on my black card". Even though that's not really true at all.

cardy wrote:
I save my files as TIFF because I've been messing around in Photoshop since the mid 90's

But you don't have a reflexive dislike of LZW compression with its predatory patents? XD
I could have sworn there were some last patents on that hanging around until relatively recently, but it seems not. Maybe I was thinking of MP3.

cardy wrote:
I need to find someone in Germany that has this scanner.

I'm not sure if they're making them anymore, the one I bought was a refurb right from the manufacturer at fire-sale prices.
The same model seems to have had several incarnations, from Scannx, iVina, Avision, etc. I think it's all the same under the hood and Avision is the manufacturer.
https://www.bookscanstation.com/ivina-fb6080e.html
http://avision-labs.com/products/fb6280e.html

flowersofnight · May 31, 2023

Not exactly "magazines" but they're multi-page items that go together, both on the occasion of Gackt's departure from Malice Mizer.

"For Those Who Want To Know The Truth": the remaining 4 members offer up some vague thoughts on the situation.
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/macherie_truth.pdf

The official announcement of Gackt's departure, with messages from Midi:Nette and from the band as a whole:
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/macherie_announce.pdf

flowersofnight · Nov 8, 2023

Should I get back on this? Yeah, I should probably get back on this.

Imperfection Vol. 6 (8/1995)

Featuring a page on Pride of mind, and a whole bunch of Kozi and Tetsu goofing around in session bands during the time between Tetsu leaving Malice Mizer and Gackt joining.

Files:
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imperfection6.pdf
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/imperfection6_150dpi.pdf

Updated the index in the first post too.

flowersofnight · Nov 11, 2023

The Gilbert and Sullivan Journal, May 1966 (Volume IX, No. 2)

Here's a rarity from that lot of journal issues I picked up a while back. This journal was published approximately quarterly by the British Gilbert and Sullivan Society from 1924 up to some unknown date. Pretty much it includes news about society meetings, performances, and recordings, plus whatever articles members felt like contributing.
The article about the history of staging revisions was particularly interesting - also notable were the various bits about what was and wasn't popular at the time. The 1966 D'Oyly Carte "Mikado" (which you can still buy on DVD) got a glowing review, whereas it was mentioned that "Patience" (which just had a delightful new production in New York) was completely out of favor with audiences.

I've got a million of these but let's start with just one XD

Files:
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/gsj_may66.pdf
https://www.prideofmind.com/data/gsj_may66_150dpi.pdf

Cantavanda · Nov 13, 2023

Now that's different than the usual minikomis you post!!! Very interesting!

The Magazine Project

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