THE ART OF REPAIR AND RESTORATION...

Copyright BBC TV & The Estate of TERRY NATION

As you all know by now (because I never shut up about it), I have all three DALEK books from the 1960s.  However, what you don't know (because I haven't told you yet) is that I also have a spare copy for each of the first two books.  (Okay, now you know.)  Control your seething jealousy at my good fortune.

Thing is, when I got them, they both had pages missing.  I knew before I bought one (The DALEK WORLD), but didn't find out in the second case (The DALEK BOOK) until after I received it.  (That's the order I bought them, not the sequence in which they were published.)  It's unlikely that the seller knew either, because the missing pages weren't immediately obvious (yes, I got a partial refund).  Not a problem to me - I merely scanned the absent pages from my complete copies, printed them out, and then restored them to their alloted space in the books.

The first book hasn't got the usual laminate wrinkling that this edition usually suffers from (not on the front cover anyway, and just a little on the back), so it would have been a waste to dispense with it merely because of four missing pages.  The second book (which was issued without a laminate covering) is pretty much scuff-free, a problem that it's often prone to.  (It was only short of two pages.)

So now they're complete, and you'd have to look twice (maybe even three times) to spot that they aren't the original pages.  They're even more or less the same thickness as the originals.  Ah, I'm so gifted.  My parents told me when I was a kid that I was a 'gifted' baby - "You surely don't think we'd have paid for you?" my father said.

Anyway, wondering whether I did a good job or not?  (Don't lie, you know you are.)

Then check out the piccies below.  (Incidentally, the camera flash bouncing off the replacement pages have made them look a little whiter than they actually are;  the difference between the new and the old is less apparent than appears here.

Posted in: Cartoons