#but when I skip it for like a week

[moeblob]

Happy Birthday to Ferdinand von Aegir!

I actually made 33 emotes, affectionately known as Aegirglyphics to some, for my own personal use on discord. However, I figure why not share some of them! They're free to use for discord servers/icons/pfps or whatever. However, my only request is Do NOT use them as subscriber emotes on Twitch. You can make them free follower emotes but you are not to make them locked behind a paywall.

[crispywizardtale]

[peachsukii]

Please spare a hug to your resident Bakugo girlie today. 💔❤️‍🩹

[gayofthefae]

Do you ever think about the emphasis on choices and how Mike being in Will's plot in season 2 is because of a very Mike choice Mike made: when Will didn't come to school he left as soon as he could and biked across town to his house to make sure he was okay.

[ccircusclwn]

Is it just me, or is that every time u draw Mk u draw her differently? 😭😭😭 (not hating)

im slowly but surely oc-fying her at this point 🙏🙏 also its bcs i try many styles i like a lot and since mk's character design is like forever dented in my brain. i draw her a lot

[m00ngbin]

CHAPTER 17!!!!! HAPPY TFS TUESDAY!!!!!!!!

[rist-ix]

https://www.tumblr.com/rist-ix/749015401700229120 not you reblogging this when you ship bloom with the man who murdered her family 😭

Bloom's into ppl who slay! Hope this helps :3

[taleweaver-ramblings]

Prayer request: please pray for my grandpa. He's having open-heart surgery tomorrow, and he has two other hospital-worthy health issues that they're going to have to figure out how to treat after that. He had a bad fall back in May, and while he was originally doing miraculously well, he stopped taking care of himself as well as he should have in July (right about when he should have been able to start doing more . . .), and that's led to a whole slew of issues.

Specific requests:

That the heart surgery goes well.

That the doctors will have wisdom to figure out how to treat the other issues.

That my grandpa will be receptive to whatever changes he needs to make to ensure these problems don't come back and new problems don't arise, and that he'd find the motivation to not stay in his current mindset (which seems to be that he's avoiding anything that requires effort).

This is a little selfish, but pray that my uncle (who's currently with my grandpa) would be able to stay with him for his recovery instead of making my mom come up again (after she already spent literally all summer taking care of my grandpa after his initial fall).

Thanks in advance.

[anaalnathrakhs]

love this part of my life where the things that are difficult but challenging and good for me are things i can stop and skip and halfass, but the things that are difficult and painful and pointless are the things i have to live with no matter what

[pennedinblood]

as of ten minutes ago we are officially Jobless™️. my sign to retire early and devote the remainder of my existence to writing toxic old man yaoi

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

new Gianni stream is really cursed. can you clip whatever was at 27 minutes . I don’t know what it was

I know not everyone sees every post so I’ll keep sayin it

Not taking requests anymore BUT do not worry since I do watch every stream and do write down most of the clips. Like 95% of em. There is an almost certainty that I will post things. Eventually™️.

It’s just easier for me to wait for it to be uploaded to YouTube and go through it when I have time, due to the way I organize things.

[sparklehoard]

Aaah. So it's neverending huh.

[telomirage]

in order from left to right: the face of someone who is unaware they're about to rawdog their first day back to work, the sky, the sky, the sky, the sky

[tenrose]

I am now in my third week of period so if I commit any crime I can't be charged with anything 🤷

[jorvikpov]

You wake up tired.

It no longer surprises you. You cannot remember the last time you were allowed a full night’s rest. Sleep comes to you in fragments these days; too many times each night to count, you are startled awake so violently that it is difficult to fall asleep again. Your dreams come in fragments, too, and it is becoming harder and harder to tell whether they are the same dream flashing back and forth between a thousand scenes or a thousand different dreams. You may glimpse a deep, wild ocean, or a cold, beautiful winter morning, or a raging scream that comes from you and yet from something entirely different—the list goes on. The moments are incohesive, and yet you feel like something you can’t quite place connects them. Like you only have to fill in the gaps. You cannot, of course, fill in the gaps.

You used to wake up feeling disappointed at it all. The fragmented visions, the gaps where something should connect them, and the uneasy sleep were frustrating at best. Now, it is only to be expected. Each day your time for evenings at home grows shorter and shorter as your training gets more and more intense, and yet each night you manage to put off going to sleep for longer and longer. You know that you will wake a thousand times with only the night sky, the rustling trees, and the knots in your ceiling to keep you company. You know that you will wake exhausted in the morning. You know that there is hardly any point to sleeping.

Oftentimes, your unease brings you to the stables. To your horse. It is still warm there. It will not be that way for much longer, though. Winter grows nearer with each dawn; the grass is already cold and crisp with frost when you wake each morning, and on colder days, your breath fogs even when the sun is highest. Soon enough, the stables will be too cold for anything but animals equipped with thick, warm coats made to let them live through the Jorvegian midwinter.

Sleeping in the stables is becoming more and more difficult, either way. Though you are never directly questioned, you know that people have begun to notice. When you leave for training far too early in the morning and far too undone to have woken up anywhere but your horse’s stall, people are already around. They begin whispering as soon as you have passed them on the village paths. How are you to save the world? How are you to lead the way? How are you to learn to control yourself if you cannot even sleep properly anywhere but the stables?

You do not actually hear them, of course—Valedale’s residents are too tactful and too used to speaking in hushed tones to let you catch their conversations—but you can only assume that these are their words.

When faced with you directly, on the other hand, they are all too nice and appreciative. Should you run even the simplest errand for one of them, they will thank you so profusely that one might think you were the goddess herself and that being graced with your presence was the greatest blessing they could have been given. Should you happen to look anything other than incredibly busy, it is impossible for you to ride through Valedale at midday without somebody stopping you to give their thanks for your constant, diligent and dutiful efforts towards keeping the island safe and to wish you well in the name of Aideen. Stood in the shadow of a house or half-hidden behind a building, others will be silently watching. Whispering. Sometimes, there is awe in their eyes. Other times, they look at you with an expression indecipherable to you. They must think that you cannot see them. Either that, or they don’t care that you can. You aren’t sure which is the better option.

The villagers doubt you, and yet you are their last and only hope. The only one on this island who can supposedly set things right once and for all. With each day that passes, even you find yourself having more and more trouble believing that you will succeed. Though you do not have the visions to prove it, a deep dread within you tells you that the Soul Riders are not the only faction to be gaining power. You have tried to find proof of it, but in your mind there is a blank, foggy space where you know you should be able to find something of use, almost like somebody is concealing something from your view. This only makes the feeling grow stronger; you can think of few people who would be that interested, much less capable, of hiding from your mind’s eye.

You do not speak of it. You cannot. It is not what you are to focus on. The most important thing—the only important thing—is your training. It is the only way you know to give yourself hope. It is the only way you know to keep going. And so, you rise with the sun every morning, painstakingly making your way through the village and up the frost-lined path to the mountainside paddock, and you do your best to hold onto whatever strength you have left.