Chinese reprints at their finest.

Shocking. And that’s a de luxe?

The quality of the Chinese prints is fine (in terms of paper, print, etc). It’s in quality control that they are sadly lacking.

Quicksilver wrote:

Shocking. And that’s a de luxe?

The quality of the Chinese prints is fine (in terms of paper, print, etc). It’s in quality control that they are sadly lacking.

The only Chinese print of the deluxes I have actually owned is Kullervo. It was hot garbage and smelled horrendous. I've seen a few of the others in the shops, and the paper used on the boards and slipcase was nowhere near as good as the earlier Euro printed variants, and the colours were much less subtle. To be fair, I haven't seen most of them, except in pictures. And the deluxe range doesn't photograph especially well.

That sounds pretty bad Stu. I don't have any of the current de luxe range so my experience of Chinese prints has been limited to the standard hardbacks. And now I think of it, I have seen some issues with those such as misaligned dust jackets. And the yellow on the DJ of Fellowship of the Ring (with the Tolkien designed cover) is a bit off compared to the earlier Italian printings.

A few of mine are later printings from the Chinese printer and they all arrived fine to me...nothing like this, that's just awful.

I think it stems from, because they produce so many compared to other printing locations, there is more room for error.

For instance, Clays may have a perfect print run of, say, 1,000 copies. A printing company in China that does....say, 5,000 copies of the same title, 100 of those may have production errors.

Printing goofs can happen anywhere: just look at The Hobbit facsimile edition (of 2016), the first few prints of the Hammond & Scull 2017 boxed set, The History of Middle-earth collector's edition, and now this dustjacket crease issue with the illustrated Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. None of which were printed in China, and encountered production errors.

I have a few Tolkien titles throughout the years (2004 hardback of Artist & Illustrator, The Complete Guide to Middle-earth illustrated hardback, and a few others) , and they're all fine despite having the word 'China' on the copyright page

My final take: something printed in China isn't automatically bad by default.....but, if you get a Chinese print, check it more thoroughly than you would a non-Chinese title. The Chinese printing companies' main goal may be to produce so many of something, and because of that, QA isn't as good as it would be elsewhere.

insurrbution wrote:

I think it stems from, because they produce so many compared to other printing locations, there is more room for error.

Actually, the Chinese print runs of the deluxe editons have typically been much smaller, yet we have seen numerous issues. Kullervo was 2000 copies and they were *all* defective in one way or another. Some copies had the page blocks upside-down, all had the text mis-centered, some had front and rear boards of different sizes, etc.

insurrbution wrote:

Printing goofs can happen anywhere: just look at The Hobbit facsimile edition (of 2016), the first few prints of the Hammond & Scull 2017 boxed set, The History of Middle-earth collector's edition, and now this dustjacket crease issue with the illustrated Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. None of which were printed in China, and encountered production errors.

The first print of the 2017 H&S boxed set that had the problems was printed in China. The 2016 Hobbit did have the swapped front and rear end papers for some copies, though (not sure what goofs - plural - there were).

Nevertheless, I feel that you missed the entire point of my post, which was about the use of Chinese printers to produce the cheaper *reprints*. The clue was in the title.

This isn't a numbers issue. This is a no-one all the way through production caring, issue. The printer didn't discard the bad copies because they hoped to get away with it. The person who assembled the slipcase just didn't care at all. To be fair, even the retailer who stuck it in a box and posted it didn't care.

And even the copies that are tolerable don't meet the original specifications. Look at set of reprint deluxes -- they are all different heights, simply because the printers don't care about accuracy to the dimensions provided.

Stu wrote:

Quicksilver wrote:

Shocking. And that’s a de luxe?

The quality of the Chinese prints is fine (in terms of paper, print, etc). It’s in quality control that they are sadly lacking.

The only Chinese print of the deluxes I have actually owned is Kullervo. It was hot garbage and smelled horrendous. I've seen a few of the others in the shops, and the paper used on the boards and slipcase was nowhere near as good as the earlier Euro printed variants, and the colours were much less subtle. To be fair, I haven't seen most of them, except in pictures. And the deluxe range doesn't photograph especially well.

Stu I don't suppose there is anywhere that we can get the size of the print runs of the HC deluxe editions? I'm getting deja vu...I think I have asked this before.

My 2017 Hammond & Scull boxed set is printed in Italy by Rotolito Lombarda, with the printing saying 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 2 for all three books. Maybe the re-prints were done there?

Mr. Underhill wrote:

Stu I don't suppose there is anywhere that we can get the size of the print runs of the HC deluxe editions? I'm getting deja vu...I think I have asked this before.

They are on here somewhere, I think. They tended to vary from 2000 - 3000 for the first prints. I think later print info was only available for LoTR.

The later print runs info is anecdotal based on the statement (from DB, IIRC) that they were able to get smaller runs for the reprints.