Protection systematically unmasks countless methods of deception by both man and machine. The publisher decided that this book's importance was such that they stripped clean of period lingo, poor illustrations and dull layout technique. they've come up with a completely revised and newly-designed version making this one fascinating read. Even though the material is nine decades old, its charm and historical significance is so powerful that it almost comes across as a period novel --
Gameroom Magazine, May 1999This "new" edition, the 10th, is the first available to the public since 1961. It's been revamped, indexed, illustrated, polished up and given one of the finest "makeovers" I've ever seen by the talented and professional Daniel Mead --
Howard Schwartz, Gaming Today, May 18-24, 1999You did a beautiful job reproducing this book! --
Edna Luckman, Gambler's Book Store, Las Vegas, Nevada
When Mead Publishing Company first encountered Protection, I was, as a publisher, singularly impressed by the contents of the book, but I was somewhat dismayed at the poor quality of the typesetting and [letterpress] printing. Previously, our company had issued reprints of gambling-oriented books that had become very difficult to obtain; but those efforts entailed the use of modern photographic printing processes to reproduce the books exactly as they existed in the original. Many were, in fact, nearly perfect reproductions of the originals. The only clue that they were reprints was a typeset line on the covers labeling them as such.
But Protection did not lend itself to that process because of the inferior quality; when photographically reproducing an image, it is usually the case that the image degrades in proportion to its distance---measured in generations---from the original. So the importance of reproducing the book languished; other projects simply had priority.
Recently, I came across the book again. This time, I decided that the extraordinary nature of its content justified extraordinary measures to reproduce it. A determination was made to re-typeset the book, rather than let it ultimately vanish into obscurity.
Once that judgment had been made, the full faculties of Mead Publishing Company were brought to bear on the book. Exhaustive research into typefaces of that period led to decisions regarding type styles and formats. Ironically, even though we have over 3,000 typefaces, it was difficult to find just the right faces---ones which actually existed at the turn of the century and would harmoniously work together.
The original artwork of the book was, of course, not available, so it was necessary to photographically enhance and painstakenly rework, by hand, the illustrations from the original printed pages.
And that was just part of the technical portion of the republishing of this edition. Since the original book was written, styles have changed in many diverse areas with which we are familiar: clothing fashions, musical harmony, automobile styles and etcetera. What may have been crystal clear to a population in 1800 may leave the modern reader with a sense of bewilderment. To remedy this, I encouraged Mead Publishing Company to set itself the formidable task of carefully editing the book.
With scrupulous attention to content, so as to retain the unique flavor of the author's style, we approached the book word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence. Amazingly, the English language has a particular quality that makes it a "living" language: it modifies itself by usage. Although this often causes dismay to the linguistic historian, it keeps our mother tongue vibrant and exciting. But, in order to make the content of a book written nearly a century ago intelligible to today's reader, it is necessary to revise it. First, the spelling was corrected and modernized . . . then, the punctuation. Then, the grammar was revised to reflect proper rules of grammatical structure, some of which may not even have existed at the time of the original publication. Lastly, the entire treatise was reread to see that the author's style had been retained; if needed, entire sentences or paragraphs were rewritten in order to accomplish this valuable result.
While the text was being edited, we noticed some illustrations were not referenced in the text; worse yet, several references in the text were found to have no illustrations. But the most aggravating occurrence was the referencing of the illustrations themselves. For instance we found that "Figure 1" occurred no less than 21 times---each one for a different illustration! Figures 2, 3 and 4 appeared nearly as many times. Adding to the confusion was the jumping from, say, Figure 1 to 12 to 3 to 20 to 32 to 126 and back again to a different Figure 1 or 2 or 3. We quickly made the decision to re-number all the illustrations and re-reference the text---in sequence---to match. In order to further enhance Protection, we have also included a Table of Contents and an Index, features which were not included in the original work. These additions, as easy as they are to produce today, were comparatively arduous undertakings for the author and printer at the turn of the century. The result is now a wonderful reference work . . . one we are convinced the author would have graciously authorized.
Some of the original illustrations came from period catalogs and booklets. We discovered our extensive reference library contained every one of these publications. So we substituted our high-quality catalog illustrations for the poorly printed examples originally used in Protection. For clarity, some were reproduced larger than they originally existed in Protection.
At last, the book was ready for the press. But wait . . . still more decisions had to be made. I reviewed the available printing papers, choosing one that seemed appropriate for both the book's content and its period style. The same attention to detail went into the choice of binding and cover stock. The original had been bound with 16-page signatures, side-stitched and glued into the cover, made of black bookbinder's cloth without title imprinting. Modern bindery processes yield a superior binding that is more durable and resists the wear and tear of normal perusal. We chose to perfect bind this reprinted edition, and to cover it with the traditional black, simulated linen cover, this time imprinting the title.
The result is a "classic" classic, faithful to the original in tone and style, but with the improvements that current linguistics and modern technology afford today's publisher.
