DIY digest-size OD&D books

I'm sure this has been done hundreds upon hundreds of times, but I printed copies of the original little brown books for my own use. Gizzards of the Roast can bite me as far as copyright is concerned. I own the originals of all of these -- (yes, even Don't Give Up The Ship and Warriors of Mars!) It took several weeks and a new printer cartridge to do it. I wanted to do Supplement 5 Carcosa as well but the pdf I have has the pages sequentially 2 to a full-size page, so it can't be paginated correctly for book layout, not without some Herculean photoshoppery effort. Not worth the time really.

 I hand sewed the bindings. I kind of made everything up as I went along. I didn't know how to paginate, so I wrote a little python script to create the page input to the printer software. An example looks like this:

$ python3 ./print_layout_book_order.py 1 68 1,2,67,68
inputs: 1 68 [1, 2, 67, 68]
setlen (before skip): 68
skipping: 1,2,67,68
setlen (after skip): 64
3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66
SET LENGTH: 64
TOTAL SIDES: 32
TOTAL PAGES: 16
Divisible by 4? YES
66,3,4,65,64,5,6,63,62,7,8,61,60,9,10,59,58,11,12,57,56,13,14,55,54,15,16,53,52,17,18,51,50,19,20,49,48,21,22,47,46,23,24,45,44,25,26,43,42,27,28,41,40,29,30,39,38,31,32,37,36,33,34,35

My first attempt of the original 3 LBBs is humorous at best. I attempted to combine all 3 into a single block. I had to do a few passes splitting it into sections instead of one giant unmanageable block until I got something that made sense. I ended up sewing the sections to a backing made out of an unused oil-lamp wick, and glued that to a bit of scored poster-board. I then realized it was destined to fall apart as the hinges would separate so I glued a strip of leather onto the outside, as if it weren't tacky enough before. It's pretty weird looking. It might actually be nice to use but I didn't trim the edges correctly so it's difficult to flip through.

The reason I bothered is I really want to read the books thoroughly, and I figured I'd avoid marking up my originals up with creases and finger-oil. There's much I haven't read yet, and I need tangible print copies if I'm going to; PDFs wouldn't do. It's not like any of this stuff is in print. Lizards would just screw it up anyway by making some ridiculous graphical improvement or something. Printing the originals is a nice compromise and a chance for me to learn something. Now I have well-thought out, untampered-with original text and layout, in a format I can produce if need be. (Well, almost original. I did omit the covers to save ink)

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Update: Addendum: My wife got a G+ notification about this post and asked to make sure I wasn't selling these. "You aren't going to get in trouble for this, are you?" I suppose there is that undercurrent there, but "No," I told her. "I own all these books. I'm not sure what the legality is. But I can't imagine it ever being illegal to photocopy a book that you own, for use in your own home. I'm not posting the result online. Nor am I selling it." Besides, none of these are in print. Rotc has no reason to print them; what they would make if they did is a tiny pittance compared to the big-production values derivative stuff they are used to making. The real reason they don't print them is that they don't care. They really don't. They have their own ulterior motives and owners (shareholders?) they are beholden to. The care and preservation of the magical early days of the hobby is left up to the enthusiasts. The trail of messy copyright and legal mumbo-jumbo has left a lot of legacy materials in a questionable state of legality. Therefor it is incumbent upon me--and everyone else who wishes to--to make copies of these things, to preserve them by propagating them in any way we see fit. The law is not always right. In fact it is only right roughly 50% of the time. Much of what the law represents is the result of bad luck, societal currents, or effects from the abuse of power by the powerful. Does that mean then that all good plebeians should be quiet and do what they are told because it is the "right" thing to do? No, of course not. The "right" thing to do is to understand systems--at the meta philosophical level--so one doesn't become imprisoned by them.