A long-desired acquisition

[mahrundl]

A little bit of history:

My introduction to T & T came about through a friend who got his gaming materials from the UK. So instead of the 5th edition rulebook that many people here are probably familiar with, the first set of rules that I encountered were the A5-sized UK 5th edition. It had an orange cover and black binding tape covering the staples holding it together.

I played T & T using that rulebook for quite a few years, and not surprisingly, it held a special place in my heart. Alas, that particular copy seems to have gone forever - my friend has not seen it for some years. I'd always wanted to get myself a copy, but everything that I saw for sale was badly battered, had a price tag in the hundreds of dollars, or (more and more frequently) both.

Well, I recently found an eBay auction for a copy in very good condition, with a reasonable starting price. Rather strangely, it seemed to attract no interest, so I made a single bid at the starting price - and won it! And today it arrived in the mail, just in time for my gaming session on Saturday. And it looks very much like my recollection of my friend's copy back when he first showed it to me - not bad for a 40 year old book.

Not earth-shattering news, or even especially noteworthy. Just a small 'feel-good' moment that I wanted to share.

This has been a long time coming... but it was worth the wait.

[zanshin]

How lovely. I think that was the version I started with - orange covered and stapled. I gave mine away to a friend when I got the 5.5e rules, as it was much loved in use.

Congratulations

[ProfGremlin]

Fantastic, mahrundl! To finally achieve the touchstone to access so many wonderful memories.

If I may be so bold, spend a little time and make clean photos/scans of each page so you can rebuild in case of the gremlins hiding your tome of tomfoolery! I'd even be willing to offer my services to tweak or clean the photos up to best effect.

I have a couple of books on acupressure that have served me well over the years. They're getting hard to find due to the company going out of business. I really want to do an OCR scan of the whole book and compile into a searchable pdf.

[mgtremaine]

Aug 12, 2021 7:49:39 GMT -5 ProfGremlin said:

Fantastic, mahrundl! To finally achieve the touchstone to access so many wonderful memories.

If I may be so bold, spend a little time and make clean photos/scans of each page so you can rebuild in case of the gremlins hiding your tome of tomfoolery! I'd even be willing to offer my services to tweak or clean the photos up to best effect.

I have a couple of books on acupressure that have served me well over the years. They're getting hard to find due to the company going out of business. I really want to do an OCR scan of the whole book and compile into a searchable pdf.

It's very satisfying when you do this. I have an ancient copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 that no longer works on my OSX machines, so these days I use Tesseract for the OCR. It's not bad but Acrobat did a very good job of reducing the file size after the OCR step. Which the one thing that really drives me crazy is the file size of these PDF that are being put out. Yes it's largely from the full color images but damnit they are getting big. ;0

-Mike

[peterpanda]

That's a great story - so happy for you - and one I can relate to. I started with 4th edition and used to borrow my friend's copy. In this case, my friend used it so much, it eventually fell apart. I have memories of him bringing it to our gaming sessions with all the pages now detached from the black spiral binding and held together in a bundle with rubber bands.

Roll the clock forward to the mid 1990s, I'm in a local gaming shop, flipping through the consignment box when, what do I find, but an absolutely pristine copy of 4th edition for only $1 US. I couldn't believe it! It even has the same upside down pages that my friend's copy had; probably a sorting mistake when it was originally attached to the spiral binding (it's possible that all 4th editions have this peculiarity; I just don't know).

Anyway, thanks for sharing your story; I enjoyed it and am happy for you.

Cheers -

Peter Panda

[faxfayfaz2]

5th edition for the win!

[order99]

Strangely enough, I purchased the 5th Edition T&T boxed set-but instead of the regular book I ended up with the UK Edition sealed from the factory! I guess they ran out of the regular books that day, not that I minded one bit...

From there I found Mercenaries,Spies & Private Eyes, then migrated backwards into 4th Edition T&T somehow?