Alas I suspect the odds of getting hold of all the original illustrations and photographs is infinitesimally small, if they all still exist. Many probably ended up in private collections before digital scans (or photographic plates) of them were taken. It's a shame, but the likely reality, even putting to one side the cost of such a piece of work.
There have been a few art books over the years haven't there, but I don't think I've ever seen any to know if they had older or newer art in. Shame really as it was such a large part of 40k for me at least. I'd love to see some of the original pieces in the,
flesh paper and if that's not possible a lovely big art book would be a decent runner up for me.
There are a few reviews of this particular copy around online (since it's been available for some years now), for instance:
And there is a bit of
background about creating it. It doesn't sound like it was rushed, and Louise Sugden seems to genuinely have a love of the older stuff if you watch her videos. So I'd have reasonable hope that this is a decent reproduction.
The starting point was a “pristine” Rogue Trader copy from the Games Workshop archive. Sugden says she melted the paper glue holding the book pages together with a heat gun and gloves, and carefully separated each page with a scalpel. Pages were physically cleaned and stored in individual archive pouches.
Sugden says it took “about two weeks” to scan in every single page of Rogue Trader, and months to digitally clean up scratches and marks from the scans. Nothing was removed or added to the text: “We had to keep it exactly the same, down to the last pixel”, Sugden explains, including the original page numbering and spelling mistakes.
Sugden says “I think they trusted me to do it because they know how much I love it… I went hard because I was personally invested in Rogue Trader”
I wonder who did the RoC books? Since they were out a few years before the RT reprint.
There are some battered copies of the original on eBay at present
one at £10 and then someone wanting
£20 for a copy with missing pages and rather damaged!, then for a further bit of madness we have just the
front cover for the bargain of £12! Crazy. Not to mention the copies of this reprint for £80-90. So in a crazy twist on reality GW is actually cheaper for once
Had to happen in the multiverse somewhere!
