National Geographic's Collectors Corner
Article Reprints / Offprints (NGS and permissioned)
This group is intended to share knowledge of / awareness of, some seldom seen "reprint", or "offprint", articles that originally appeared in the published magazine.
The vast majority of these items were generated by the Society on special request by non-profit organizations, government agencies, and other higher profile entities (authors, significant contributors).
Print runs of each varied widely, from a few dozen to thousands of copies. Some bear the personalization of the author.
An Interesting Pair of Reprints (It's All Greek to Me)
An Interesting Pair of Reprints (It's All Greek to Me)
While continuing my search for all things Geographic, I stumbled across a couple of items on eBay. They are reprints of older National Geographic Magazines in Greek. One is of the April 1921 issue and was translated and reprinted in 2004, and the second is of the March 1940 issue and was produced in 2003. From the seller's photos, it appears that the text for all articles, including the photo captions, have been translated and that all advertisements have been removed, (the back covers are blank).
Since I had just posted my monthly discussion on 100-year-old issues for April 1921, I had to buy the following reprint:
The second reprint, the one for March 1940, was sold on eBay April 12, 2021:
Yours in Collecting,
Tom Wilson
George Thomas Wilson
Note: These items are article reprints, not reprints of entire issues sans advertisements. The one I purchased, (the top one shown above), is a translation of the first article in the April 1921 National Geographic.
The original article is entitled "Modern Persia and Its Capital" on the cover, and has the subtitle "And an Account of an Ascent of Mount Demavend, the Persian Olympus" located above the article inside the magazine. I can only assume that is what the heading and subheading read on the cover of this article reprint in Greek. (I haven't a clue.) The article was written by F. L. Bird. The last two lines in Greek on the cover of the reprint contain "April 1921"; probable stating that this was a reprint of that issue. The next line contains the year "2004", and probably states when it this reprint was produced. That line may include a month, and even a day (there is a "7" embedded in the line), but again, I can't read Greek so I'm clueless.
The article reprint itself is 52 pages long (counting the covers), and contains forty of the forty-seven black-and-white photographs in the original article. They all seem to have a brownish tint to them, probable from the copying process. Many of the photos that were small in the original article are blown up to full-page in size in this reprint. On the inside front cover and the facing page (page 3) there is a color advertisement for CD-ROMs, in Greek, produced by the National Geographic Society; and on the inside back cover (page 51) there is a color ad for DVDs, again in Greek and again by Nat Geo. The article starts on page 5, with page 4 containing the usual board of directors and editors page, but in a hybrid English and Greek. The back cover is completely blank yellow.
Tom Wilson
May 12, 2021