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.
Berrien Book Bindery
Berrien Book Bindery
National Geographic Magazines are notoriously difficult to part with. Even people who don’t want them, don’t want to throw them away. Through the years a number of people interested in a particular topic would save only the issues containing an article related to that topic. To save space, they would have the articles they wanted removed from the magazines and then have them bound, either together in a book, or individually, mimicking article reprints. I would not be surprised, by the number of Berrien bound articles on Abe Books, that some entrepreneurs figured they could make more money selling several separate articles than one used magazine.
Berrien Book Bindery seems to be the most popular bindery for National Geographic articles. I had resisted buying any of these items for some time, suspecting that they were destructively produced, but I recently pulled the trigger on a set that had been advertised on eBay for years. As suspected, they are original articles lifted from the magazine; the prove being that some contained the last page of the preceding article or the first page of the following article. Article reprints blank those pages.
The set I purchased contains fourteen bound articles, all related to Central Asia. I don’t believe I’ll be purchasing any more of these items, but if I do, I’ll have this Album to put them in.
Yours in collecting,
Tom Wilson
Scott T. Shier
Tom,
Interesting . . . what do you think of the quality of the cover boards? And do they open nicely (eg, hinges), and lay flat for viewing? I have often had it on my far back burner to pick up a couple of these -- just for "reference" if nothing else.
I think it speaks well of the "old days" when people valued the information in NGM enough to make the effort to do bindings, and along with breaking up issues into thematic-bound volumes.
- Scott
P>S>
looks like your batch are all single-article editions.
Dec 30, 2023