Crossword puzzle from Gambit #5, a Blake’s 7 fanzine.
Why am I giving you this?
Because I just spent a friggin’ half-hour with Photoshop cleaning it the hell up, as my zine’s previous owner had filled the puzzle out.
Which is one of the reasons why scanning a zine can take so long. Scanning the pages can be a long job by itself. It means holding the zine on the glass so it’s straight, or taking it apart and doing it page by page.
Then, if you want it to look nice, or just be readable in a lot of cases, you have to clean it up. This means rotating the page in tiny increments, because even if the page was laid straight, sometimes the printing itself was crooked. Then cleaning off specks. Not just specks from the scanner glass, but binding holes, age/spill stains on the paper, or printer bleedthrough. Photoshop does have a nice “newspaper” setting that will automatically remove opposite-page ghosts, which saves some time, but it can’t handle when the print leaked though so strongly that portions are as dark as the printing on that side of the page.
Gambit, as long as it is, is actually one of the easier zines I’ve worked on. Professional printing means it’s mostly straight. And when it’s not? Every page has these guidelines on the top and bottom. (You can see this page’s bottom line on the crossword.) It’s much easier to gauge straightness by lining that up instead of lining up the text. Professional printing also means no bleedthrough. It’s mostly speck and yellowing removal.
But it’s 300 friggin’ pages. Per issue. And while the first five issues were cirlock bound and easily taken apart and put back together, the rest were perfect-bound. They’re actual books. I’m going to have to choose between cracking their spines to hold them flat, outright destroying them to scan the pages flat, or investing in a $300-$500 specialized scanner designed to scan and straighten open-book images.
Or, just giving up on the scans and transcribing the suckers. Which would leave out a HUGE portion of fan art.
I’ve acquired a double of one of the perfect-bound issues...a copy whose spine was destroyed and was sold for only $5 because it’s literally in pieces. I’m keeping my eyes open for others, but I’m not holding my breath.
Still, #5 is almost done. There’s less than 40 pages to go, and then there will be a pdf for y’all. And trust me, the Gambit series is worth both the work and the wait. Every issue has content for every season of the show and PGP, printed and indexed in season order. Their sheer size means odds are good that there will be SOMETHING for you, no matter how picky you are about your fanfic.













