File:SB-10-107-source-1.png

Summary

Description

Working His Passage Home — cartoon signed Bisbee in Puck, vol. VI, no. 151, 28 January 1880, printed p. 763, upper-left cartoon (PDF page 5). The signature is retained without an unverified expansion of the artist's name. Printed caption: “The unfortunate situation of Mr. Smith of Skowhegan, Maine, on returning from a visit to the Capitol.”

Matches the illustration on H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 10, page 107. Tall-hatted man chest-deep in a snowdrift, raised hand, snow-covered hut and fir trees, coat hatching, title, caption and Bisbee signature match. The album backing is The Medium and Daybreak, 31 October 1879; that backing date is not transferred to the separate illustration. This matching Puck witness is dated 28 January 1880. Earlier publication and the particular physical carrier used for the pasted cutting remain unestablished. Album material and annotations remain separate and unchanged.

Source

Internet Archive, Serials in Microfilm, exact item sim_puck_1880-01-28_6_151, ark:/13960/t1xf31732, digitized from microfilm IA1630702-01, box IA1630702, scanning centre Cebu, 400ppi. The current exact archive record was checked 5 November 2026. The printed cover independently supplies vol. VI / no. 151 / 28 January 1880 and Keppler & Schwarzmann, New York; the target source page supplies printed folio 763. The archive's generic Publisher field Open Court Publishing Co is not treated as the publisher printed on this 1880 issue.

• Exact issue record.
• Complete source page.
• Complete source issue PDF, p. 763/PDF page 5.

Thank you to Internet Archive for preserving and freely supplying the historical periodical scan. This is a monochrome processed microfilm representation, retaining its source softness; it is not a natural-paper-colour upgrade. The cartoon's contours, distinguishing details, signature and caption remain legible. No digital colourization or enhancement has been applied.

Rights

Historical cartoon published in the United States in 1880, public domain there by age. The exact freely accessible archive record and digitization provenance were verified. No separate Creative Commons licence, CC0 or institutional Public Domain Mark is invented for the scan. This is a faithful representation of old printed linework from microfilm, not a modern creative seller's photograph or restoration. Source and digitizer credit are retained.

File and processing

Lossless RGB PNG, 1340 × 1495 pixels. The fifth PDF page contains two 3820 × 5284 grayscale JPX layers and a JBIG2 mask. They were faithfully composed through the PDF renderer on the original 3820 × 5284 source pixel grid: media 687.6 × 951.12 points at 400 dpi. This is a native-scale PDF composite, not a raw image-stream extraction and not an enlarged low-resolution reader image. Hidden OCR text is not painted. Original PDF: 10567864 bytes, SHA-256 72faaaf1d48395daaec3a47cf4f2f3b5c857e261f6b7320e2b92d125bc6c6821.

Measured title baseline -0.076503887° from 23 inlier glyphs. Already level within 0.1°; no rotation or resampling was applied. Exact crop (510, 635)–(1850, 2130), right/bottom exclusive. Complete cartoon, title, original caption and signature retained. Unrelated neighbouring text and drawings are outside this crop but remain in the linked complete page. Source-support mask minimum 255 and independent exact pixel replay checked. No enlargement, tonal/colour correction, sharpening, retouching, reconstruction or generative processing.