The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album (1979) scan

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Monster Brains has a scan of The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album from 1979, which was illustrated by underground cartoonist Greg Irons. Isn't it nice when someone makes something much nicer than required?

From the Wikipedia entry on Greg Irons:

After working on the film Yellow Submarine, he returned to work for Graham Productions and soon branched out into album covers and work for the Print Mint, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, and other local underground publishers. Irons' collaborations with writer Tom Veitch in the early 1970s (the creative team known as "GI/TV") included such titles as Legion of Charlies and contributions to many other underground comix, including Skull Comix and Slow Death Funnies.

In the mid-1970s he started doing book illustrations mainly for Bellerophon Books. One of his books was a coloring-book format illustration of Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" which was issued with "The Miller's Tale" illustrated by Gilbert Shelton. It was also around this time he began doing tattooing.

On November 14, 1984, while on a working vacation in Bangkok, Thailand, Irons was struck and killed by a bus.

It's out of print, but you may buy a copy on Amazon for $999.97+ $3.99 shipping.

The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Cory Doctorow

I had that one and really, really treasured it!
GawainLavers

Being a good parent is going to empty your toner cartridge today.
aynrandspenismighty

This is so cool, I’ll use my +1 Crayolas!
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

OH MY GOD WANT.
http://twitter.com/MarinDaddy Andrew Fox

OMG—that was my favorite coloring book of all time! My best friend’s dad worked for the printer that printed the Troubador Press coloring books, and we would get freebies all the time, including this one. Hours of fun, especially with a set of those fine-line markers in every conceivable color. Definitely printing out this one. I better print two copies: one for my 8-year-old and one for me.
http://www.kmoser.com kmoser

These works are still under copyright, aren’t they? No reason, just wondering.
- Strato Head
  
  possibly… but frankly, where most fans (myself included) would love to cough up the change for legit copies of the things we are into… sometimes time and or ridiculous price tags make a good case for an old fashioned bootleggin’.
- http://www.facebook.com/neal.starkey Neal Starkey
  
  It is not as if one cent of that $999 is going to the actual artist or even whoever own the copyright nowadays. What sale is lost if something is out of print? That kinda illustrates the inanity of modern copyright in the first place.
  - http://www.kmoser.com kmoser
    
    What does money have to do with it? Copyright is not about guaranteeing income to the rights holder; it’s about preventing unauthorized duplication. Hence the term “copyright”, not “moneyright.”
Lobster

Back then all the manuals had naked boobies in them. Especially the Monster Manual! :D
Bevatron Repairman

I had that book, too! Alas, I’m sure I actually colored it. I can’t imagine I still have it, though, even buried in amongst my old Dragon magazines and stuff. I’m going to look, however!
Arys

omg… deja vu. I had one of those.
lorq

“Isn’t it nice when someone makes something much nicer than required?”

Stephen Fry talks about this in relation to the band Abba, I believe. For Fry, the criterion for good commercial pop art is that it’s “better than it needs to be.”

For some reason the example that pops into my head is the movie “Alien.” Given what it *is*, it’s much better than it needs to be.
Strato Head

“how old are you?”

“old enough to recall my first copy of D&D was played on graph paper, and came with an orange crayon.”
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones
  
  You got a CRAYON?
  
  Man, my D&D set came with a block of wood, a whittlin’ knife, and a jar of ink. We had to carve our polyhedra dice and pain on the numbers ourselves. And we were grateful!
  
  * * *
  I was a teen when I got my first RPG books, but I still felt compelled to color in the wonderful Liz Danforth illos in my copy of Tunnels & Trolls, 2nd Ed.
Mister44

Quick – there is one now for 76 bucks. Pretty neat stuff. I bet they show up on ebay now and again.
Alan Olsen

Wow. I need to see if I can find mine. I had one of those somewhere.
GatoRanch

I had either this one or another similar edition!

Still have these dice and some pewter figures:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/82762711/lot-of-16-vintage-dungeons-and-dragons

And guess what? Alibris.com has three copies of this coloring album far under $999 – run and get them fast!

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=Dungeons+%26+Dragons+Coloring+&mtype=B&hs.x=6&hs.y=8&hs=Submit
Lawrence Schick

Dang, they didn’t include any of the text that I wrote to go with the illustrations and with that mini-dungeon on the last page. Great to see the pictures again, though. I was the lead game designer at TSR at the time, and Gary had me do this as a quick side project. Lost my copy when my second wife changed the locks during the divorce, alas.

– Lawrence Schick
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  Thanks for commenting Lawrence! Was the copy you wrote a complete story, or was it descriptions of each illustration (but not a story)?
- Lawrence Schick
  
  If you follow the pictures page-by-page you can see that they kind of illustrate the story of an absurdly high-level D&D adventure, ending up with fat loots and roistering by the player characters. The text (going from memory here) provided a flimsy pretext for the glorious pictures, while implying that if YOU played D&D, you too could have this kind of fun.
- http://drow.myopenid.com/ drow
  
  the PDF has all the text.
ChrisO

I seem to recall there was some kind of mini-adventure *in* the coloring book. Am I hallucinating this?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

I’m going to have to look for this on my weekend thrift-store circuit.

AD&D stuff turns up at Goodwill all the time. Mostly late-TSR era stuff.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/KWM2Q3DVHM44JODOKWMHGBGTPQ BukaHobbit

Holy Schnikies, I have one of these. I guess I’ll make rent this month!!!
jtegnell

One of those “working vacations” in Bangkok, huh?
Ceronomus

What a wonderful thing. Makes me want to dig my old copy out and finish coloring it. There were some GREAT products at the time. This was one, the Sears licensed model kits were another.
http://www.takoyaki.org barron

I bought mine way back when… I only colored maybe 10% of it. Now my son (10) is taking over for me.
http://twitter.com/AeronAlfrey Aeron Alfrey

I’ve since shared the entire book at Monster Brains with a disclaimer that I’ll remove it at the request of the copyright owners. The copyright issue was part of why I was reluctant to share the entire book in the first place but when I realized people were printing these out to have their kids color them, and that it has been out of print since 1979 with the only copies available close to a hundred dollars, I had to share the whole thing.

Lawrence Schick – the book only credits Gary Gygax and Greg Irons, to my knowledge? I’ll be happy to credit you in the post and I would love to include anything you have to say regarding working on the book.

Thanks for sharing the weird things that I find, boingboing!
sTmykal

This was a gift from my mother, who encouraged me to be the nerd that I am today. Thanks for bringing back some memories!
R. Scott LaMorte

Ghah!!! I just threw mine out a couple of years ago.