I had mentioned in an earlier post that - thanks to a distribution
deal with Random House - TSR was financially incentivized to overprint
all of their publications... and they did so in spades, printing far
more books than ever the market would bear. This habit would
eventually cause the ruination of the company, but until that point it
felt like free money to TSR, and they took full advantage of it.
Still, even they realized at a certain point that the sheer numbers of
all those extra books was problematic, and in 1984 they took advantage
of the "10th Anniversary" of D&D to try to liquidate some of their
older stock.
One such attempt was the creation of the "10th Anniversary Collector's
Set", where they packed 12 older adventures and rulebooks into an ugly
faux-leather slip-case; I posted this item a few weeks ago. However,
they also created 11 "Bonus" packs, each of which included anywhere
from two to four different publications, shrink-wrapped with a yellow
label sheet. These books were not re-prints but just excess stock and
- removed from plastic overwrap - were identical to the books sold
singly.
The idea was to offer these "bonus packs" as freebies if you bought a
different D&D product (e.g., buy TSR 1011 D&D Basic Rules box-set and
get bonus-pack #1) but everytime I saw them in stores they were being
sold stand-alone (presumably the store-owners were just as desperate
to get rid of the older stock as was TSR). Personally, I was fine with
this; it was a great way for me to pick up some of the older books I
didn't have in my collection ;-)
Although I have numbered these files "Bonus Pack #1" through "Bonus
Pack #11", they were never officially referred to as such. They were
each given individual TSR stock numbers (#1100XA through #1110XA, note
that TSR #1103-1109 were later reused for completely different
products) and I've based the order of these bonus packs on these stock
numbers.
Like TSR, these scans are just a combination of existing PDFs into one
compilation. I added a special "cover page" for each file which
incorporates the yellow label sheet; the original hard-copies were
just the books and the label sheet shrink-wrapped and didn't have a
seperate cover. Still, I think this is a better method than using the
label-file alone as the cover (or embedding the label into the actual
cover of the first book).
These are all complete - and very clean - scans, with the usual
bookmarks, OCR and everything. The only difference between these and
the stand-alone files is that in the stand-alones I've stitched
together any multi-page maps, and these images weren't included in the
bonus packs (the cut-apart pieces of the maps are still there,
though). Consider it an incentive to download the individual books ;-)
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