The third book is a smaller booklet of extra material that as far as I know, came with all of them. You won't find direct from Japan shipments, but celga.com or other auction proxy sites can help you get it off Yahoo Japan Auctions, where it shows up frequently. There are two books, the smaller booklet and a pink bag in the 'complete' set. It just costs a lot.

I am, little by little, adding the content of HoU to the gallery. It's a rather gargantuan project so it's going to take some time.

http://ohtori.nu/gallery/Series/Episodes

The folders labeled 'high resolution' are all from HoU, which is predominantly high quality scans of the cels for the show. The book with actual artwork is 99.9% stuff I actually have in higher quality on the gallery already. Scanlations wouldn't be a thing; there's no text. It's just an image collection.

Giovanna wrote:

The third book is a smaller booklet of extra material that as far as I know, came with all of them. You won't find direct from Japan shipments, but celga.com or other auction proxy sites can help you get it off Yahoo Japan Auctions, where it shows up frequently. There are two books, the smaller booklet and a pink bag in the 'complete' set. It just costs a lot.

Thanks so much, I really appreciate the help I'll be sure to check out those sites!

So, I just found the entirety of the Hardcore of Utena uploaded by this flickr user - https://www.flickr.com/photos/13638589@N00/albums
The pictures aren't scans, so not all of the images are of great quality, but it's really nice for anyone who just wants to see exactly what is in the books (it certainly made me want to throw all caution to the winds and spend all my money on them).
What I really want to ask is, does anyone know who uploaded these? I'd really like to know if they mind people using the pictures for things like tumblr or twitter headers. I don't have a yahoo account so I can't message them directly, and the albums were uploaded in 2013 and are the only things on their account - so possibly they don't check it often.
(also - I'm sorry if this was done by a forum member and has already been posted before! I couldn't find any mention of it anywhere but I might have missed something)

Thanks for the tip - I did some even more refined google searching to see if I could find the original poster and eventually ended up at... IRG of course> http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?p … 83#p255783 - so I guess I'll message cscratch if I want to use any of the images!

If you want to buy it but for whatever reason not through an auction, you can get it through a third-party shopping service. I can personally recommend My Favorite Things From Japan. They don't charge much, although shipping can be a lot. I ordered a CD through them and it arrived today.

Giovanna wrote:

Tardigrade wrote:

I can barely imagine how long that would take, I'll look forward to seeing it update

It's definitely going to be a project I chew on for a loooong time. The images in the book are gorgeous, but of course once I scan them, they're scans, and I really want to try to preserve the spirit of them, which is to say very high quality images of the art of the show. So I'm block shading most of the images entirely over again. I'm not correcting degrading ink lines or anything, but I do want the colors to pop and not be all noisy the way a scan is. Similar to the other content in the gallery, which also took years, and when I had a lot more free time.

I'm doing it from start of the show through, but I will probably make detours here and there for images I really want to see done. (Don't worry, there's disappointingly little Akio in the book for how prominent he is later in the show.)

Can I just say, you are bad ass.  My figurative hat is off to you ma'am.