I’m a sucker for reprints of ancient newspaper comic strips. I got a little excited when I saw this description of a Krazy Kat book: “This new deluxe hardcover collects full-sized Sunday newspaper comics from 1919 through 1921 in a handsome archival collection.”
Full-sized Sunday pages! That should be huge, like a book of posters! Then I read on and find the book is 11.4 x 0.9 x 13.8 inches. In what world is 11.4 x 13.8 a full-sized newspaper page?
That doesn’t say they’re printed at full size.
Buy a magnifier.
Are they, perhaps, spread across two pages to show the original 14x17 dimensions?
No, thank God. That would have been terrible.
I doubt they printed a single comic on a Sunday page. Newspaper sizes were traditionally 15" wide, so given margins, 13.8" would be a reasonable width. Length was 22", so 11.4 also makes sense if two comics were on a page.
They did devote full pages to Sunday strips. Little Nemo is a good example. Thimble Theater and Krazy were, for a while, full pages.
Other Krazy Kat collections that more precisely advertise original size are 14x17. The newspaper pages were 16x22 leaving room for margins and a header.
https://sundaypressbooks.com/kkbook.php
Huh. Coincidentally, I just bought a book of reprints of Little Nemo in Slumberland comics. The cover says “302 full-page weekly comic strips”. The book is 8.5" x 11" and the images are about 7" x 9.5". They did say full-page rather than full sized, so I don’t think this is terribly misleading, and the Amazon listing did show the actual size of the book. I do find myself using a magnifying glass on some of those pages. I’d say the “full sized” description on the Krazy Kat book is indeed somewhat misleading.
Seems like shrunken Nemos would be almost unreadable. Like when Winsor (in contrast to the virtuosity of his art) would pretend to miscalculate how much space his word balloons needed and cram in a bunch of text at the end.
Since the OP didn’t link to whatever they found we can’t be too sure.
Perhaps what they meant was it was a book of individual Krazy Kat cartoons at their full size as printed in the Sunday comics. So each book page has 2 or 3 episodes of Krazy Kat; each printed at full size of 9-ish inches wide by 3-ish inches tall.
Not necessarily the entire page, though. Viz. the Chicago Examiner from April 30, 1916. Krazy Kat takes up maybe 3/4 of a page:
There are certainly some parts that require a magnifying glass. Interestingly, there are some parts where the text is hard to read because the text is so small that the half-tone dots interfere with the letter forms. This makes me think the text was probably hard to read even in the original newspaper prints.