What are the Attack on Titan guidebooks?

Kodansha published the paired official guidebooks in 2013, at the height of the first anime season. Attack on Titan: Inside is the reference half: character profiles, story data and interviews, the franchise’s officialdom in one binding. Attack on Titan: Outside is the art half: concept work and production material, and it preserves something no other book does, Isayama’s draft of chapter 1, the rough version of the most consequential first chapter of its decade.

Guidebooks are ephemera by design and primary sources by accident: the Inside/Outside pair is now the standard citation for early-series facts and the only print home of that draft. Later years added further character encyclopedias and a final official guidebook in the same tradition, but the 2013 pair is where the documentary trail starts, and the draft pages are this shelf’s argument that publishing history is preserved in exactly the books nobody thought to keep.