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I'm surprised to hear you had a problem with that seller - I've had a fair few bits from them & never had a problem ... including a couple of manuals, and they were genuine ones came from broken up kits rather than being copies.

ok maybe i am wrong about the manuals but they look identical to the manuals you can download on here

They're all from later issues... but were they printed in greyscale originally?

The vintage Hornet manual has basically the same layout & identical artwork, but had a blue background on the top "half".

The one Agemax linked to is a re-re manual (which is all greyscale) - you can tell it's a re-re manual (rather than an original copied in black & white) by the writing to either side of the stars at the bottom being assymetric, and the extra Japanese under the "Hornet" text 1/2 way down.

Of course, it could still be a copy of a re-re manual ...

I'm not sure of the dates Tamiya switched from single colour manuals to two colour & back again - I don't own that many original manuals, but my RA1023 (58023) Holiday Buggy is single colour, 58070 Midnight Pumpkin is two colour, all the way through to 58231 Wild Dagger, 58242 Wild Willy 2 (1999?) on the other hand is single colour.... I'll try to narrow it down further

Among the first 100 manuals, only the Holiday buggy and Sand Rover (the cheapest kits) came with black/white manuals.

All the reissues, from the Reissue Hornet and onwards came with black/white manuals. (I have not checked the latest reissues, though)

-Lars