A VINTAGE-SUITABLE CALENDAR

     I needed a calendar for my mostly-vintage hamshack.  1932 and 2016 share the same calendar, but buying an old one in intact shape and ripping each month off seemed too destructive to me.

     So I made one.

     The backing sheet is card stock.  The calendar pages look crooked -- the paper fasteners that hold them are a bit loose in the punched holes.  It straightens out when hanging.  The printer output does not look like hand-set type, but might pass for offset printing or lithography.

     I'm trying to figure out how to post the original as a PDF, if any readers would like their own copy.

OLD-STYLE COVER FOR A MODERN LOG

     It is modeled after one published by Bud in the 1930s:

     I'm not too unhappy with how it came out.

PORTABLE-MOBILE LOGBOOKS FOR AMATEUR RADIO

     Any more, hams are not required to keep logs - but it is nice to have a record of who you heard from, and when.  Here are a couple for portable and mobile operation -- Field Day is coming up!

      The upper one is an ARRL original, found at a well-known online auction site.  The lower is one I made when I took a ham station along on an extended out-of-town trip.

     ARRL version is "shirt pocket" size, 6¼" by 4".  Mine is 8½" by 5½", trimmed from standard-size pages with one cut.

TYPEWRITER FONTS

     Richard Post offers a wonderful collection of free, downloadable typewriter fonts at his site!  Royal's "Vogue" font is very similar to the typefaces used for labeling on some Millen ham radio gear.

SET IN TYPE

Set in wooden type, in fact: the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin keeps the obscure skill of wooden poster type and printing therefrom alive. (So can you, if you join: they offer studio access as a benefit of membership.)

Wooden poster type? It was the standard; most old posters (and even some new ones), especially the ones run off in huge numbers to promote events, were made with wooden type, offering huge flexibility in font and form.* It was cheaper than cast type, too. How good is it? Have a look at a nice topical example, and you tell me. (Plenty more in their store).

More about wood type can be found at the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. It appears the very last commercial manufacturer held on until 2001.
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* Windows users will find a parallel in Word: if regular typesetting is like normal typing in that program, wooden type is the Word Art utility.