The Sam's technical publishing co. is still in bussiness, and offers nearly every service manual they have written since 1947. They can be found here
http://www.samswebsite.com/ , but if the copyright on your manual has expired you can legally get the manual cheaper from other vendors. Some libraries also offer sams manuals for free (though the sometimes necessary photo copying will gobble up some change).
I may take flack for this, but in a pinch on a few occaisions where my variac was in a different part of the country than me I've pluged sets into outlets ( you can get adapters for light sockets too) that were controled by a dimmer switch to do about the same thing a variac does (ie start the set at 0v and slowly work my way up to line voltage).