Hi everyone I'm Robert/Unimatic1140, I created and run the website
www.automaticwasher.org, which is like VideoKarma, but for vintage home appliances. I've posted here in VK many times in the past and have received some great advice from you guys when I've been restoring some of my vintage TV sets.
On automaticwasher.org we are currently experimenting with creating a rotating library of scarce paper ephemera making available public domain sales literature, owners manuals and service manuals for a variety of vintage products for the home, including vintage TV and electronics. We are calling the new library the "Daily Doctrine Dispenser". Every night at 12:00 midnight Central US time a new document is automatically loaded into the Dispenser for the next 24 hours. The reason I'm posting this tonight here in Videokarma is because the Thursday April 19 daily download is a collection of absolutely beautiful 1955 Admiral B&W Console Television Brochures. The brochures are all compiled together into one large pdf file. For those who might not know, a pdf file is a file that combines an entire scanned document into one nice package that can be read like a book or magazine on your computer screen. Newer/high quality printers can reproduce many of these documents almost as crisp as the original. You'll need to have Adobe Reader 7 or greater installed on your computer in order to read and/or print these brochures (which is free from Adobe.com).
I've been very diligent with my scanning. Each page is scanned in high resolution (300dpi) on a top-of-the-line Epson scanner. Each page is then brought into photoshop and I remove things like paper punch holes then I contrast and color correct the images, I remove as many imperfections as I possibly can. I figure if I'm going through the trouble of turning these documents in permanent electronic historical records, which might be around for centuries, they better be as clean and perfect as they possible can. Many of these are cleaned so well that they look much better than the original aged document.
Although we are non-profit, we are charging a small fee to download files ($1.39) just to keep the costs of running the new library under control.
If there is enough interest in vintage TV, Radio and Phonograph materials we can certainly try to offer them as often as we can. If you are interested is seeing the Admiral TV brochure, please check the Dispenser out here at:
http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-b.../Dispenser.cgi
You can also download samples of our documents so you can see the high quality scans I'm talking about here:
http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-b...ser.cgi?Sample
Thanks everyone! Moderators if this post is inappropriate please remove it and accept my apologies in advance.