In 1983, Radio Shack published Forrest M Mims, III's "Getting Started in Electronics," which @frauenfelder calls "probably the most famous and best-selling book about electronics" - famous not just for its outstanding instructional value but for its striking design.
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The 128-page book is hand-lettered, designed to look like pages from a 3-ring binder, filled with hand-drawn illustrations. Frauenfelder interviewed Mims in 2008, and he recounts that interview in the latest edition of his newsletter, The Magnet.
themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-0…
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themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-0…
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Mims had published "16 or 17" Radio Shack books when he contracted for Getting Started; his earlier titles were traditionally laid out, but his editor Dave Gunzel was so impressed with his beautifully organized lab notebooks that he commissioned new titles based on them.
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This created "The Engineer's Notebook" series, which started out as typewritten manuscripts with hand-drawn art, but progressed to fully hand-lettered works, whose lettering was so labor intensive that the work literally made Mims's fingers bleed.
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By the time "Getting Started" rolled around, Gunzel was so enthusiastic for hand-lettered work that he proposed that Mims letter it in crayon - they settled on pencil, which was easier on Mims's fingers. It sold 1.3 million copies.
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Frauenfelder recounts inviting Mims to an early maker-style event, Moogfest, where he was decades older than most attendees and from a totally different world - but where he was mobbed by autograph-seeking superfans whose careers he had launched.
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"At the end of the event, an exhausted but smiling Forrest told me he had no idea that so many musicians knew of him or his work. I was happy that I had been able to connect him with his admirers." -Mark Frauenfelder
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And you can check a scanned, digital copy out of the @InternetArchive's online library:
archive.org/details/gettin…
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archive.org/details/gettin…
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