How to Scan! Pt. 1 Picking a Scanner

Well, well, well. I take my eye off the ball, look up, and see it’s been three months since my last post, my apologies. Last time I promised an exploration of the term “pulp”, and I will get to that sometimes murky question soon, but today I’ve set aside an hour or few for something I probably should have done long ago, a post on how to scan a magazine. I’ve received numerous inquiries into my methods, and I am more than happy to share some thoughts on the scanning process. I will try and keep it simple and stick to the basics, but please excuse if I geek out here and there. Also please remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and opinions vary widely on the best way to produce a great scan. Let me preface all this, also, with the caveat that scanning is a very strange pursuit and will not be for everyone. Most people who do it really have a passion for the material they scan or for the idea of sharing their books because they have enjoyed reading scans from others. And then are those strange characters who, like me, enjoy the process and find it a relaxing pastime.

The Machine

Most people that decide they want to try and make a scan will just use whatever machine they have on hand, and that’s a-ok. But if you are going to be scanning often, it is worth a little time in choosing the right scanner to suit your purposes. If you scan for long enough, you will likely figure out that scanners, like many electronic devices, are basically disposable. The cost of servicing a scanner (replacing the bulb and tuning-up) with shipping costs is usually about as much as just buying a new one. Some signs of a dying scanner are red or yellow lines (which can be just a sign that a fiber has gotten stuck to your bulb and that the bulb and mirror need to be cleaned by using compressed air or a swab with a bit of alcohol on it), fading or uneven blacks, or prominent moiré patterns that were not there before. If your scanner is dying, getting a new one is preferable to the editing gymnastics necessary to fix the image, and some raw scans just cannot be helped. Put that lame horse out to pasture, eh?

There are basically four options I’d consider when picking a scanner. A standard flatbed, an “edge” model, an A3 (oversized) flatbed scanner, and a photo scanner.

A4 flatbeds are by far what most of the scanners out there are using. As a general rule, I’d stay away from all-in-one units (scanner plus printer), as I had a rough time with my first HP all-in-one, and the raws I’ve seen from all-in-one units generally are lower quality than a standalone scanner. The main two brands that scanners use are Epsons and Canons. For a majority of my scans, I use the Epson v300, and, when it dies, I will probably check out the v500 (which is faster). The v300 is the scanner that I am recommending as the best all-purpose scanner. The pros: long-life (McCoy is still on his first v300 and I’d guess closing in on 1000 magazine scans), sharp raws, software that is very compatible across operating systems, the option to scan film, and an affordable cost. The cons: pre-scan settings require a lot of tweaking and the scanner glass is sunk in to the unit a bit making a ridge than can crease pages when the lid is closed if you are scanning loose leafs.

“Edge” scanner - Here I’m talking about the Plustek Opticbook 3600 which I assume has the patent on the edge design, otherwise other manufacturers would surely be using it. The edge scanner is built so that a book can hang off the edge, so that you can scan books without spine shadow with little damage to the binding. A pic so you can see what I’m talking about.



You do lose about 1/8th to a ¼ of an inch of the page at the spine, but this is really a great feature for scanning books and especially for minimizing damage while scanning pulps. I’m on my second plustek and use it when I need the edge feature (I use it mainly for the high grade or expensive pulps). The pros: besides the edge design, this scanner sports a blazing fast speed of seven seconds for a full sized page at 300 dpi. You will be hard-pressed to keep up with the thing. Also, this machine gives perfect color on your raws every time. No pre-scan tweaking is necessary, and I think the software is generally marvelous (though, I have heard that finding the right driver for newer operating systems can be a pain). The cons: cost and durability – Almost every single scanner I know who has bought one ends up seeing lines in their raws at a year or before, so the bulb life is a big problem. The scanner costs about $250 bucks, so this is pretty much unacceptable. Add to this that their customer service is poor and the turnaround on getting a machine serviced is often months (and they don’t even always get it right the first time), and I tend to warn people away from this machine. That said, I know a few guys that have bought another after their first died out of warranty (1 year). An incredible but flawed machine.

A3 Scanners are a good choice if you are going to be working with over-sized magazines or will be using your scanner to scan in canvasses and the like. Pretty much the only affordable A3 is the Mustek USB 1200 (@$150, the next step up is about a grand). Pros: it’s an A3, you can scan big mags or tabloids or two pages at a time on smaller publications. Cons: Clunky software and driver, lack of a scan button (you have to use a graphic interface on your computer), middling image quality, slow speeds. Despite these cons, I like having a Mustek. I do not recommend it as a primary scanner, though, unless you will be scanning large items.

Camera scanners – I’m not very familiar with these, but here’s what they look like. This is a picture of a professional-make (there are at least a couple of companies that make these, this is just the first one I could find, I make no recommendation having never used it)



And here is a DIY model:



You can find out more about these DIY makes from this site which has all sorts of designs and is where people come together to talk about new designs. Though I probably would never move away from my flatbed scanners, I think what these folks are doing is very cool.

Pros: Blazing fast speeds, no damage to the book. Cons: Image quality, problems with curvature and glare, the professional makes are expensive. The scans I’ve seen made with photo scanners are almost uniformly of a lesser quality, though I have seen a scanner or two achieve excellent results with their own makes.

My blogging time’s up for today, and I’ve hardly covered any ground, surprise, surprise. Back tomorrow with more “how to”…

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945)

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Clyde Prettyman is the artist.

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945.T.W.O.Charles)(D&M).cbr
Get the cover to cover scan here!!!

A fantastic find, tonight's edition is hot off the scanner, can you dig, daddy-o? Bound by a single staple, and a little bit larger than the pocket mag of the 50s, here's your travel guide into the land of jive. The thought of translating jive brings to mind these guys from Airplane:



Which just might not be too off-base, as editor Lou Shelley writes on the inside cover of the lure of black slang. If you don't read this book, you just won't know, Jackson, so get hep.


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And to back up the hepcat cred, the dictionary pages are punctuated by photos of R&B, jazz, and swing musicians, somewhat crudely printed, but a fun who's who of the music world of the day, contents and photolisting:


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A couple of photo samples, beginning with one of my faves, the Nat King Cole Trio. Nat King Cole was always smooth as silk, and Oscar Moore was a fantastic guitarist, ahead of his time and definitely one of the pioneers of jazz guitar. And if you want jive cred, you can't forget Satchmo:


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Before I talk about some of the fun words inside, though, I think it's good to talk about this funky little pub as part of a broader movement that was really picking up steam in the 40s (I'm thinking comic/magazines like Miss America, Keen Teens, Teen Life, etc) with the emergence of the modern youth market, that is, publications and advertising were for the first time directed exactly towards teens and the youngest adults (which has grow over time into the behemoth it is today). I remember in Bradford Wright's 2003 book, Comic Book Nation, Wright takes an askance look at oft-vilified crusader against comics, Frederic Wertham. At the base of Wertham's oft-absurd claims, says Wright, is a real concern for the fact that publishers are now selling books directly to children and the publishers see this market ripe for exploitation instead of an audience to be cultured (essentially an anti-capitalist argument?). The publishers were out to make a buck and meant to give the kids what they wanted (horror! cheesecake! crime!) instead of what they needed (literature without pictures that will make them good adults). And certainly many comics from he golden age ARE unsavory to the point where I wouldn't want my kids reading them. But Wertham was aware of what much of society didn't really catch on to, that is, that publications were now being made for sale directly to children and many parents never even thought to look at what might be inside. Society was now affluent enough and printing now cheap enough, where a kid could afford the dime a comic or pulp would cost, and the kids were crazy for them. For a more on Wertham and when this all comes to a head, I highly recommend David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague. It's not only of interest to golden age comic book fans but is also insightful as a broader history of the paranoia and congressional hearing circuses of the post-war era. Much of the book comes from interview material, and it's great to hear what the kids who were there at the comic burnings have to say today on the subject.

But back to the dictionary - a cool look at the state of slang over 60 years ago. I doubt most words in here were ever in common usage, but who knows. Some slang phrases hit a tipping point and catch on nationally only to be discarded a few years later, while some bits of slang are practiced only by the outcast groups that use them and passed down through the decades like a sort of musician or druggie or hipster's code. Of course, today, we have the Urban Dictionary online to help us out, truly an invaluable resource when it comes to slang. Who says the web's good for nothing, eh? Warning to the PC crowd, there are offensive words for racial and social groups included in the dictionary, but they seem to be equal opportunity about it, and when you go digging around in old pubs - you will find dirt, so there it is.

I'll just mention a few groups of words from the first section. Here's a series of words that are now in common usage, still going strong:



This second group are some I'm not familiar with or that aren't used too much in these forms, but I like. I wish they'd survived. Maybe it's not too late!



And a small group of words still in usage but with different meanings today. Take note, misinterpretations or misuse on many of these counts could spell trouble



And dare I forget to mention, big thanks to McCoy, an alreet fellow and strictly solid, for doing the edit work on the scan. It was cut poorly with bits of text missing, but he fixed it right up for hard drives everywhere.

Next time! Sticking with the dictionary theme - a definition - just what is "pulp" anyways?!

Love Street, June 1968 / Happy Birthday, America!

Well, once again, I've been neglecting my blog for Summer play and Summer chores, but so it goes. Today, I thought I'd share an interesting underground with a topical cover, Happy Birthday, America.

 

I don't know much about this publication and take the date from the gentleman that sold it to me. Coming out of the Haight-Ashbury, this pub shows a tendency towards art and poetry. There is some political content (including a grisly page reprinted from Vietnam GI) but the emphasis is towards the arts and maybe towards pages that can be used as posters. I love the red and blue inks on this issue. I do not know any details about this paper other than the fact that I found reference to issue 2 from September of 1967. They must be somewhat scarce, as I've only ever run across this single issue on ebay.

I offer two versions of the scan. Here is the edited version, and here is the raw scan. It was so highly processed, I offer the raw scan in case it better captures the feel of the pub.

A few samples. The back side of the centerfold, a Declaration of Cultural Evolution.

And the centerfold, a great printing of Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial Orgy 

Wally Wood is bar none one of my favorite comics (and pulp!) artists and I get a real kick out of this piece, Disneyland Memorial Orgy (wiki). He did not admit to drawing this poster til years later. After sitting through Cinderella 3 (a straight to video item I believe, along with such ill advised sequels as Dumbo 2, Bambi 2, etc), I smile at the dollar signs emanating from the castle in the background. The underground had some other run-ins with Disney including a suit over Air Pirate Funnies, though I think it's only natural to play with such weighty and weightless icons. Today, I see artists tooling around with the Simpsons in such a fashion, perhaps Mickey has lost some of his centrality. (There will be some lampooning of Disney's characters in the Ballyhoo I share next time, so Disney had inspired dirty lampooning for decades before the underground got to him).

And lastly, the back cover

 

Next: Ballyhoo!!!

Hey Ladies

Sigh, I spent too much of a beautiful Sunday trying unsuccessfully to unclog a drain that managed to cover my laundry room with debris from the kitchen sink, but here I am, as promised, to continue a short tour of some vintage girlie magazine scans. Again tonight, click on the issue title to download the scan.

I'll kick off tonight with what is probably my favorite of these magazines in my collection.

My wife likes to tease me about my affair with my scanner - and here is a fine Mistress indeed. A very well-done magazine.

Mistress v01n04 (1966-04.D and R)

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Another excellent magazine full of cuties. I think the cover design is absolutely outstanding.

California Girl 08 (1973-01.Phenix)

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Here's a neat one that is a bit experimental. The cover does not extend all the way to the edge of the magazine (leading to a fold open front cover) and there are some strange brownish graphics pages.

Mister Cool v01n01 (1960.Billingsley)

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And issue one and three of Rapture (love the name), a pre-Parliament magazine from Milton Luros.

Rapture v01n01 (1959.Tower)

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Rapture v01n03 (1959.Beacon)

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And lastly, two magazines I think are somehow related though I can't pin that down. I had an uncle who liked to talk about handing out wolf-tickets, so I'm completely loving this magazine.

Wolf Bait 02 (1959.Zee Zee)

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This is a "pitchbook," sort of an advertising pamphlet for performers, published by Zee Zee Martine, a dancer featured within, and it features a number of famous burlesque artists of the day. A very interesting little pub, wider than a pocket magzine but tall (like Fling) with an amateur feel that was nonetheless very well done. A mix of pics, cartoons, jokes, articles, a bit of fetish material, and more. This last magazine is full-sized but shares a pic or two with the last magazine and sports a very similar look. And with a title like Scandolls, well, it was just begging to meet my scanner.

Scandolls v01n01 (1959)(D&M)

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I probably won't be posting every one of these mags I do here on my blog, but for certain you can catch them at vintagegirliemags.com, and we welcome all there who'd care to share their magazines or just to discuss topics of interest regarding the mags, the girls, photographers and artists, the publishers, etc. I'm a few volumes into Dian Hansen's volumes of The History of Men's Magazines and have only recently begun collecting more of them, but I can safely say there are so, so many forgotten titles that deserve to see the light of the digital age. Scan em if you got em...

Next time on volunteer radio, a Mae West Number! I'm oh-so-close to beginning the series of posts on the birth of the girlie pulp I've been threatening forever, but I keep coming across items that I just have to have to include! (last it was a beautiful trio of La Vie Parisienne from the collection of Francis Smilby, now it's a curious little 1925 jazz mag called Hi-Jinks) In the meantime, we'll run with a post or few on varied subjects and magazines while I try and get my ducks in a row...

Vintage Girlie Magazines / The Land of Milk and Honey

Something a little different tonight. A parade of girlies. I usually keep it pretty toned-down on Darwination Scans, and I'm not ready to start posting scads of naked womens, but I feel like it's time I give the girlie magazines their due. There was a time not so far back when I wouldn't have considered scanning girlie magazines from prudishness and some ill-formed conceit that such material is not worthy of digitization, but just a cursory exploration of the girlie magazines of the 50s and 60s has cleared the fog. Many of the competitors of Playboy were very well done, and any cursory dismissal of the whole genre as mere smut ignores the fact that much excellent fiction was printed in these magazines and that the production of many of the hundreds of titles over the years was performed with utmost care. And before I go justifying or apologizing or whatever this foot-shuffling I'm engaging in is, smut has its charms, too.

But, really, in the age of XXX & internet porn, these magazines are downright quaint, a wholesome appreciation of the female form. Playboy and Penthouse these days don't seem much different to me than a Maxim or FHM. They are all glossy and polished with sanitary and conventional graphics layout and the magazine content is barely distinguishable from the advertising content. The girls tend to be stick-skinny and all reality-airbrushed from the whole thing and they are trying very much to keep the amplifier at 11. It's hard to call out the modern girlie magazines as being more objectified, but I can say unequivocally that I find the magazines from the 50s and 60s to be sweet and intimate, something you just cannot say about modern productions.

I probably won't be blogging that many of these, but I'd direct those with an interest in exploring the wide world of vintage girlie magazines to this site:

http://www.vintagegirliemags.com/

You won't find runs of Playboy or Penthouse here, but you will find a wide variety of gentleman's magazines from pulps to pockets to sweats through a wide variety of pin-up and nudie publications. I post regularly there and think the site has a lot of potential as a library and database of a whole variety of magazines. You can find any of these issues I'm posting tonight there with further detail as to contents as well as many other magazines from other scanners, so check it out. But onto the parade of magazines, you can click the issue title and number to go to the download link for each magazine. And before I forget my silent partner here, thanks to McCoy for the edit work on many of these issues. I'm sure he would agree with me that editing this type of magazine is a pleasure. Let's kick it off with a smokin' issue, I can almost feel the hellfire ;)

Sizzle v01n01 (1959.Spice)(DOM)

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Featuring Tura Santana of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame. Watch out, boys.

21 n04 (1956.Monogram)

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Featuring an article with a psychological approach to spanking with many panels from Eric Stanton's Madame Adista, illustrated fiction, burlesque ads, a neat article on the girlie pulps of the 20s and 30s (which makes a convincing argument that the mags from the 50s were no naughtier than their predecessors), poetry, cartoons, and more.

Beau v01n03 (1966-08.PDC)

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With features on Jayne, Alan King, Rolls-Royce, Will Bardot Be Another Monroe?, Sybil Burton and the Wild Ones, Ann Austin, rock climbing and more.

Jayne Mansfield for President (1964.Books, Inc.)

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Not exactly a girlie magazine exactly, but a novelty publication, and a nice companion to this last issue. The thriftstore-in-the-hood where I got it wanted way too much for this not-so-great copy, but I drove all the way back to the store to get it the next day after a sleepless night. I'm happy to have it now and to share the scan with you. I scanned it back during the election, and I still say Jayne for President.

Escapade v01v06 (1956-03.Dee) (McNation)

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This mag included illustrated fiction, articles, poetry as well as pictorials. There is a feature on Corliss Archer along with a few photos of Bettie Page taken by Bunny Yeager.

French Frills v02n02 (1962.American Art Agency)(D&M)

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An early-ish magazine from Milton Luros' American Art Agency that is now more commonly known under the Parliament banner (the company that distributed the magazines). The Parliament mags are still highly prized by collectors for the great girls and great photography.

And one last magazine, I'll have to get up the rest I'd planned on posting tonight tomorrow. Much yard work, two soccer games, two birthday parties, and two chocolate brownies have me ready to curl up in bed early with a paperback, so I'll finish up with another handful of these tomorrow.

Nugget v01n02 (1956-02.Nugget)

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I became interested in this magazine from my interest in Archer St. John's comics. Early in life he and his brother, Robert, tangled with Al Capone when they ran a small newspaper rallying against the mob. Before he died perhaps of a speed OD, the comics industry had started to falter,and Archer St. John had been putting a lot of effort into this stylish men's magazine and the classic crime magazine Manhunt. After his death, Archer's son stepped in to see this published. On the contents page there is even a reference that the magazine was founded by Archer. Running mostly literary reprints and photo shoots, this is a neat magazine with cool photos and illustrations. This a classy magazine, from when we could mix a little playful nudity in with literature and esoterica. Nugget is still around (um in a far naughtier form), but it has surely been bought and sold many times since back when.

More tomorrow!

Crack Detective Stories, May 1949 / Ten Detective Aces, November 1945

And lastly in this series of posts on detective pulp, I offer two of my earliest pulp scans. It's sort of painful for me to look at some of my earlier scans with uneven color and jacked contrast, etc., but it is what it is.


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Get the scan here.

Here's one of those covers I'm embarrassed to admit to liking. There's something more than a little bit unwholesome in the faces of the terrified girls that endured all sorts of rough treatment on pulp covers. They were at the art of the scream long before the modern horror film. What this says about the male attraction to sex and violence, I can't say, but these covers are certainly rich in Freudian subtext and charged imagery.

Contents:



I particularly enjoyed "Murder in Small Packages" and "Deuces Dealt for Death". A lot of the stories seem to have a sort of gothic inner-workings of terror thing going on.

Splash samples:





A couple of ads within:



The simplicity of that. Send me a dollar please and I'll fill you in on life's big secrets. There are also all sorts of self-help, weight-loss, marital aid, and other types of ads for the insecure. I find it reassuring to know some of this cultural anxiety has been around for a while. But on to tonight's second issue:


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Get the cover to cover scan here.

contents:


samples:

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Next time on Darwination Scans, a quick sojourn in the land of milk and honey, a look at a selection of vintage girlie magazines from the 50s and 60s and more than likely a few words in adoration of the full-figured female.

Detective Fiction Weekly, March 19, 1938 / Cleve Adams' Punk

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Get a cover to cover scan of the issue here.

Detective Fiction Weekly was one of the longer running pulps, previously titled Flynn's Weekly, a Munsey pulp. Flynn's ran from September of 1924 to August of 1927, a total of 193 issues and then continued on as DFW until May 1942 another 704 issues. The mag then continued for 26 issues as Flynn's Detective until 1944 and would resume 7 years later with the same volume numbering as Detective Fiction for 6 issues. That's a total of 929 issues of this pulp of which this is the first scanned example. Grab a shovel, peeps, lots of pulp to digitize here. Writers on this pulp included Agatha Christie, Carroll John Daly, Gaston Leroux, Day Keene, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, L. Ron Hubbard, Raymond Chandler, Judson Phillips, Frederic Brown, John D. MacDonald, and many, many more.

Besides the fiction and true crime stories, this pulp has a couple other neat features including an Illustrated Crimes spread depicting a historical crime as well as a puzzle section, a confidence scheme investigator, and some nice letters from fans. I particularly enjoy the letter from the reader who writes how a friend of his claims that the pulps are "an opiate" devoid of literary merit and distracting from higher concerns.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this ish as the first of this title I've read, but one story in here makes it all worth it. As any pop culture archaeologist knows, you have to dig for the nuggets, and for me the standout story in this issue is "Punk" by Cleve F. Adams. I'm not familiar with this writer, and like many pulp authors, can't find much about him. I did find a bit of a bib here, and the magazine uber-resource philsp.com lists his pulp appearances and also gives a pseudonym of John Spain here. It looks like he was pretty active in the pulps from about 1935-1940.

Also of note is that it looks like he worked alongside William Faulkner on the 1944 film adaptation of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not which I recall as a pretty good Bogey/Bacall film.

Some internet definitions of the word "Punk":

-noun---

1. Slang.
a. A young person, especially a member of a rebellious counterculture group.
b. An inexperienced young man.
2. Music.
Punk rock.
A punk rocker.
3.
a. Slang. A young man who is the sexual partner of an older man.
b. Archaic. A prostitute.

[Origin unknown.]

or

Today's first meaning of punk, a small-time hoodlum, developed in the period between the World Wars. And in the late 1970s punk came to designate bizarre clothing and body decorations associated with loud and aggressive rock music. To the general public, it still has an unpleasant taste.

I thought it might have a 19th century street origin, but this small-time hoodlum definition that pops up between the wars seems closest. Of course, if you read the story, you'll come to a fuller sense of who a punk really is.

I just love this story. Alcoholism, rackets, trampy broads, and smash-mouth violence. I've got low tastes, I suppose, but this is the type of Pulp Fiction Tarantino was trying to evoke with his film. The story rotates around a group of three guys that grew up together on the wrong side of the tracks. One's become a weak alky married to a money-grubbing tramp, one has become an honest but run-down cop, and the last is a successful mobster. The dialogue is excellent and the story is gritty and realistic. The pace of the thing gets awkward at the end (I think he had to just finish this one up to get it in the right number of assigned pages - these guys were getting paid peanuts per word after all), but overall this story is a great read that would make a nice hard-boiled noir flick. I also enjoyed the glimpse of the era's prison culture in the true crime piece "Big House Cats."

Enjoy!

Contents and samples:



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