Forrest Mims III comments on the writing of the Engineer Notebooks

[ledtester]

On Facebook Forrest Mims made this comment about the production of the Engineer's Notebook:

"I Take Pictures of Electronic Parts" is a Facebook page that occasionally features comments about my Radio Shack books. Today I responded to their latest comments with this:
In view of the many kind comments about my Radio Shack books, I
I thought this photo of the 0.7 mm mechanical pencil used to print/illustrate all those books might be of interest. Prior to the hand executed books, I wrote some 20 conventionally printed Radio Shack books. The first hand printed book was "Engineer's Notebook." It and its sequel were printed and illustrated with India ink on Mylar. There were two problems: An error meant the entire page had to be redone and pressing down on the pen caused my middle finger to bleed. That's why I asked Dave Gunzel, Radio Shack's editor, about using pencil on paper. Dave agreed, and the first such book was "Getting Started in Electronics." This book was completed in some 54 days, including rebuilding every one of the 100 circuits 4 times to check for errors. This book, which became a best seller, was followed by 16 Mini Notebooks. All the hand-lettered and illustrated books have sold more than 7.5 million copies (plus being pirated on thousands of sites)..

Facebook link:

https://www.facebook.com/forrest.mimsiii/posts/pfbid02sgHtD1YGkC5tTHQys2N49K4aa2tUhruN4hdjEm3xL44VdQUZptkBCVTKyBrjq1zpl

[Tycho_Brahe]

I love this.   I still have several of his little books I bought from Radio Shack in the late 70s or early 80s (can't remember exactly).   As a kid, I loved going in to buy some discrete components even if I didn't know what to do with them.   

What really amazes me about Forrest is his drawing and penmanship skills.    How I wish I could write that neatly.

[casualrex]

I have both titles mentioned: Getting Started In Electronics and Engineer's Notebook.  I just used EN recently to construct a multi-hour time delay based on the 555 timer IC.  That takes me back to 1984, when I bought the books at Radio Shack.   I also was and still am a big fan of the pentel 0.7mm pencil.  I wore-out one of them doing my college math homework.