The title is still in print.
Its an antique bottle collectors magazine. Bottles and Extras
Kitty and I started it on our kitchen table. We published for 5 years and then we gave it to the National Bottle Collecting club.
We got burned out. If you think 2 people can publish a full magazine a month, with no wear and tear, you haven't thought about it much at all.
Articles, ads, subscriptions, dealing with printers, making up "state bags" for shipping to every state in the union. County bags for the big cities. Thousands of address labels, keeping the books, ordering supplies for next time.
Then, its gone for 2 seconds and the next issue is due.
Christmas deadline means you work straight though.
Every statement in the above paragraph is grossly................... under-exaggerated.
Its a non stop roller coaster minute to minute and every dip is the big one.
We had planned to merge with the Federation anyway. The Federation was really short on members along about then and all our old friends were still board members, so it was a good time.
http://www.fohbc.org/bottles-extras/about/ I stayed on as Western Region reporter for many years and also we both helped every person who ever had anything to do with the magazine, especially when they first took the job.
I always write several long letters to every new editor to help them get their feet wet. Its a steep learning curve coming in blind, and no editor in Bottles and Extras history ever had a full magazine editing job before.
I still have a few boxes of the original books in my attic. Not many. A few hundred books. We were going to move one time and only as much as could be moved, were saved.
Oh btw, this was all before computer printing. We had to turn in a --master--, on paper, of the whole magazine. Every word and every picture hyper meticulously hand cut and pasted up, (because everything and mean everything shows),
in a weird order and upside down 1/2 the time.
I still have a huge table in my spare bedroom with a mechanical machine on it to keep everything straight, and lights and a light table with glass and lights underneath.
And a small box of special tools. Mostly knives and such I made or customized.
The printer used tin plates and ran huge sheets of paper through the press.
These were then folded up into signatures, on a psychotically complicated folding machine looking like a science fiction devise from a nightmare,
and finally trimmed and bound into books.
yours Scott
