Re: Old Pamphlets

[boblong@xxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Long)]

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996 08:40:47 +0100, James Norton wrote:

|4. This is the last one.  I have a date (1956).  It's called the Kodak 
|   Master Photoguide.  It's really neat, lotsa stuff to play with inside.  I 
|   would like to get an idea if this is a common little book.  Any info on 

This is the only one I've had any contact with.  Kodak had made
Photoguides (or were they called Kodaguides?) for some time, and I
believe they went through a series of editions.  Each was a little
card with a wheel (some with two wheels?) that you could revolve to
set for the Kodak film you were using and find out what stop to set
the lens at with, I think, a shutter speed of 1/125 second and with a
variety of natural lighting conditions.  In effect, they were
inexpensive circular sliderules dedicated to a single purpose. They
were what I was brought up on, photographically.  The Master
Photoguide built on this concept to cover a wide range of photographic
information.  It was around for a number of years, and presumably
Kodak sold a lot of them--though not to me.  For one thing, 1956 was
just when I was exploring all sorts of non-Kodak exotica: films from
Ilford and du Pont and Adox and developers from all sorts of
companies.  Kodak's voluminous--nay, exhaustive--photo-help output
supported Kodak products exclusively.  You could hardly afford *not*
to use Kodak products at the time because so much more information was
readily available about them than about any competing products.  (That
was probably why I particularly liked using the competing products!)
Kodak's stuff was generally very slick and well considered.  The only
other game in town was PhotoLab Index, a klunky, expensive, ugly,
looseleaf database that you kept updated by subscription.  It
attempted (not always successfully) to cover all manufacturer bases.

The Master Photoguide is an excellent example of how Kodak maintained
its preeminence through ancillary printed matter.

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Topic No. 5