NOTES on Use of Color in The Bulletin in Vol 1 and Vol 2 and Vol 8

Volumes 1 and 2

Due to circumstances beyond my control... the fact that the institution holding some of the issues of Vol 1 and Vol 2 of The Bulletin that were missing from our holdings did not have a scanner available that could render color... all scans of Volume 1 of The Bulletin and the first dozen or issues in Volume 2 were made using black and white (and occassionally some form of gray scale) scanning.

Unfortunately, in all issues of The Bulletin in vols 1 and 2, spot red color was employed on the front and back cover to highlight the banner and sometimes other parts of the text present.

Additionally there was occasional use in volumes 1 and 2 of The Bulletin of spot red color on pages inside some of the issue. Some of this involved various approaches to highlighting boxes around text in red, or at times putting both the box and the text inside it in red, or at times just highlighting a paragraph in red without putting a box around it.

Further, a few (not all!) of the infrequently-appearing sketched illustrations were printed in spot red color.

Perhaps of most aesthetic interest to me was the use of spot red color for a graphic sketch overlayed on a full page of black and white text. This occured three times in The Bulletin in Volume 1, in v1n3 page 4, v1n6 page 11, and v1n7 page 3. This is a technique very rarely seen in left publications, and can be quite striking.

I was later able to access a collection of original issues of The Bulletin using a digital camera (Canon T2i with 28mm f/2.8 lens) and employ a copy stand to get full color (shows red) images of a number of representative pages from The Bulletin's first 2 volumes. The bad news is that I was forced to use an inadequate copy stand and very poor room lighting. Worse, it took hours of work to tweak the colors to make them somewhat more accurate, then convert to properly-sized .pdf files of reasonably small size. Three or four different image-manipulating / file format changing / meta-data editing programs had to be employed. VERY tedious stuff. The good news is that I was able to capture and insert into some of the Vol 1 and Vol 2 files color images for at least a representative sample of the pages that employed spot red color:

v1n1
cover p1 (banner)

v1n2
cover p1
page 8 (paragraph about LBJ)

v1n3
cover p1
page 14 inverted map of Great Britain superimposed on page of text

v1n6
cover p1
page 11 map (right side up) of China superimposed on page of text

v1n7
cover p1
page 11 Box with M L King quote saying how he respected J E Hoover.
page 16 back cover (use of red to highlight large format text)

v2n09
cover p1
page 7 red box with red text
page 11 red box with red text
page 16 back cover

v2n10
cover p1
page 7 sketch of a man with a cart


NOTE that all front convers in Vol 1 and 2 used red in the banner and in the small text at the bottom of the cover. All or nearly all back covers used red to highlight some of the text presented there.

Use of red inside was very limited, and a few issues of Vol 1 and Vol 2 had no such use of red at all. I had not the time or energy to meticulously render EVERY instance of use of red spot color in those issues I did not own (those I could not scan with a proper flat bed color scanner for pages bearing color), where the institution in question deliberately wished to impose barriers to image and freely distribute such images. However, I believe the images I was able to acquire do give one a pretty good idea of the use of spot red ink in the first two issues of The Bulletin.

 

Volume 8

Missing from Holt Labor Library's otherwise stunningly complete collection of The Bulletin volumes 3 - 9 (and beyond, tho we decided to end scanning at 1973, Vol 9, for various reasons) were a few issues in volume 6 and 7, and 25 issues (v8n08, v8n35-v8n56 includsive, and v8n58) in Volume 8.

Volumes 6 and 7 employed only black and white ink, so the limitation at the institution where I scanned the missing issues to black and white scans was not a problem at all.

Volume 8 used red in, but ONLY in the banner on the front, and the banner in the rear page. This use was IDENTICAL in ALL issues of paper in Vol 8. As Holt did have half of the issues in Volume 8 (roughly) available to me to scan properly (rendering the use of red ink by scanning such pages in 24 bit color on our Epson GT 20000 flat bed scanner used for the rest of this archive) one can easily infer what the black and white-rendered issues' cover and back page looked like in color based on those issues I provide full color images of. There was no use of color what so ever outside of the banners on the front and rear cover of Vol 8. [This changes with use of varying colors of spot color internally in later volumes, and then still later the use of full three color printing to render color photos. But, again, that came later.]

Martin Goodman


 

Last updated on 30 October 2014