Paper in the post

The manuals page keeps its gaps in the open — dashed cards standing for paper the site knows exists and does not have. Six eBay lots went against those cards in one run this week. All six are bought; they ship separately, so they should arrive across the next month rather than in one box.

Nothing below has been opened. Every detail here is read off a listing photograph, and the last eBay run taught that lesson properly: an order placed for an operator's manual turned out to be three pieces of sales literature. Read this as a manifest, not an accession.

Two dashed cards

The Mark II shelf has carried a wanted card for factory sales paper since it went up, with a January 1978 db advertisement standing in as the only period print of the machine. What is coming is Otari's own: MARK II TWO AND FOUR CHANNEL PROFESSIONAL RECORDERS, and under it, in italics, Preliminary Specification Sheet. Preliminary is the interesting word — this is pre-launch paper, printed while the machine was still being introduced, and it reads that way: Otari proudly presents the new Mark II, with a potted history dating the original series to 1974. The bullets are the Mark II's whole case in eight lines — separate transport and electronics, DC capstan servo standard with ±7% pitch control, electronics adjustable from front and rear, and an interface jack for dbx or Dolby.

The second card is on the B shelf: instruction manual OS1-011. The site has been able to print that catalog number without ever holding a page of the book, because the B's maintenance manual names it in its own opening sentence — it calls itself a maintenance supplement to the MX-5050B series instruction manual, catalog No. OS1-011. The cover in the photograph says only MX-5050 PROFESSIONAL RECORDER INSTRUCTION MANUAL, with the catalog number small in the top right corner. That card closes when it arrives.

Nothing at all for the eight-channel machine

The third lot is a brochure for the MX-5050-8, and the site holds no sales paper whatsoever for the eight-channel machine — the manuals are here, the pitch is not. S-111, the 1976 specification sheet the library does hold, covers the one- and two-channel machines and sends four- and eight-channel buyers to its siblings, sheets S-108 and S-110. Neither of those is here either.

The cover pitches the 8 at small studios, musical groups, educational institutions and training directors, at a price they can afford, and lists motion sensing, 15 and 7½ ips, selective reproduce, a variable speed DC capstan servo, and portable, rack or console mounting.

A form number this site has never recorded

The fourth lot is a single sheet in the same two-column house style as the brochures: the blue MX-5050 COMPACT PROFESSIONAL RECORDER title panel, and beside it five captioned photographs — the full-track FL, the rear panel with its XLR connectors and the −10/+4 dBm reference level switch, the remote control box, the machine in a road case, and the floor console. The footer names and dates the sheet itself: printed in U.S.A., S-112, 9-76.

S-112 is a number this library has never recorded. It falls one month after S-111 and nineteen months before the April 1978 brochure, in a run of sheets the site has only ever seen pieces of. It also brings a small question to settle on arrival: its FL caption sends readers to bulletin S-110 for complete specifications, while S-111's own introduction gives S-110 to the four- and eight-channel machines. One of those two readings is wrong, and the paper will say which.

The two books this library holds worst

Two of the six are books the site already publishes. Buying them on paper is the entire point.

OS2-004, the B's maintenance manual, is here as a 32 MB scan with no text layer — an image of a book rather than a book. The digital edition transcribed from it covers sections 1 to 4 and then stops: sections 5 and 6, major component replacement and the parts lists and schematics, are declared but not transcribed. Section 6 is exactly where an image-only scan hurts most, because part numbers and schematic call-outs are the first thing a soft scan loses. The copy coming is stamped SERVICE COPY — NOT FOR RESALE in red across the cover, which says something about where it has been.

OS3-031, the BQ-II's instruction and maintenance manual, is the weaker of the two, and its card says so: not a scan at all but a retyped transcription, laid out in Word with the figures pasted in as pictures, carrying its typist's errors along with it — Table 1-2 lists an Extension Board Ashley. Even the catalog number on that card is an inference rather than a fact. The accessories table and a packing list both print it as 053-031, and the site reads that as OS3-031.

The cover in the listing photograph ends the inference: Parts No.OS3-031, printed, top right. Below it, two things the retype never carried — Edition No. 2, and Issued: November 1983, which puts this book within weeks of the MKIII-4 manual beside it on the same shelf, whose only date is a 22 DEC 1983 drawing title block. Someone has written ¼" 4 TRACK across the cover in red pen, which is what a working copy looks like.

When it lands

The same bench as the last pile of paper. Anything flat enough to feed goes through the Epson FastFoto FF-680W at 1200 dpi, which took 117 pages of factory manual without complaint. Anything folded does not: a fold jams that feeder every time, so those go face-down on the flatbed glass at 600 dpi, page by page, the way the 1975 and 1978 tri-folds did.

Until then, the cards stay dashed

A listing photograph shows a cover, and a cover is not a page count, an edition, or a complete book. The wanted cards stay wanted, the OS2-004 and OS3-031 pages keep their warnings, and nothing on the manuals page changes until paper is in hand. If one of these six turns out to be something other than what it says, that gets its own entry too.