World Radio Labs - 1949 World Radio Labs Catalog

This is the cover of the 1949 World Radio Laboratories catalog featuring WRL PERSONALIZED SERVICE. Featured on the cover is "Maj H.N. Detrick, J2DND, Nagoya Japan "Nelse" works many fellows stateside and says his Globe King is tops". Also featured are Doc Wilson, W5NIH and Harlan Dewitz, W0DHO. The captions under their photos read: "O. A. "Doc" Wilson, W5NIH at his GLOBE TROTTER. His brother "Judge" W5NIG and Henry W5KJZ also have GLOBE TROTTERS, Making Mont Belvieu, Texas 100% WRL equipped". and "Harlan Dewitz, W0DHO, Wisner, Nebr. says in 20 years of Hamming he hasn't seen a better value than the GLOBE KING." This is the oldest WRL catalog I presently have and certainly the most expensive. I purchased the catalog on auction at eBay last week.

The price I paid for the catalog was $37 - a personal record and perhaps the highest ever paid for a catalog of this type. I feel it was worth the purchase price as I intend to digitize the works and make it available as a reference source. Some of you who have downloaded the few manuals I have put in digital format may not be aware of the efforts required to do this. Each page must be scanned in high resolution (average scan is 5 minutes), then a required touch up to position the scan and edit out large imperfections or yellowing, then the file is down-saved to a smaller format and finally a Word do*****ent is created which can later be exported to a Postscript file and converted to PDF format. If you do this times hundreds of pages you can see the time adds up to weeks. The long and the short of is this: I have some WRL catalogs that I want to put in digital format, the smallest at 116 pages, the largest at 208 pages. This means about 40 hours pre-production time for a small catalog and 80 hours for the largest. Should I do this work and give the catalogs away absolutely free? Should I give them away and solicit voluntary donations? Should I charge a moderate fee for downloading the catalogs (say $2.00)? As you all know, data transfer is not free, neither is hosting, computers, scanners, power, etc. not to mention the cost of acquiring the catalog itself. The other issue I have is that some of these catalogs contain images of people who may still be living, such as Leo Meyerson himself, and various other hams. Copyrights on most of the WRL items were abandoned- but I would not want to offend anyone or have it appear that I am attempting to profit from their previous work. What do you feel I should do with this? I have the 1960 WRL catalog scanned- ready to put into PDF. It has lots of hams on the cover- a few guys are still alive and well.