Old tools of the trade......

.....I've been attic-cupboard diving again, it's that sort of day....

Some of this lot dates back to 1971 when I was doing Dept of the Environment in-house cartographic training down in London.....

SOME STUFF I LEARNT
* How to sharpen a pencil, the definitive DOE guide
* Mastering the vagaries of ruling/Standardgraph/Graphos/Rotring pens and the thorough cleaning thereof (a skill I soon lost!)
* Area measurement and how to work out the scale of a map when it hasn't got one....got a job years later on the strength of that one!
* The correct placement of placenames on a map......nope, I never, ever used that one!
* A full week hand lettering (in 1" caps *) the word MOONMAN with a mapping pen and a scalpel (partly a handlettering exercise but also 'all you really need to know about kerning in a single word')
* Brush care and control and all about colour washing with Town and Country Planning inks
* Census data manipulation for thematic mapping
.....oh, and so much more......that I've obviously forgotten......

* including getting to grips with that new-fangled 'decimalisation' thing!

Now interesting and technically challenging as it all was, in retrospect it was definitely 'old-school' training that hadn't really changed for decades, it was just one small step on from etching with acid in reverse on copper plates. Only on our very last day of the course were we introduced to the (then) brand new method of colour plate production called 'scribing', but it was very much on a look-don't-touch basis because 'they' only had one, space-age perspex stylus with a (supposedly) diamond tip and one sheet of 'scribe-coat', AND they had to specially ship in a light-table for the demo (interestingly this was actually a complete back-flip to those copper plate days, so proof positive that what goes around, comes around.....and yes, I can still read backwards and upside down, though not quite so fluently or quickly these days as I used to ;-))

Anyway, first day at work in the regional office of the DOE and what am I given to do.....some gentle handlettering maybe? Nope. Sharpen a teetering pile of pencils? Nope. Wield a ruling pen in anger? Nope. A bit of colour-washing with a sable brush? Nope. Oh no, I was set to work scribing local authority boundaries for the regional atlas and then afterwards straight into the darkroom to process the plates (needless to say I'd had zero darkroom training on the course), and then within 6 months I was co-opted onto a local digital mapping pilot study and those Graphos pens were never used again!

Weather report.....it's just started snowing......homemade chicken pie for tea......