[Slightly different - threads ?] Let's...

[bcarso]

[quote author="PRR"]> Cherry, Hooper .... highly recommended Amplifying Devices and Low-Pass Amplifier Design, which has among other things a unified treatment of hollow- and sand-state devices. It is also infamously expensive---you would think by now that more ex-library and estate copies would be showing up, as it dates to 1968!

Darn you and your good ideas!!!!!! Made me $330 poorer.

OTOH.... why didn't someone tell me about this book 40 years ago? It says the things which need to be said, which most authors don't say..... perhaps because they assume you will meet AD&LPAD some day.[/quote]

Better than the $1900 it was at for a while!

I found the book in the UCLA Student Store, on display as a text for someone's class, probably about 1969. If I'd forgotten the date, it could be inferred from the legibility of my signature on the FFEP. I may have even deprived some worthy student of the copy, as the store rarely bought more than the minimum requirement. I didn't appreciate at the time how good it was by any means.

The only other person I know who had used it and appreciated it was Marty Zanfino, who had been VP Engineering for Harman Kardon for a while. He spotted it on the bookshelf in my cubicle circa 1991. In view of its rarity I doubt I'd leave it out in the open these days.

 

[clintrubber]

[quote author="bcarso"]Better than the $1900 it was at for a while![/quote]
:shock:

We had a few students from China working at our department and they brought along say not too original but familiar books costing a few (translated) dollars.
With these prices, I can't imagine this book hasn't been cloned as well.
Or perhaps it's still just not that very known to the general public, in which case the posts about it might be better removed to protect the investments of you both....

 

[JohnRoberts]

I bought a well known DSP programming text on amazon or one of those used book websites and the book was a cheap binding Indian copy marked not for US resale. I suspect those authors didn't get royalties from the initial sale, or much help from them being sold used on US market.

JR

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="clintrubber"]Or perhaps it's still just not that very known to the general public[/quote]

I should ask Cherry, through Rossiter, how big he thinks the print run was. It just may have been one of those books that didn't get adopted much at the time, in the twilight years of tubes for small-medium signal/power applications.

Valuations of books and other stuff is a funny business. I think of the shelves full of old test equipment at Apex, which self-described S.O.B.* Steve Slater (our APEXjr.) used to quietly declare he would finally price realistically and get sold when his father retired. In the meantime Slater pere undoubtedly looked at all of it as major wealth.

Similarly, boooksellers sit on stock for ages sometimes. And with the internet, many escalate pricing when they see that there is probable rarity, sometimes coming down when others put more reasonably priced copies up for sale.


* Son Of Boss

 

[PRR]

> how big he thinks the print run was.

I'd be curious too.

Textbooks are funny things. Possibly just one course in one school adopts it. The publisher never knows what will be the next Terman.

This one was doomed. Vacuum tubes in 1968? This isn't radar stuff, explicitly DC-LF.

Some of us caught the tail end of steam locomotives in routine service. Diesels killed them VERY fast, in the US and most countries (exception: where import/manufacturing was costly and labor was nearly free). If you look in Mark's Mechanical Engineer Handbook from the 1920s or 1930s, there's hundreds of pages on piston steam engines. The 1965 edition has about 5 pages, one un-clear picture of a steam engine, now it was all steam turbines. Marks' editors saw the handwriting not too long after the steam piston market fell to zero.

C&H were on the cusp of the vacuum tube crash. By 1969 everybody "knew" that tubes were "dead", merely running-off existing stock until the day a trasistor would be so much cheaper that all those tubes would be trash. Nobody needed new tube designs, and there was an over-supply of old tube designers. (Who knew tubes would limp through 30 dark years and become a high-profit market when transistor stuff was cut-throat no-profit?)

 

[PRR]

My copy of C&H is ex-library, stickers ripped out and stamps blotted with a Sharpie. But it appears to be ex-Hazeltine Library, and the seller is within ~~100 miles of Hazeltine's old facilities, and closer to the merged/demerged remnants of Hazeltine.

I didn't know Hazeltine held the patent (and collected royalties) for AVC. That was a cash-cow you didn't even have to squeeze.