QSL 100%

Back a few weeks a friend of mine got his ham license. He's been on the air mostly with the 2m gang from down in Cincinnati and a couple times on HF. I think it's the outright vagaries of the ionosphere that slows him down there, but he's at least getting on the air and having fun chattin' with people.
     I have yet to get him interested in contests. We'll see.
     I have to get myself interested in contests most of the time any more too. In the long back, I'd get on the air on weekends and, depending on the contests, I'd work a couple hours here and there and be done with it. Sometimes I'd have a couple pages of the log book filled up and sometimes I'd have a page on a good day. Either way there were contacts in the log.
     Also long back I got into the habit of QSLing all DX contacts. First there was the kick of actually talking on my own radio to somebody in a country that I'd either never thought about or, in the case of the Mediterranean & Canada, places I'd been. And back when I first got into ham radio – and even when I was just a SWLer – my father had printed up QSLs for me on his huge Chandler & Price press.
     Hand set type; hand fed press. Beautiful work done by a true artist. The shame is I really took that kindness & interest in my life for granted.
     If I could live this live over again . . .
     After Dad died I ended up with most of his print shop in my garage. I remembered some of the stuff he'd taught me but I had to go looking through the libraries to find a book that did the art of letterpress printing justice. That book was The Practice of Printing by the Polk brothers. Published most recently in the 1950s, I think. By hook and crook and scouring of used book stores I found a copy. Then I found another. And then I started adding printing books to the burgeoning collection of text material that will confound the witless when I'm gone.
     So I learned what I didn't know and relearned what Dad had taught me.
     And I started printing my own QSLs.

Now the art of a QSL is pretty precise. The most important part is the text block area where the contact with another ham via radio is verified with a strangely vague minutiæ for which hams are famous. It all comes down to time, date, frequency, signal report & who the hell was listening or talking. Five or six lines of ten point type on ten pica slug will do the job.
     Then there's the callsign, station location and operator's name &c.
     Easy: you wrap that around the call sign with the call sign set in as large a size as you can cram onto a 3.5x5.5 card.
     Now all of this goes onto the card one way or the other. Many of the cards that I've received over the past nearly 38 years of ham radio have had the QSL info on the back of the card. Thus the front only has the call sign, the operator's name and address and maybe some graphic doodad. That and a club affiliation symbol or two.
     Get all that done and it comes down to colors of ink, type of card stock & how much money you wanna spend. That, of course, comes out of who's doing the printing, how it's getting done & whether or not the printery is dedicated to QSLs only or is a job shop that does everything from wrestling & bull fight posters to business cards for the local drug pushers.
     The big shops with a wide client base do some beautiful work. Some have pretty quick turn arounds on orders. But the simple fact that your job is just one of however many come in on a daily basis does make a difference. And big shops have many different ways of producing the same product. The deal can get very sticky.
     Small job shops that do QSL cards and maybe rubber stamps – such as Ebbert Graphics & Stamps, now no longer in the QSL business – turn out some very nice work in reasonable amounts of time for reasonable money.
     Either way it all comes down to trial and error and the good luck that you picked a good printer with a solid reputation for quality work from in front. If you bought cards from Ebbert, you got quality stuff. If you bought 'em from the guy's got an old offset press in the garage and a home-brew plate burner, you took your chances.

I knew what my callsign was before I got the ticket. I knew that 'cause one of the first letters I got after I took the test was from Rusprint QSL printers in Missouri. I also got one from The Little Printshop, another place that may no longer be in business. (There are two places listed on the web under Little Print Shop. Ain't sure if any of them's the one I'm remembering.)
     Both of those firms printed their QSLs via letterpress. I was impressed with the stuff they showed but I knew that my father was all set to crunch out a batch of cards for me the minute my license arrived. The fact that I was in Puerto Rico and my folks were back home in Ohio meant little.
     Being the sort of neurotic letter writer that I am, I sent each of the aforementioned firms a letter explaining that, although I appreciated their samples & mailing, I already had a deal made on QSLs. One of the folks sent me a nice note back thanking me for taking the time to write and expressing appreciation for my father's endeavors.

Nowadays I just walk out to the garage, set some type in a composing stick from the late 1800s, lock the form up in a chase & put some ink on the 1923-vintage 10x15 C&P NS that's holding the corner of the garage down. Then I stand there for however long it takes to print however many of whatever I'm working on and, from time to time, put piles of printed stock on the drying flats that I built under a bench that holds a 1911 C&P Pilot sidelever press. When that color's done, I clean the press & go back in the house.
     The next day I print the next color and so it goes until I have the entire stack of whatever printed up and ready to use, mail, fold, hand out, stare at or toss away.
     It's a time consuming process and by today's standards, I'd be just as well off buying a big box of photo print paper and running it all through the photo printer that Cindy has tied to her Sony Vaio. It would probably take a third as much time, even if I did have to take the entire pile of printed material out to the garage to cut down to size on the 23 inch C&P paper cutter that's holding the rest of the garage floor down.
     But it wouldn't be the same.
     At which point we can get back to my friend and his QSL cards, among other distractions.

A while back I came across a QSL card design that I really like. The QSL info is on the left side of the card, separated by a border design of some sort or the other. To the right of that is the call sign in another color and then the geographic & operator information goes above and below the callsign.
     It works out to three press runs. First for the black ink, which is the QSL info & all that. Then the callsign, centered between the operator info. And then the color decoration separating the two blocks of black ink text.
     For my own cards I use blue anchors as the separator. The call sign goes in gold or metal-flake red or orange or whatever I feel like mixing up. It's a nice open design and I am lucky to have enough of the entire Cooper Old Style face (1920s-vintage Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry in Missouri) to print all the card in it.
     For my friend's card I put the call sign in red and a blue design out of an old type case for the separator. The cards came out looking really sweet. Only thing I did different with my friend's cards was omitting the "A W8IJN QSL" that I have in the lower right corner of my cards. And I didn't put the press name as a separator between the address area and a hand written note on the back, like in the days of old fashioned post cards.
     You do remember post cards, don't you?

So out of this experience I found myself recently looking at eHam.net's product & service reviews for QSL printers. And there's a ton of 'em still out there in this day of desk top publishing (most of which needs a serious slap on the wrists from the keepers of the typographic graces). There's sixty-four of 'em, in fact. Most are companies in North America but there are also QSL printers doing international business from Italy, South America and, most amazingly to me, Russia and Eastern Europe.
     Yeah, the places where you had to get a license to have a typewriter are now home to free-market QSL card printers who do extremely nice work, despite what the reviews might say.
     Rusprint is still in business.
     Ebbert ain't listed 'cause I think he went out of the QSL business before the web found out about reviews of QSL printers. Too bad, too, 'cause Tom Ebbert has almost as much type & cast iron as I do.
     Neither of us has enough of the really stupid gene to consider going into the business of QSL card printing with the equipment and technology that we have.
     Letterpress printing can be very beautiful. It's the only form of printing left that lets you actually touch the type that's going to carry the ink and, unless you're running a Heidelberg "windmill," it's the only way left to print that kind of work by hand. As in hand-set type and hand-fed press. And that requires patience, nimble fingers and a lot of standing in front of rumbling machinery.
     For all that, Tom & I are very happy to let Wayne (QSLs by W4MPY) wear himself out. Back in the day we would all gather at the Dayton Hamvention to complain about how much work it was having to work as a pressman but none of us ever had the good sense to stop before we got really tired of it.
     Which is a nice way of saying that, while I do enjoy printing cards for friends and for myself, it's too much like real work for me to be doing it for free – or for money.
     Modern technology has made everything about printing that my father knew – or that I ever knew or learned as a graphic arts person – just another mouse button click and a thumb drive stuck in a slot. The hard core printing, the heavy metal printing, takes a lot of time and it's not exactly outside of the world of the physical.
     Put a 40x60 pica form in a 10x15 chase and load that into a press if you want to know how physical it can be.
     Still, it's fun and once we get past the feasting season I'll have a chance to hand all 1013 QSL cards to my friend. I hope he doesn't use 'em up real quick. But then he could scan one into his computer, take the file to a photo printer and have 'em crank out as many as he needs. My only involvement then will be in chomping all that paper down to the size of a post card.

Hope he realizes that he can print eight at a time on a 11x17 sheet.