Until taking on this book project, I never really understood or appreciated the huge amount of work that is involved in providing reference material for the hobby.

In early 1991 I started working on a visual reference for the many kinds of Canadian railway insulators. This was to be for my own personal use, as I had over 350 different insulators at the time that were all basically the same shape. I now have 600. I had a difficult time keeping a record of what I had in my collection. I was also finding it frustrating describing individual pieces and colours in written and telephone correspondence with other collectors. I quickly discovered that there needed to be a detailed reference for collectors in the form of a publication documenting the variety of these beehive insulators. Grant Salzman published a series of articles in Crown Jewels of the Wire magazine in 1980-81 on the CD-143 Canadian beehive insulator. These articles awakened a broad interest in these little jewels and set down a numbering system by which to classify them. These articles certainly got my interest going, partly because it gave me an. idea of what was out there to collect.

During the development of the book, I acquired a growing appreciation for Canadian railway telegraph communications. On road trips I really noticed the changing Canadian landscape. The absence of multiple cross arm pole lines along railways has really affected me. I am alive during a time when this method of communications is being phased out. I will always have memories of open-wire pole lines, my children won't. This is an important time in the history of railways in Canada. With CN now going on the auction block, and many other branch lines being pulled up, the availability of Canadian railway insulators will now reduce even more quickly. Railways and their communications helped build the nation. These functional little glass and porcelain electrical devices are historical artifacts. I really felt that there needed to be reference material documenting the variety of these insulators. I greatly appreciate the wealth of reference material available in the hobby, and wanted to contribute to that resource.

Life is what happens while you are making other plans.

It was inexperience that led me to believe I could produce this entire study in my spare time, evenings and weekends. Those times were mostly spent recuperating from the day job. I was running my own construction business in '91 and part of '92. Evenings and weekends were taken up with phone calls, meeting clients, and other business related activities. Work on the book progressed very slowly. My quality of life was beginning to suffer, so I shut down the contracting business and went to work for someone else. Ah!, peaceful evenings on which to work on the book. No, too tired. Weekends. No, hard to get going on it, just want to relax. It was always there in the back of my mind, "I could be working on the book". After moving and having my entire collection in storage for many months, it wasn't until the spring of 1994 that I made a decision to take large amounts of time off work to finish the book. Things were progressing nicely, I had lots of encouraging feedback from collectors and historians who saw the mock paste-up of one of the appendices. 

Just about this time the decision was made to revive the Canadian Insulator Collector magazine. Wow. Every other month since then lots of available book time was pushed aside for the next dated issue of the magazine. It takes an average of 10 hours prep time and an additional 12 hours of production time to do each issue. The first 4 issues also included a combined 6 hour, 2 day travel excursion to Russell's house on the mainland (BC) to produce the thing! Throw in an extra 10 hours of correspondence and phone calls, and 3 hours of stamp-licking and address labels, and each issue effectively took close to 30 hours of decent time away from the book. That was it! In October '94 I decided to take 3 months off my day job to finish the book. It is now 12 months later and I can finally say I know how many pages it will be! 280 total pages.

Insulators are round, paper is flat. 

The first obstacle I had to overcome was to figure out a way of accurately describing the embossing engraved into each mold. In many cases, slight differences in the curve of a letter is the only way to determine one mold from another. I tried a video camera and slowly rotated the insulator as a computer scanned in the image from left to right. This system only worked when I rotated the insulator at exactly the same speed as the scan speed of the computer. The width of the embossing was different each time! Back to the drawing board. I tried strips of paper and soft graphite but it was messy and didn't pick up the fine details. I tried rubbing grease pencil over aluminum foil, but the foil tore and photo-copied as black as the pencil. Then I painted the foil white and after pressing all the raised areas into the foil, I rolled it across a stamp pad. No good. The inked area was too soft. 

Then I tried rubbing a broad felt pen across the foil, and that seemed to work alright. The only problem was that it highlighted the sides as well as the top parts of each letter. Then I tried carefully running a fine tipped felt pen across the raised areas on the foil. This was finally acceptable, but took nearly 20 minutes for long embossings like 'Canadian Pacific'. There were so many of those. I also went through a similar process to discover that I could roll the insulators in plasticine to get a flat mirror-image of the actual engraving. With a camera and very critical lighting I was able to produce an accurate flat image from a round surface! There are over 40 such photographs in the book, and over 200 embossing illustrations using aluminum foil.

The value of contributors. 

Starting in the summer of 1991, I made an effort to visit other collectors around B.C. Alberta, and Washington in order to obtain photographs and information for the book. I also started corresponding with collectors all over the continent in an effort to acquire much needed new information. Numerous people sold, loaned or gave me specimens during the last few years. It seemed for a while there I was receiving or mailing an insulator every business day. Our mail comes to our island by speed boat at about 6:30 AM. The boat also goes to 3 other small islands in our area (between the continent and Vancouver Island). (Recently I have been mail-trading big multiparts packed in TV set boxes. These are all on-loaded and off-loaded by the trusty postal service at our Government wharf.) The 30 or so pieces that were contributed by others have really helped to make this study even more complete and accurate. Bravo to all of you!

Photographs 

One thing I wanted in this study was full-size photographs of each different mold style. This was very important in order to accurately identify these insulators. After taking several rolls of film with the insulators in front of a light bulb, I found them all to be much too dark. I found shorter exposures in front of a diffused, back-lit setting was the most accurate. I used to wait until the sun was on a window in the house with insulator shelves in it, then tape the frosted plastic to the outside of the window, and take the photos. This, however, did not prove to be that possible in the winter when the sun did not rise high enough to get into the window! Getting a roll of film developed involves a day-trip by ferry and highway to the nearest town on Vancouver Island. After taking 21 rolls of film over a period of 4 years, I managed to get enough good photos for use in the book. There was also the problem of getting the photos screened with a halftone dot screen so they could be printed. This cost was an average $6.00 per photo. There are 269 screened black & white photographs in this book.

No way to make a living. 

Friends ask me when and how much money I am going to make from my book. Very funny. An estimate of the time it took to produce this book is 280 hours. That's 1-1/2 hours a week for 4 years. Wow, that seems low! I figured I would have to sell the books at $63.00 each to make minimum wage, or $109.00 each to make the wage of someone who works for a print shop typesetting and placing photos, etc, and to recover my actual cash costs. If I put a price of $109.00 on the books, I probably wouldn't sell enough to even cover my production expenses of $4,875.00. This includes unseen items like $480 long distance telephone, $420 postage, and over $400 film & developing.

I have been involved in the hobby of collecting insulators now for over 22 years. Long enough to have seen a few photo-copied price guides and reference books around. After all the work I have just contributed, I would really feel that my efforts were unappreciated if I saw a photo-copy of my book around. I need to sell 200 copies in order to break even. If I only sell 100, I will personally be pitching in $13.00 for each one I do sell. This is a scary thought. I don't even own my own home, I can't really afford the privilege of being able to write books that will cost me money I'll never get back. I just happen to have a few investments that I have been cashing in on in order to pay for the printing of the book! These little investments are glass, and sit on shelves in the window.

Mark Lauckner of Mayne Island, British Columbia, was not in attendance at the National Show in Marlborough in August to receive his special recognition award. He is pictured proudly holding the N .R. Woodward Award for Research and Literature presented by the Lone Star Insulator Club. Mark's article, "The N.W. & B.I.T. Co.", appeared in Crown Jewels of the Wire, November 1994.