In the Interim:
5 January 2012: More on the TSC Supplier's Guide
Ordering from
Dorsett Publications
2011 Catalog of Publications
Wholesale Policies & Orders
Sampling
The Wares
Why Scale?
Adirondack Chair
(TSC 1:4)
In
the Interim
(1976-2005)
The
Scale Cabinetmaker
Reading List
From the
Workbench of:
Workshop Notes 1976-1978
The TSC Contributors,
1976-1982
Contact Information
Links to Resources, including Museums, Organizations, and
Recommended Suppliers
Advertising
With Dorsett
Publications
In the Interim, 2012
5 January 2012
Four and a half years ago, we decide to open a toy store in the front end of the depot to help pay for paint for the building (a necessity created by the Norfolk Southern Railroad, which decided to raise our annual rent for the land under the depot from $680 per year to $6,000 per year). I don't think either of us really understood Christmas season in quite the same way and were not quite ready for the impact of three year olds on our normal routine. Every other part of Dorsett Publications grinds to a halt for about six weeks, while we extended business hours and spent from the weekend before Thanksgiving until December 24th talking about the finer points of puppets, blocks, and woodent trains.
Now that the chaos of holidays has passed, we have slowed down to a more moderate pace and returned to the drafting table and the computer to finish up the first annual Suppliers Guide. We are adding a number of extra features to the Guide, including the reprint of Jim Jedlica's article on required tools for modeling, the TSC measurement conversion chart, and a couple of "must read" articles from our previous pages, including Helen Dorsett's excellent article on basswood.
The Scale Cabinetmaker's 2012 Suppliers Guide (pdf file) will be available, free of charge, on the website and will be included on all of our cd-roms. We are publishing it in order to help scale modelers make the best decisions they can about the tools, supplies, and products before they buy and to answer the "is this still out there" questions we receive on a weekly basis. We intend to update the Guide on an annual basis.
In other news, our staff (all two of us...we are, and have always been, a very small operation) has redoubled efforts. Now that we have the "print to cd" conversion down to an artform, we are hoping to have the remaining 10 volumes out by the first of November, if not sooner. Keep an eye out for the release announcements on our front page.
If you are new to The Scale Cabinetmaker and are not sure of the range of subjects we covered over the 20 year spans, we have uploaded the Subject Index for Volumes 1 through 10 (yes, we have reached the half way point in republishing TSC).
In the meantime....
In the Interim, 2011
The Scale Cabinetmaker Suppliers Guide
Over the course of twenty years, The Scale Cabinetmaker reviewed hundreds of products, from miniature bricks and quality woods to table saws and scale rules. When TSC started, we made the decision to base the health and future of the journal on subscriptions rather than on advertising revenue. The decision was deliberate because Jim Dorsett wanted to have a product review that provided the level and quality of information on scale modeling products on par with Consumer Reports. He did not want to be beholding to advertising revenue for the journal's survival. While TSC never topped the charts in terms of the number of subscriptions, it held its own for two decades...an extraordinary length of time in publishing.
The product reviews not only benefitted readers by providing them with accurate assessments, based on extensive testing on the TSC workbenches, but it alo benefitted a wide range of companies by introducing readers to the suppliers, but it also helped to refine products that were already on the market.
Some of the questions we hear on a regular basis from new readers are:
- How many of these products are still on the market?
- Where can I find _____________ (fill in the blank)?
- Are there substitutes for the products you list in some of the articles (especially those that required the use of a specific kit)?
To answer the questions, we have decided to put together The Scale Cabinetmaker Supplier Guide. We are tracking down the companies we reviewed over the years, those still in operation, and asking if they would like to participate in the Guide and provide updated information on their current product lines. For products and companies that have disappeared during TSC's fifteen year retirement, we are trying to find suitable substitutes or to see if another company is carrying the product lines recommended years ago. The Guide is organized by category and will provide a brief overview of companies, references (where possible) to earlier reviews, and current customer reviews. While we do not do the same level of workbench testing now that we did years ago, we are attempting to make sure that the companies included in the Guide represent the best suppliers and retailers in the business.
The Scale Cabinetmaker Supplier's Guide will be included on all new TSC cd-roms and will be available as a free download (pdf) on this website. We will also provide a listing of other sites that provide some level of product reviews in order to help our customers make the best choices for project materials, supplies, and tools. It seems only right to continue the tradition and the approach we started nearly 40 years ago. (mhd)
Adventures in Publishing
October 24, 2011This year marked the release of more issues of TSC, most notably Volumes 7, 8, and (soon) 9. Volume 8 turned out to be a challenge on a lot of different fronts, not the least of which was overcoming some pretty bad printing jobs in 1984, when we shifted to a local printer (a shift that was blessedly short lived). Volume 8 was unusual for a number of reasons. To address the recession, we expanded to six issues. While it kept a fair number of our regular readers on board and subscribing, the production of six issues in a year turned out to be more than we could handle. Dorsett Publications has rarely had more than two to three full-time employees. Not only did we stretch ourselves thin over the course of the publication year, we stretched thin our contributors as well. Now, almost 20 years later, I am still amazed that all of us hung in through the process. Not surprising, we went back to the quarterly format with Volume 9 and promised ourselves we would never try that particular experiment again.
2011 has marked another change in Dorsett Publications. For the first time since 1975, when Dorsett Miniatures officially became Dorsett Publications, we expanded our catalog. When we stopped publishing The Scale Cabinetmaker in 1995, all of us swore we would never publish another quarterly journal, feeling a bit like Sisyphus. Famous last words. Last year, we started work on a new journal, The Community Planner, a how-to publication (in the vein of The Scale Cabinetmaker and Popular Mechanics) on community planning and government for citizens, planning commissioners, local officials, and planners.
We realize soon after releasing the first issue that we had a couple of small problems. First, the subject matter seemed at odds with the rest of the catalog for Dorsett Publications. After all, we are best known for miniatures, not for community (small town, county, rural, and neighborhood) planning. One of the hallmarks of the journals from Dorsett Publications is that they reflect the strengths each of the members of the family (it is a family-owned business) bring to the table. Jim was a Sociologist and a former Presbyterian minister, with a passion for modelling, writing, and social history. It should come as no surprise that his favorite history book was J.D. Furnace's The Americans. Helen's expertise was in the history of furniture and the decorative arts, and she brought her passion to the front cover and the contents of TSC for nearly 15 year. The current crop of Dorsetts also bring different interests to the business. I am, by training and inclination, a long range planner and cartographer; Carol is a social science statitician and researcher and a political junkie. We are both writers, carrying on the tradition established by Jim. Still, trying to meld miniatures and planning in the same company turned out to be a bigger challenge that we had expected. The specialties have changed, but our commitment to the miniatures hobby hasn't.
The other problem happened because of the credit card processing setup used by Dorsett Publications. Four years ago, we started a small toy store in the front end of Jim and Helen's beloved depot as a way to fund ongoing maintenance and preservation of the building. It seemed like a really good idea at the time (it still does, although by December 24th, I threaten to swear off Christmas and toys). The credit card charge appeared on folks statements as the "Cambria Toy Station." For miniaturists, that didn't seem to be a problem. For county government finance officers, it was a different story. We have since resolved the problem, but it did cause a fair amount of consternation and raised eyebrows.
Now, a year into the new venture, our days are marked by mounds of work and the daily mix of phone calls. Today, I answered questions about finishing techniques for walnut, sources for commercial spindles, how to build a spreadsheet for a comprehensive planning process, and how to write an effective press release about changes to a zoning ordinance, as well as questions about a pull-along hedgehog, a set of German made architectural blocks, and the differences between two brands of puppets.
One final bit of news. Work on the new "Beginner's Workbench" series is coming along. We hope to have the first volume (Finishes and Finishing Techniques) ready to go by the first of December. Other volumes will crop up as we have the time to develop (or redevelop) the materials. Watch for an announcement on our front page.
In the meantime....
Meghan H. Dorsett
Adventures in e-Commerce: Lessons for Mac Using Technophobes
23 March 2011As is readily apparent to anyone exploring the Dorsett Publications website these days, Dorsett Publications has finally entered the 21st century and the world of e-commerce. Bare with us, we are still working out the kinks. While we understood the use of calipers, shaper saws and the other tools of the miniature trade, we have always been slightly behind the curb in terms of technology.
The year after Helen died, I gave my father a Mac LCII for Christmas. It was, at the time, already out-of-date, but it revolutionized the production of The Scale Cabinetmaker. Until 1991, TSC was still produced using a photo typesetter, a drafting table with a parallel bar and triangles, and a rubber cement glue pot. At the time, I teased my father, Jim Dorsett, about his dinosaur approach to publishing. He continued to write his articles by hand, on legal pads and computer scrap paper from an old Mac Classic (c. 1983), which held among other things his entire subscription list. He revised his draft at the AM typsetter, printed the type off on 4" photographic paper that required darkroom work, and constructed each issue by hand. It was, at the very least, time consuming. Even after the shift to computers, the plans and patterns included in TSC were still created by hand, using a drafting table and 00 to 0000 rapidigraphs. Autocad, while convenient, didn't allow, and still does not allow, for the level of exactness required for plans.
Despite our presence on the internet, we have remained slightly behind the times, evidenced by the fact that our phones are still connected to landlines. So, it was with a fair amount of trepidation that we finally took the plunge this week. We have finally ventured into the world of e-commerce with the addition of an online catalog connected to Google checkout. Unfortunately, at this time, the e-commerce feature of the website only extends to orders coming from North America, at least we think it only extends to North America. International orders will continue to be handled by email.
In other news:
The Scale Cabinetmaker, Volume 8 is taking awhile. In 1983, as the miniature market collapsed, Dorsett Publications made the decision to increase rates, but go to six issues per year. The six issue year nearly killed us. In 1984, we went back to the quarterly publication schedule and chalked the six issue year up to a bad experience. TSC remained a quarterly until we laid the last issue to rest in 1995.
One of the major problems in 1983 centered on printers. Our primary printer for TSC became a victim of the economic downturn. It left us scrambling, two weeks before the publication date, to find another printer. We went with a small local outfit for two of the issues, much to the detriment of our sanity. The local printers were not quite up to the job. We had pages miscut, pages out of place, pages left blank, and a host of other problems. Two issues later, we found a new printer and returned to the high standards we had established in the previous years.
When we sent The Scale Cabinetmaker off to the document scanning firm in New York, we had forgotten the printing problems of 1983. More precisely, we forgot that the desk copies we still owned were all remainders, copies with flawed pages. Thanks to Pete Westcott, we now have a clean issue of TSC 8:2, are rescanning the issue, and should have the cd-rom ready by the middle of May.
We have also started work on two new "Best of TSC" volumes, one on lathes and the other on the roomboxes of Pete Westcott. Watch for the release of the two volumes by the end of the summer.
In the meantime...
