ONLY BELIEVE HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE!
DID you spot my deliberate mistake on the cover of the September issue? Readers may recall that in the closing paragraph of that month's editorial I asked if anyone could see what was wrong with the picture. So far I have had no letters telling me where it was wrong. Obviously I had done the job too well. Look again at the A-10 on the cover and you will see that the picture has been reversed left to right. How can you tell? The large flat plate-like object on the lower nose is on the wrong side of the fuselage!. Look again and then at other pictures and you will see what I mean. But I can immediately hear readers saying how did he do that because all of the other markings were the right way round with the exception of the Nato 'hook' markings which were again invert­ed. You cannot see it in the printed picture but the offset nose wheel undercarriage door is on the wrong side. This therefore questions why was it done?. First of all it is worthy of mention what can be achieved by computer users nowadays when they know what they are doing. One of the clever gentlemen at Regal Litho, our printers, was able to reverse the tail markings which would have been a dead give away and replace them the right way round even though the picture itself had been reversed. The reason for the change is something that the ordinary reader may not appreciate. We cannot always do it but it is important, where possible, to get the nose of an aircraft pointing to the left when featured on a front cover. It's the same rule that applies to photographers when taking pic­tures of people. You never photograph their backsides do you? The same applies to an aircraft front cover. Most magazines on the newsagent's shelves get half covered by others. There's no way round this as there is only so much shelf space and so many magazines to get onto it. It is therefore vital that the browsing potential reader sees the aeroplane with the nose pointing to the left. It has been proved beyond doubt that a casual purchaser will always go for the title that interests him if the cover attracts. What then is the point of having an aircraft with only its rear end showing? Now you know one of the rarely mentioned, but equally important, tricks of the jounalist and publishers trade!.

In spite of my admiration for the lads at Regal who were able to make the transposition I still have no great love of computers. Now that I have achieved some sort of mastery over my own Apple Mac I still get the most horrendous hiccups now and then. I have learned to appreciate that spell checkers are worth their weight in gold, I have learned that one can change paragraphs and even whole chunks of an article at will without having to start all over again and I appreciate that they are quick and clean but there's still something that I cannot get used to as I was brought up in the days of hot metal when we set the type on a Lino or Mono typesetting machine, it was made up into pages using copper halftones and locked into a forme and printed with as equal clarity as any litho machine can do today. Why, I keep asking cannot we still work in the printer's measure of ems and ens. Part of the traditions of my generation is maintained in the size of a computer type face but that seems to be about all. I still cannot get used to the idea that the width of a column is not 10 ems but 40 mm. I suppose it will only be when, through the expertise of others far younger and more intelligent than I in the workings of computers, that I will be won over to their usefulness. I appreciate being able to sit down at the desk and completely layout a set of pages without clambering into the dark­ened camera room to make the half tones or having to wash-up at the end of a day's work with printers ink all over my hands . It seems to me that entirely new skills have come into the business of publishing magazines that have left the older traditional methods behind. It is more the pity that we cannot still lift a printed sheet and see the perfectly even impression as the type 'kisses' the paper and know that everything is perfect. Yet when one can, at a will change an aircraft in its direc­tion of flight and have nobody be the wiser is something that perhaps I will get used to in time. I will certainly make use of these new found skills to produce a better magazine and improve on standards as we know them now.