Atari Punk Console
A hand-lettered book for the electronic age
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FAVORITE THINGS
A hand-lettered book for the electronic age
I bought Getting Started in Electronics, by Forrest M. Mims, III, on 6 Dec 1986. I still have the book and the receipt, which shows that I purchased it from a Radio Shack in San Francisco. The receipt also indicates I used a $20 bill to buy the book for $2.49 plus $0.16 sales tax, and that I opted not to buy the extended service plan.
Getting Started in Electronics, first published in 1983, is probably the most famous and best-selling book about electronics, and it remains one of my favorite books. The instructional content is excellent, but the main reason I like it is because of its stupendous design. Forrest hand-lettered the entire 128-page-book, and it has hundreds of his charming hand-drawn illustrations. The electrons and some of the components have faces on them. The book looks like a notebook with lined paper and has punched holes to fit in a 3-ring binder. Anyone interested in design, even someone with no interest in electronics, is likely to appreciate its clear, inviting layout. Take a look at a couple of sample pages:
I’ve never been able to get this book out of my head. In 2008 I called Mims, who was 64 years old at the time, and asked him how he created this book. He told me:
Getting Started in Electronics was a sequel to the original Engineer’s Notebook series. My editor at Radio Shack was Dave Gunzel. By that time I’d already written 16 or 17 Radio Shack books. We were sitting there talking one day and Dave witnessed my laboratory notebooks. He said, “Wow! Your books oughta look like this!” because I hand-printed everything in the notebooks with little drawings. He said, “Your next book has got to be done like your notebooks.”
So the Engineer’s Notebook was done that way. It begins with a typewriter. Then it becomes typewritten pages with hand-written symbols, and then by the time you get to each of the integrated circuits it’s totally hand done. It’s done with India ink on Mylar. It was so hard to letter this book that my fingers were bleeding — the middle finger, where you press the India ink pen. And I had really severe writer’s cramp. And also, you can’t make mistakes with India ink. If you make a mistake, you have to start over the whole Mylar page.
Then the idea of Getting Started in Electronics came up, so I met with Dave. Of course it was gonna be hand-lettered. He even suggested using a crayon. I said “You can’t do a book with a crayon. It has to be a pen or a pencil! But I don’t want to use ink again, because it’s too painful.” So we agreed to use a #7 pencil — well, he didn’t agree to it, I just showed him what it would look like. I drew the book. I think the entire book was done in 54 days. I was doing two pages a day. Getting Started in Electronics sold in the neighborhood of 1.3 million books or more. The first printing of 100,000 copies was gone in the flash of an eye.
In 2014, I was invited to produce a half-day event about DIY electronics at the annual Moogfest convening in Asheville, North Carolina. I immediately thought of including Forrest because of the influence his books had on many electronic musicians. Forrest’s 1982 book, Engineer's Notebook II: A Handbook of Integrated Circuit Applications, had a circuit he designed called the Sound Synthesizer, a simple musical instrument with two knobs. Electronic musicians embraced the circuit and renamed it the Atari Punk Console because it sounded like a retro video game. When I asked Forrest to give a presentation at Moogfest he replied by email, “The Atari Punk Console is a minuscule footnote when compared with Bob Moog’s work.” But with a bit of arm-twisting, I was able to convince him to come. He was at least a couple of decades older than the average attendee and was dressed like Mister Rogers. He looked out of place and seemed a little uncomfortable. But as soon as I introduced him to a few people, word got around, and for the rest of the day, he was surrounded by a throng of adoring fans who peppered him with questions and asked for his autograph. (I regret not bringing my copy of Getting Started in Electronics for him to sign!) At the end of the event, an exhausted but smiling Forrest told me he had no idea that so many musicians knew of him or his work. I was happy that I had been able to connect him with his admirers.
In 2012 I made an Atari Punk Console and put the circuit inside a wooden craft box I painted:
Here’s a video of my Atari Punk Console with sound.
COMMENTS AND ERRATA
I made a mistake in The Magnet 0003. In the piece about nontransitive dice, I wrote, “Black beats red 21 out of 36,” but it should have said, “Black beats yellow 21 out of 36.” My father was the first person to point out the error!
The Magnet is written and produced by Mark Frauenfelder and edited by Carla Sinclair.