Record and ABU Catalogues: Anomolies
The elusive 1958 and 1963 Tight Lines catalogs
Two English ABU catalogs seem to cause a problem tracking down: Tight Lines 1958
and Tight Lines 1963.
As I’ve pointed out before, the search for a 1963 Tight Lines catalog is in
vain. It does not exist.
After TL 1962 the TL 1964 was released, probably some time before the Napp och
Nytt 1964 catalog was ready, because they used the cover of Napp och Nytt 1963.
The contents of TL 1964 is also very similar to N&N 1963. A couple of spinning
reels are lacking in TL 1964 (on p.40), but for the rest most everything is more
or less taken over from N&N 1963.
The same thing is the case with Tight Lines 1965, which has the Napp och Nytt
1964 cover and contents. There is no Tight Lines with the 1965 Napp och Nytt
cover (the girl in the orange anorak). The 1965 Swedish catalog was never
translated in English. They just skipped a year with TL - or more likely much
less than a year, because of staying behind on N&N with the TL-releases. Then
from 1966 on the Swedish and English catalogs are similar again and they have
the same cover.
A greater mystery is the 1958 Tight Lines catalog. I’ve never seen one. I
searched the internet to see if I could find an image or mention of Tight Lines
1958. Nothing. Still it may well exist, though I’m not to confident. But we may
be able to tell more by looking at the contents of of the TL catalogs before and
after 1958.
I do not expect that if the TL 1958
does NOT exist, it will be because of the same synchronization problem as in the
mid-sixties, resulting in the 1964 and 1965 TL catalogs with the cover and
contents of N&N of the previous year. This is because both the 1957 and 1959 TL
catalogs – preceding and following 1958 - were synchronal to the Swedish
N&N catalogs of those years, in contents that is (but not necessarily in the
season of the year they were published).
To specify this synchronicity: TL 1957 is similar to that of N&N 1957: the
products are the same but the English catalog has less stories and additional
information translated and as a result it’s considerably thinner (50 p.) than
the Swedish original (82 p.). The covers are also the same. One year earlier
this had also been the case with TL 1956: same cover as N&N 1956, and similar
contents, but thinner still (34 instead of 82 pages). TL 1959 is completely
similar to N&N 1959: same cover and contents, both 98 pages. And the same
applies to TL 1960.
So when translating the Swedish catalog into
English ABU reduced 82 pages to 32 pages in 1956, and 82 pages into 50 in 1957.
In 1959 there was no such reduction (both versions 98 pages). If you’re with me
still, this means that if a TL 1958 catalog does exist, it must mark a
change in translation policy: it will be either the last TL in reduced form or
the first TL in complete translation. If it does not exist, we can only
speculate why not: perhaps because ABU was slow to decide whether they should
have a complete or a reduced translation made of the Swedish catalog? Or because
the translated catalogs may have come to appear too late in the year (as
explained below)? Perhaps someone out there knows the answer - or better still
he can provide some scans of the elusive Tight Lines 1958.
It would also be helpful to know just when exactly the translations and the
Swedish original catalogs were published. Was there initially a great span of
time between the publication of the original N&N and that of the translation.
Perhaps so. The Swedish N&N catalogs had the year-number published on their
cover from 1953 onwards. These catalogs probably appeared somewhere early in
spring, as they still do. But it seems meaningful that this year-number was
omitted from the 1956 and 1957 Tight Lines catalogs. It makes you think these
catalogs could well have been issued by the end of the year, to be used until
autumn of next year (hence omitting the year-number would prevent them from
looking obsolete after December). The 1959 Tight Lines is the first one to have
the year-number on the cover. That could mean this catalog was now - just as N&N
- also published in early spring, so it could last almost a whole calendar year,
until the end of 1959, without looking obsolete.
Now if TL 1959 would indeed have been published in spring 1959, while TL 1957
wasn’t published until late in 1957, it might have been so that ABU chose to
skip TL 1958: instead of publishing it a year after TL 1957 - which would have
been around autumn 1958 - they could have chosen to skip half a year or so and
wait until early spring 1959 and from then on synchronize with the N&N
publication. That would be a similar solution as used with the Swedish 1965 N&N
catalog, which was also never translated and published as Tight Lines (see
above); they just skipped that year with the translation.
Of course it would also be a
crucial help to know if a German and a French ABU-catalog are known to exist
from 1958. As started in 1956, these would be called Petri Heil! and Bonne Pêche!
respectively, with or without the mention of the year 1958, but most likely with
the 1958 N&N catalog cover of the rising trout. But again I haven’t found any
such catalog on the internet yet, nor in my documentation…
Always willing to have an e-mail discussion on anything ABU!