Rural Sonore Instrs
RURAL SONORE
Instructions
Here are some scans of an instruction card for oiling and a general instruction booklet for the Rural Sonore. NB the missing pages of the booklet were just blank. I just love the injunction on P17 - "Ne pas perdre son sang-froid". It conjures up an image of a film show in a rural village hall in the late 30's run by the French equivalent of Corporal Jones, who runs about shouting "Don't Panic! Don't Panic" when the film breaks.
I have included a much-cleaned-up version of the card and a modified scan of one of the booklet pages - the rest are raw scans. The nearest to what the booklet actually looks like is the front cover. It shows the problem of scanning old stuff in particular. Unless it is completely flat, you get shadows/shading across parts of the image, which are impossible to remove without considerable tweaking of the image, which can lose some detail. The scanner seems to decide its own colour cast for each page. I think the cleaned-up card looks much better, but it's a lot of work. There's still one bit at the end I couldn't read. Something I do quite often is to find a similar type-face and re-type words or letters, either completely or by super-imposing a new letter over the original. In this case, there is one group of three words re-typed and several super-impositions.
The adjusted image of P17 of the booklet shows the problems of having to tweak heavily - the text is simply not as clean/clear as the original. Depends a bit what we are trying to achieve, I suppose - conservation of original documents or preservation of information.
