[Bell Historians] RW 5000

[Chris Povey]

> How many noticed that this week's Ringing World was no 5000 (I hope
> you did, Robert!)?

Is this tongue-in-cheek? Hard to tell from emails.

John Camp

No; well not quite. I feel privileged if I've managed to cause you to scratch your head, John.

This week's RW still hadn't arrived when I wrote that message; it came this morning (ahh, the days when it used to come on Thursdays...). I happened to notice last week's issue as being the 4999th. It would have been a shame to miss the big event. Having read it at long last, Robert clearly did the occasion proud.

The tongue-in-cheek bit? The $64k question is: is this week's really the 5000th? When I was compiling my collection of RWs, it became clear that, in the 1950s particularly, the printers must have employed a particularly dozy type-setter. On a number of occasions the issue number was unchanged for the following week and then it progressed in increasing numbers for a few weeks until someone noticed the numbering was out of kilter and the number went forward by 2 digits to correct it. I seem to remember there being one occasion when the error wasn't corrected, which would have made the 4999th edition the true 5000th - or whatever if there were other uncorrected errors. Have other RW collectors come across this?

Bit like a 2999th pealer expecting the next one to be 3000 and finding an extra one popping from the past.

On another current subject, RW carried a very interesting article by Bob Smith re Kings Lynn. The very last sentence of the last paragraph was nicely and correctly commercial.

Chris Povey

           
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ringingworld.co.uk/pipermail/bell-historians/attachments/20070224/39745a92/attachment.html>