Radio amateur QSL cards are not usually worth a second look, unless you send or receive them to confirm reception (short-wave listener QSL cards, usually sent by state run radio stations are better designed and colorful) but many ordinary printed items like beer mats, matchbooks, business cards or chocolate box menus, when lots of them are shown together, they are certainly worth a second look.
Author Roger Bova found the book's 150 QSLs in a New York state antique shop in 2020 and he was hooked. A bit of research confirmed that Charles Hellman, with the call-sign W2RP had received them all over the last few decades.
The book's format is to have the front and back of each card on one page, they are life-size and mostly 5.5 by 4 inches with the essential information in a series of boxes for the date, time, frequency, signal quality et cetera. Frequently a three-letter grouping, always starting with a Q, pops up on many cards, page thirty-three lists twenty-four Q codes.
With so many cards they are certainly interesting to look at and W2RP received a lot of them from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. To break up the book's format there a frequent huge page-size blow-ups of part of a card. Oddly, the book has an Index over eleven pages with thumbnails of all the cards and the page numbers but it serves no purpose because there is no obvious way to find a card, say, by country or date.
Radio amateurs will enjoy the book and others, like graphic designers or those who follow the look of popular culture will have an interest.
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