| Welcome to the Beer Magazine Viewer!!! |
| The program you are now running is a custom written Java application for display of various beer can collecting magazines. At this writing, nearly 40,000 pages of eighteen different magazines have been scanned into a digital archive, allowing for display of specific years, months, and individual pages, as well as usage of a custom written keyword search engine for referencing this quantity of data. |
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While the first beer can collection was likely formed soon after beer
cans were introduced in the 1930's, the first major collecting oriented
publication, the BCCA "News Report", didn't appear until
March, 1971. The 1970's were a boom time for collecting, with new
organizations and multiple publications, such as
"Beer Cans Monthly". Unfortunately, the boom has long since faded, and many of
those organizations and publications exist no more.
Fortunately, significant information about our hobby was published, and it is the goal of the "Beer Magazine Viewer" project to provide this digital archive to both current and future collectors as a reference to this vast amount of data. No collector should learn on their own, but instead from the knowledge shared by those who came before. Let this digital archive preserve this long out of print information, as well as remember many early collectors who may no longer be with us. |
| And in the words of Robert Dabbs himself, founder of Beer Cans Monthly, and written in the Welcome of the first issue, "Knowledge and information is of little value if not ever put in use. Let us put it to work with our large audience of beer can collectors." |
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| Please support the Rusty Bunch and future projects |
| A major number of hours went into producing this digital content, as well as many more hours in the writing, testing and support of this BMV application. Still, there is no copy protection or other activation process. Why? The content and usage of the BMV is completely free! |
| Please read, search, and enjoy the articles included within this BMV package. If you do find yourself caught up reading and reminiscing about the hobby from years past, please make sure to support the Rusty Bunch and the BCCA. If you find value with the project, please donate to the RB chapter or the BCCA; either monetarily, raffle items, your time, or additional content for the BMV. Happy reading... |
| -Randy Karasek (RB 636) |