Home / Archive / August 16, 1950
The letter that turned round, 1950
The Bend Bulletin · August 16, 1950
In the story: 6. The emblem outlives the club, 1930–2010.
In three days of February 1950 the Bulletin replaced its masthead block, and the new one has its third letter backwards.
The Bend Bulletin ran a business directory headed “WHO’S WHO in BEND” from February 1939, with an impression of the emblem at each end of its banner. On 3 January 1950 those impressions read BEND. On 16 August 1950 they read BEND with the third letter mirrored - its diagonal running from the top right down to the left instead of the other way.
A worn block does not reverse a diagonal. Ink spreads, counters close, corners round; none of that turns a letter round. Between those two dates the paper was printing from a different cut.
It matters beyond the Bulletin. The Bend Chamber of Commerce bought a full page in the Bulletin’s Golden Jubilee edition in June 1953 and headed it with the emblem, and that drawing carries the mirrored letter too. For as long as this archive has held it, that page has been filed with the 1912 cut, which it does resemble at a glance. It was printed from the 1950 block.
The reversal was found by eye, looking across the drawings at one size. The shape measurement had not caught it and could not have: a reversed diagonal moves very few pixels, and the score those drawings were being judged on is a whole-device one, dominated by the ring around them.
What is not known is why. An engraver working from a reversed proof would produce exactly this, and so would one copying a photograph the wrong way round, and so would a deliberate choice nobody recorded. The window is three days. The banner of Wednesday 15 February 1950 still falls from the top left and the banner of Saturday the 18th rises to the top right, and the directory did not run on the 16th or the 17th — every page of both issues was searched. Eight impressions from December 1948 to February 1950 are filed with their addresses and hashes; each is an IIIF region of the provider’s own scan, because a render of the provider’s PDF reads this letter the wrong way round (guards rule 82).
Measured
The 1950 re-cut, the angular construction. The 1912 cut's broad letters and three-armed E with the third letter mirrored: its diagonal runs from the top right down to the left.
Read at low confidence from 147 px of letter.
Not measured. The same masthead cut as 1939, printed so heavily that the counters have closed. Declared light, like every other impression of this device, its mask is broken slivers and scores 0.04 against the 1939 printing; declared dark it becomes a near-solid disc and scores 0.81 against the 1953 Chamber drawing - agreement earned by being a blob, not by being that drawing. Neither number is about the drawing, so it is read by eye and not measured. Excluding a drawing is itself a finding, so it is recorded rather than estimated.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured
