Unexpected Find: a Lunopinion from 1946

My bookshelves harbour interesting stories.... Today I was moving one of my bookcases to another space in my living room (holidays are a perfect time to do stuff like that). As I can be quite clumsy, I dropped a stack of books while moving them.

While gathering the books, I suddenly saw a paper that I didn't recognize and had never seen before. As I have a habit of buying books in second hand shops, preferably in Britain or Ireland, I supposed it had fallen from one of the books. It was a Lunopinion, No 4, dated Saturday February 16th 1946. A small historical find!?

I immediately started searching the internet.... A Google search on "Lunopinion" gave no results (apart from L' Opinion, which definitely wasn't what I was looking for...), so I decided to read the old paper carefully to find more information about it's purpose and relevance...

The terms "Luneburg Airfield", "squadron" and RAF, the header of the front page - see above, the triangle with 'wings' - and the pictures and cartoons in the four page paper, gave me the impression that it had something to do with a RAF squadron, that had been stationed at Luneburg Airfield in Germany. Another thing I noticed was, that the whole paper was in English, but it said "Price 1/2 mark"... so it was sold in Germany.

My sense of adventurousness awoke. Wouldn't it be nice if I could give this paper to someone who is doing research on this period in Germany, or about the British RAF, or to someone who had been stationed at this Luneburg Airfield?

To share my enthusiasm about my find, I wrote a short message about this on Twitter, to see if any other Twitterers had any suggestions. And especially @rotjong started searching with me (thanx!). I searched for "RAF squadron" "151" or "5". But @rotjong found a page from the 51st squadron that mentioned Luneburg. I'm not sure yet which one it is, but I hope I'll find out by placing this blog item. I also took some more pictures of the paper and of some of the cartoons in it and put them on Flickr. Who knows, maybe someone will search for Lunopinion one day and find this blog or these pics?

Another suggestion from a Dutch Twitterazi was to get in touch with the NIOD, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. So I also wrote them an email. Not expecting anything, but it might be nice to hand this paper over to someone interested in this subject.

One other thing that "hit me" was the interesting information in the "Editorial" about the way this paper had been set:

• "The bloke who does his sits at a sort of typewriter attached to a cloddy great chunk of machinery which does every thing except answer him back. He just touches the letter keys and hey presto moulds of letters dash along go up, down and in, metal is heated poured in, taken out, the moulds disappear again into the bowels of this monster and finally whole lines of type appear. Lines make columns and columns make pages. There is our page of print."

A smile appeared on my face, as I've graduated in Book and Publishing Studies (in 1996) and it has been ages ago that I did something with these studies... It's a nice reminder of the good times I had in the Printing Room of Academic Press Leiden organizing lead type on rulers and handprinting book covers :-)

It also reminded me of another 'historical find' that I'd done during a trip to Dublin in 2006. I'll tell more about that in my next blog item. Let's see if this can generate any interesting experiences :-)