The Vintage Electronic
Art Books Collection

Equipment that Shaped our World

  • Some pieces of equipment are not merely tools, but the legacy of extraordinary human ingenuity.
  • They shaped science, industry, and sometimes history—and deserve to be understood and preserved.

Technical Art Books

  • Many of these instruments are true masterpieces, even if their beauty is not immediately accessible to everyone.
  • As masterpieces, they deserve to be presented in books that treat them as works of art.

Art Books are our Work

  • Each volume requires hundreds—sometimes thousands—of hours of dedicated work.
  • Such an effort cannot belong to an industrial publishing model.
  • The final price reflects production costs alone, not profit margins.
Read Quacktech manifesto

Why should art books be limited to painting, sculpture, or architecture? We engineers are perfectly capable of recognizing masterpieces, even when they are created with technologies far more advanced than those humans have had at their disposal since antiquity.

There are electronic creations born not only from research, investment, and engineering, but also from passion, enthusiasm, and the brilliance of extraordinary individuals. Many of these works are true masterpieces; they are simply more complex to understand and therefore dismissed as mere “technical objects” by most people.

Yet many of these instruments have shaped our lives, enabled entire fields of scientific research, and even helped preserve freedom in the modern world. And they are really beautiful to look at, if your eyes can see their beauty. They—and their creators—deserve to be described and celebrated with the same care we devote to classical art.

These are the ideas that inspired me to begin writing what I call technical art books. The aim of this book collection is also to preserve and share the vast technical and historical heritage left by great engineers and scientists—lessons that extend well beyond material science and remind us how powerful our industry can be when guided by creativity and vision.

Giovanni Becattini
giovanni.becattini.books@gmail.com

IN EVIDENCE
COMING SOON: Quacktech Quarterly — The Technical Art Magazine. Issue 1 will be available free of charge.
COMING SOON: New book “The Tubes That Changed the World - From a blackened lamp to the birth of electronics” from Quacktech Editions (radio section).
Our contact mail address was wrong, corrected
A new book “PDP-8 - The Minicomputer That Anticipated Microprocessors” is available from Quacktech Editions (computer section).
FREE: new eBook “OTTO - Build Your Own Educational PDP-8 Clone Using an FPGA” is available from Quacktech Editions (computer section).
A new book “When Machines Learned to Write” is available from Quacktech Editions (radio section).
A new book “Digital But Analog - Digital Behavior in an Analog Era” is available from Quacktech Editions (radio section).
The work “The Golden Age of HP Through Some of Its Masterpieces” in five books is now complete and available.
Web Site Revision Hystory

QUACKTECH QUARTERLY

The Technical Art Magazine

Quacktech Quarterly is a new free digital magazine devoted to Technical Art: instruments, computers, radio equipment, circuits, components, restoration stories and the people and ideas behind them.

Its purpose is to document, explain and preserve technical knowledge that might otherwise become difficult to find or simply disappear.

Issue 1 will be available soon.

Would you like to receive it — or contribute to a future issue? Just drop me a line at info@k100.biz
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Radio and Communications Books

Books on telegraphy, radio systems, communications equipment, and related technologies

This section gathers titles devoted to communication technologies in the broadest sense: printing telegraphy, military and civilian radio, signal systems, and restoration stories centered on how information was transmitted across distance.
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Tektronix Books

Oscilloscopes, plug-ins, instrumentation history, and restoration

This section is dedicated to Tektronix: one of the most important names in electronic instrumentation. It will collect books on oscilloscopes, plug-ins, technologies, engineering ideas, and the restoration of some of the most fascinating instruments ever built.
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Hewlett-Packard Books

The golden age of HP through instruments, systems, and design culture

This section brings together books related to Hewlett-Packard and its extraordinary contribution to electronic measurement. It includes instruments, systems, and broader reflections on the technical culture that made HP one of the most remarkable companies in the history of electronics.
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Computers Books

When computers weren’t all the same

This section tells the stories of some of the computers that helped shape our world, from an era when a new machine was often incomparably better than those that had appeared only a few months before.
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Other Titles

Special topics, publishing, and books outside the main instrument families

This section contains titles that do not belong to the main series above, but still fit naturally within the broader Quacktech world: publishing, unusual technical subjects, and projects that deserve a place of their own.
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IMPORTANT NOTES
Prices: Prices, shipping costs, and delivery times are detailed on the retailer’s page.
Size: Unless otherwise noted, the nominal book size is 210 × 210 mm.
Book quality:
- Elektor Books: we can consider their industrially-created books as the state of the art, with the best print quality and book robustness.
- The Great British Bookshop: these books are printed on luxury coated paper, and offer a print quality comparable to the above ones. Some of them are available in hardcover, with somewhat lower binding robustness than Elektor. Being produced in UK, higher shipping costs and possible customs fees may apply, depending on destination (see notes on each title) - Amazon KDP: these books are a bit larger (8.5 x 8.5”, 215.9 x 215.9 mm) and are printed on Premium Color paper (about 90gsm, matt). The print quality is lower, however more than acceptable. Hardcovers are not available. On the other hand, they offer fast worldwide delivery and generally lower shipping prices.

DISCLAIMER
Quacktech Editions is a project born without a profit motive, whose primary purpose is the preservation of knowledge. Any eventual revenue is intended solely to cover the costs of production and publication. The books are produced with the greatest care possible, with the aim of achieving the highest quality in both content and print. However, no warranty—either express or implied—is assumed. The contents are provided as is, for cultural and educational purposes.