Digitizing the Taro Leaf is nearly complete
Our goal of digitizing ALL issues of the Taro Leaf is nearly complete. As of April 2015, 352 issues with a total of about 10,100 pages have been converted to electronic format and uploaded to the website.
I do not know how many Taro Leafs have been published; I don't think anyone does as the Association has no master list.
This involved understanding each Editor's logic with several issues published each year. This was not only inconsistent from Editor to Editor, it was inconsistent within Editors! What this means is the table of Taro Leafs begins with years, then about 1963 converts to Bi-yearly Volumes, and about 1996 returned to years with four issues per year.
What this may mean to you is the possibility that a specific issue of the Taro Leaf you are looking for may be located in a year that you may not anticipate, either the previous or the following year.
We will scan additional issues if we find them. Issues since the Fall of 2007 were available in electronic format; all other issues going back to the first in August 1947, have to be scanned from the paper copies.
Thanks to Ed & Carolyn Farmer's* most generous financial assistance, my Canon** Sheet Feeder Scanner will digitize an 80-page Taro Leaf magazine in about one minute! While this renders the digitizing process a great deal less time-consuming, organizing and preparing the documents for scanning, and then verifying the scanned document, optimizing them for the web, indexing and uploading still are not trivial by any means!
More Taro Leafs may be needed.
The following Association members have provided a large number of old Taro Leafs: Jim Mims, Gene Spicer (whose copies were still wet from a basement calamity), Joe O’Connell, Clinton Roberts, John Shay, Vonnie Mullins, Rod Stack, Wes Morrison, Gerald Brown, John Haverty, Ben Wahley, Mario Iezzoni, Margo Nelsen, Bill Hosler and possibly others. But more are still needed.
I have no idea if there are any more missing issues, as I have no idea how many were actually printed. The number published each year varied from two to ten. This is the reason for the imprecision.
If you believe you have Taro Leafs that are not in the table, please contact the webmaster.
* Ed and Carolyn Farmer at Springfield, MO 2008 Reunion ; photo by Thiel.
** Canon DR-M160 Sheet Feeder Scanner shown open in scanning position. While it looks rather large, it only has a 6” x 12” footprint! $937,