I bought my Adana 8x5 on eBay a few months ago. I was lucky. It was a bargain and in complete and full working order. The only thing that really needed doing, and I've been meaning to get round to this for ages, was to replace the packing on the platen. It had gone a bit wavy in the less than perfectly controlled humidity of its surroundings. Now however, as I'm about to print some business cards for a friend I decided the moment had come to tackle the job.
A previous owner had rather ingeniously used magazine pages covered by brown card to pack the platen. I was curious to see what lay beneath - just to see what year the packing had last been changed. If I'd thought about it at all I would have assumed that the pages were from a Radio Times or a Reader's Digest. Or perhaps even from Small Printer (The British Printing Society's magazine, though come to think of it, Small Printer would be better suited to packing an Adana 5x3).
Imagine my total delight when I found that the magazine pages actually came from a soft porn magazine. Not just any soft porn magazine either, but from Fiesta magazine, which is famous for introducing the original "Readers Wives" feature to an unsuspecting and more innocent world. There are so many things which I could write about this discovery – but it would feel like shooting fish in a barrel, so I won't. It certainly brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Ladies of Letterpress" though...
Enough to say that I made the following observations:
1. The women have carefully tended but luxuriant lady gardens - it's all rather retro
2. There were no dates (the pages had been cut to size) but judging from the film reviews (Aliens, Stripper, Pretty in Pink and Invaders from Mars) it seems that this was an issue from 1986.
Clearly, replacing the platen packing was a job that was long overdue.
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