I too have an original of AP 129 and it sits proudly among all my treasured books as I type this.
Now, in case the Mods read this and cry "advertising not allowed" I shall say right now this is not the intent. I too have written my memoirs garnered from daily diaries and photos kept since 1952 and cross referred to 23,000 hours worth of military and civvy log books. I found the cost of writing and publishing let alone advertising was beyond my means. There had to be another way and I found it.
Chris Brady of
www.b737.org.uk wrote his marvellous The Boeing 737 Technical Manual many years ago. I recall we talked by email and he advised me to use an internet publishing site called
www.lulu.com which is based in Louisiana USA which is free.
The website shows a budding author how to collate the pages etc and submit the book for publication to them. All at no cost. The snag is you have to write your own book and that includes designing the cover page and back page, do your own proof reading and page layout. I needed help from a friend who had computer keyboard expertese. In other words the author is entirely responsible for the donkey work. As I said I needed someone to help me with page layouts.
That done, you simply forward the book file to the internet publishing website of your choice - probably hundreds of them available. I chose
www.lulu.com despite googled comments criticising the site efficiency. My book was around 12 MB. Incidently there are well written instructions from lulu how to decide on what size pages and format and you decide how much you want to sell the book for. Say $20 USD. If someone sees your book advertised (free) on
www.lulu.com they send off the $20 plus around $6 postage to lulu. The author gets $5 and lulu get $5 and the printer gets $10.
Or, you can do what I did, and that is buy 30 copies of your own book from lulu (delivery usually within 14 days) and give them as gifts to friends or family. The printing is the interesting bit, though. As soon as
www.lulu.com get your credit card amount for the book, they contact the nearest capital city to your home address and arrange for one of the hundreds of specialised computerised printers to dash off one copy (or more) to your nominated address.
That is where the $6 "shipping" comes in as it is sent by courier and not by expensive post office means.
All this so far at not a cent from your pocket. All you need is the desire to write your memoire, the basic nouse of writing a story of your life experiences say in aviation, the help of a good friend to guide you through page layouts etc and someone to help you design an attractive colour front page.
For the latter, all I did was to go through my photo albums and selected about four photos of aircraft I had flown, and I found a nice shot of a Pacific island runway taken from very short final from my 737 cockpit. With those photos in my grubby hand I went to a local shopping mall which had a graphic designer who puts photos on coffee mugs and tea towels.
I thought of a title for the book and asked the man behind the counter could he please design a evocative picture for the front of a book to include the photos I gave him and title.
A day later he showed me his work which included several choices. He had done a wonderful job and I was delighted. That cost me a grand total of $35 for his work. I would show you the picture on Pprune but am not permitted due to The Rules.
You may not want to sell the book but just to have something for your family. Fine - lulu couldn't care less but will merely print any number copies that you want.. they get their $5 commission and you are happy. By the way, just google the words "Tall Tails of the South Pacific" and see what comes up. Make sure you spell it as `tails`, too. I achieved a life long ambition to put my log books into words and my family were delighted.
I hope this starts a few of you thinking about those flying experiences of long ago and start off with Chapter One..."there I was at 30,000 ft with nothing on the clocks except the maker's name". And all the jazz.