Way back when . . . good bands (and by good I mean organized) . . . good bands kept in touch with their audience by publishing a mailing list. The Jim Small Band is an organized band dadgumit. Nowadays, we uses the inter-net to let youze know what is going on. Back then it was the good old US Mail. Early calendars are by Phil Reilly, later ones by Mike Guido. Both of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to K. Douglas Baldwin, guitar player and graphic artist extraordinaire. He showed us how to do it.

Anyway, in the beginning we used the cut and paste method. By that I mean actual, physical cutting and pasting. In the era when smoking was allowed, all bars and clubs had matchbooks with their logo, address and phone number printed on them. The matchbook covers were perfect size to fit into little boxes on a calendar. We would also cut out things from newspapers and magazines, especially MAD magazine. I love MAD. I have been reading it since the 1950's. They have great caricatures and those cool little cartoons in the margins. I cut out a thousand of those and glue-sticked them onto sheets of paper. For lettering, I would use transfer sheets that you could buy in hobby shops. I spent hours lining up letters and tracing over them with a pencil to transfer the dry ink. Some of the calendars I scanned (like Jan Feb '88 ) are the original sheets and you can see how I would glue stuff onto the page and hand letter in some spots and letter transfer on others

In the September 1991 calendar we have first evidence of a computer. No graphics yet, just text. I printed out little essays in small boxes on a dot-matrix printer and then glued them into place. Then you have the few cartoons from MAD and you are ready to go. By January 1992 I was using a Mac computer with Adobe Pagemaker. I eventually graduated to Quark Xpress, which I use to this day. For those of you keeping score at home, I use Dreamweaver to build the Bagsite.

Special mention also should go out to the March 1990 calendar featuring the one and only published edition of "Two Dudes" - a cartoon drawn by Jim Small himself.

The actual paper calendars are all spread out on a table here in the Paper Bag War Room. I scan in another year of calendars every next time I have a night when I want to stay up late staring into the two 20" screens hooked up to my Mac.

Well, I hope you have fun rummaging around in our past. Start on any calendar and you can go forward and back, almost like travelling in time.