When did they stop printing Sweets Catalogs?
Because internet
2012 according to this article.
https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-last-sweets-catalog/
I am teaching a class about specifications research and wanted to mention SWEETS. Many in my class have probably never even seen a SWEETS catalog!
2012?! I thought it was 20 years ago that they stopped printing.
They stopped printing?
We used to box and archive a full set every year in case of lawsuits. I can’t imagine how much that cost over the years. In the 1990’s one firm I knew of paid someone to digitize an entire set of Sweets one year but didn’t think to set up a means of searching and retrieving the information so you would have to look through entire disks to find anything since the disks weren’t labeled, just numbered sequentially along with everything else digitized that year (project drawings, specs, Code books, etc.). Thousand of hours and hundreds of disks, all useless.
First in the 1980’s and again in the 1990’s, I wanted a set of my own at home so I took home the previous years set when a new one arrived at work. That worked out to one volume per evening carried on the bus from the financial district to my home in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. When it was time to say goodbye, the reverse process was one volume per morning down the 66 stair steps from my home office to the recycle bins. Coming or going, those suckers were heavy.
Steven, it seems, just like project manuals, Sweet’s catalogs, due to their considerable weight, had other uses beyond that intended. Acting as a temporary door stop is the first that comes to mind.
Wheel chocks?
I do remember Sweets being used for dry-mounting and de-curling projects.
A well known, award winning San Francisco Architect once threw a Sweets Catalog at me when I explained that his brilliant idea didn’t meet code. I forget which DIVISION.