Before posting a link, here’s some fun facts about scanning squelch issues (read: me bitching about how it’s much harder than I thought it’d be):

The scanning of a 16 page issue takes about one and a half hours. At 600 dpi, this produces a 30 meg image for each page, so you’ve got 480 megs for each issue.

Cropping, rotating, editing, and cleaning up a full issue takes about another hour and a half. Then pdfing can take as little as a half hour or as much as two hours depending on how many tries it takes to get the file size right and whether you try to OCR it so the text is selectable. Spending a day doing each issue wouldn’t be so bad except that getting the file size down to 6 megs makes the whole thing look like crap. Oh well, it’s still legible.

This is the Chelsea Issue from 1997. It’s somewhat sarcastically referred to as the start of the Squelch "common era," which is another way of saying this is the first respectable issue after a year or two of funding problems and most of the people who made it are still vaguely around. The cover may seem a little cheesy, but I’ve got a warm spot for it. Unlike most old Squelch covers, it’s actually funny. And though it’s extremely topical (it’s about Chelsea Clinton) it’s still easy to understand and fun.

The back cover was apparently popular. Someone bothered me about it last year, begging me to find a way to get a digital copy for him. Upon reading it finally I’m a little confused, but hey, the cocaine line is funny. I just sent him an email about it, pretty much exactly one year and one month to the day after his first email asking about it. Let this be a lesson to you. The Squelch cares about your emails, but not enough to answer within one calendar year.