Stronglight catalog # 27 (1984)

The question has been asked, "...what gives with the Stronglight No.27 catalog posted to Velo-Pages having an imprint date on its last page of August 1982 when it is claimed to otherwise be a 1984 publication?". And that would be a very good question....

As a basic "rule of thumb" regarding dating sequences for Stronglight catalogs (...and that is to say, only their "full line" catalogs and decidedly NOT their secondary brochures), consider that they were published every other year from at least the late 1960's through the late 1980’s (...this according to Mel Pinto who was once kind enough to confirm my supposition), and past that point in time I am going to plead “ignorance of exactitude” owing to the fact that I do not have any such later publications:

1970 - No. 20
1972 - No. 21
1974 - No. 22
1976 - No. 23
1978 - No. 24
1980 - No. 25
1982 - No. 26
1984 - No. 27
1986 - No. 28
1988 - No. 29

Knowing all of this, for the longest time I too wondered how it could be that the particular Stronglight catalog No. 27 held in my personal archive had an August 1982 publication date in contravention of their normative release schedule - that is, until the advent of eBay when I started running across a multitude of other copies of this very same Stronglight catalog No. 27 clearly marked with an August 1984 publication date (...I kid you not - I now make it a point of asking each and every seller that lists one of these catalogs for sale on eBay "...could you please tell me the publication date found on the back page?"). The only thing I am left to theorize then is that somehow someone let, for lack of a better term, a "printer's mistake" out the door with the wrong publication date for 1984 errantly indicating that it was from 1982 for at least SOME NUMBER of those earliest Stronglight catalog No. 27 copies. Having been in the marketing and advertising biz myself, I know only too well how painfully easy it is to take an inadvertent bite out of your own bottom line by discovering well into having ten million catalogs printed that there was a "boo-boo" and being confronted with the harsh reality of either "using what you got - right or wrong" after making the correction for the remainder of the print run ... OR ... biting the financial bullet and dumping those mis-prints so that you can have the bittersweet pleasure of re-printing a couple million publications on your own dime (...not the kind of tax write-off I generally look for). Now I am not going to suggest that Stronglight had quite that number of catalogs in their distribution channel back then, but I can certainly empathize with their circumstance and subsequent decision to make some use of those "copy goofs" if, indeed, that is what happened. As a self professed perfectionist, I must say that as much as I like everything to be neat and tidy and orderly and without any loose ends whatsoever, the reality of life is that very rarely if ever does that occur. Thus, I am left to say that while I cannot offer anything more than "speculation" as to the dating discrepancy seen here, I would at least like to think that my hypothesis as to why this may have occurred is both fairly studied as well as fairly plausible.

And believe me, I have STRONGLY considered "doctoring" images of the No. 27 Stronglight catalog as posted herein to Velo-Pages (...as it would be SO easy to do). But that somehow rubs my sensibilities wrong despite the obvious expediency.