3.11 More Information

Slide Rule manufacturers of the 20th century usually provided instruction booklets/leaflets for the use of their slide rules, many of which are hard to come by 100 years later. Often times expanded texts – in either hard-bound or soft-bound varieties – were written and sold by the manufacturers as well, and often can be found for sale in used book stores. And of course there were several authors who wrote books on the subject without the bias of a single manufacturer. The Chapter Books, Manuals, and Sheets contains a few books which I have stumbled upon over the past few years and have added to the collection.

The International Slide Rule Museum (ISRM) has produced dozens of books with reproductions of original slide rule manuals and of original catalogs from major slide rule manufacturers as part of their Slide Rule Instructions Library Preservation Project. A searchable Table of Contents of this collection is available at the [ISRM web site]https://sliderulemuseum.com/Volume_Index.shtml){target=“_blank”}.

The reader is also encouraged to check out the other slide rule information found in the References section of this web site. The “Beginner’s Guide to Collecting Slide Rules” and “All About Slide Rules”, both produced by the Oughtred Society, are particularly useful introductory publications.


Over the past three chapters, we have gone through the mathematical formalism of the logarithm and its computation, and we have seen how the logarithm allows for the generation of scales that can be used to perform multiplication and division on a slide rule. Armed with these new insights, and with additional slide rule books and information within reach, hopefully the collection of slide rules displayed in the following chapters can be viewed with more meaning and appreciation.