When I received my original Curta with canister, box, and two manuals (Your Curta and Computing Examples) - - the two manuals were loosely curled around the canister with many dog-eared edges. I took them out and carefully straightened the folds and pressed them in a large book to restore them to flatness.

My question is, how do others store their manuals?

I currently still have mine pressed in the book, but I can just imagine that over the fullness of time forgetting where they are and them being eternally separated from the Curta. Is it best just to neatly curl them back around the canister as they originally came, or is there another good approach?

Well, I found an easy solution to this for all the Curta's I have bough so far. None of them came with manuals, so no problem.

I would offer to ship mine to you, but then you'd just have the same problem as me.

My Curtas are in a display cabinet, as are the manuals. The curl enables them to stand upright as part of the backdrop along with copies of the blueprints and an old advertisement.

My manuals are in plastic sleeves - and some of them are online

From a view of long time archival storage an acid free paper envelope would be the best (plastic contains emollient which can be bad for old papers...)

2010*smiths wrote:

My Curtas are in a display cabinet, as are the manuals. The curl enables them to stand upright as part of the backdrop along with copies of the blueprints and an old advertisement.

Now that's a glass half full!

I think I'm going to accept the curl like you, and just slip them into a thin acid free envelope as murff suggested, and return them to their embrace of the Curta canister in their Curta box. Curta's are a treasurable physical object which will almost certainly be traded back and forth a millenia from now - - it would be all too easy for the manuals to get separated from the set and lost in the mists of time.

Curt A. Calculator wrote:

Now that's a glass half full!

That's the way that I roll, and don't unroll

Are we ever truly owners of our Curtas? Or merely short-term biological stewards in their long-term mechanical existence? Curta∞!