The key documents published by DEC describing each model of the PDP-8
are all out of print, and DEC was in the habit of printing much of
their documentation on newsprint with paperback bindings, which is to
say, surviving copies tend to be yellow and brittle.  DEC distributed
huge numbers of catalogs and programming handbooks in this inexpensive
paperback format, and these circulate widely on the second-hand market.
When research laboratories and electronics shops are being cleaned out,
it is still common to find a few dusty, yellowed copies of these books
being thrown out.

Douglas Jones has made a small number of bound photocopies of DEC's
1973 introduction to programming, perhaps the definitive introduction
to the PDP-8, and the other early DEC handbooks need similar treatment
before they all crumble.

Thanks to David Gesswein, a growing collection of PDP-8 documentation,
including the Small Computer Handbook, the PDP-8/e/f/m maintenance
manual, and prints of various boards have been scanned in and made
available on the web at:

	http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/pdp8/
	http://www.pdp8.net/query_docs/query.shtml

Some PDP-8 reference material has been transcribed into Hypertext format
and is available over WWW from:

	http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/index.html

Much more material is available from:

	http://www.spiritone.com/~nabil/pdp8/

In general, maintenance manuals are hard to find, but valuable.  If you
need one, you usually need to find someone willing to photocopy one of
the few surviving copies.  DEC has been friendly to collectors, granting
fairly broad letters of permission to reprint obsolete documentation,
and the network makes if fairly easy to find someone who has the
documentation you need and can get copies.  The most difficult to copy
material is the large prints, many of which would be quite useful if
photoreduced, but this is expensive.