The effort to catalog and describe all known Order of the Arrow issues has been ongoing since the 1950s.  Many old collectors will remember the Bill Price books that had a picture of each flap and attempted to describe the restrictions.  David Leubitz had a book – the original Blue Book that tried to catalog the issues and introduced the vocabulary that many collectors are familiar with today such as “S” for solid embroidered flap and “F” for not fully embroidered flap.  Later Albertus Hoogeveen and Richard Breithaupt revolutionized this effort with Arapahoe that was published in 1976 with pictures.  The Arapahoe II Supplement was published in 1988 and reorganized the original catalog based on new information.  Perhaps it was this renumbering of issues that led some collectors to begin work on a new Blue Book effort that would have a structure of national (4), regional (18) and lodge (100+) editors to make the final determinations on cataloging Order of the Arrow memorabilia. 

In this session that was recorded at the Dallas TOR in 2013 there is a discussion led by Roy More of TSPA that catches up on that history and explains what is going on with Blue Book 2.0. The Blue Book was published in 1996 and eventually the printed book included 5 editions that came in two year intervals.  The final version was released almost completely as a digital product in 2006. 

Johnny Sneed of Louisiana is also  in on the session and he served as one of the original regional editors and volunteered his time and talents to lay out the massive book.  You can also hear the voice of Todd Rogers who chimes in with some good points. Much of the second half of the session is a brainstorming chat about how to redo the numbering and classification system of OA patches. Find more Scouting memorabilia content and all of my podcasts at http://www.scoutpatchcollectors.com.