Everyone else skip over this—it's a comment to Redsy. McGraw-Hill and NFPA seemed to develop, over several decades, a long-term love/hate relationship that takes a little explanation, but eventually led to “a parting of the ways.” {I have thumbed through a 1953 version of the collaboration.} There was a person by the name of Joe McPartland, who I last talked to in the late 1980s, and he had nine sons were all in various facets of the electrical business. He was THE undisputed-best code lecturer and author on the NEC, and knew that document inside out and backwards. His every-three-year rounds on Code updates were on the top of the list for everyone—physicist to apprentice, and had a truly blue-ribbon panel of equally talented UL and engineering good guys. They would trade positive comments, potshots, insults, occasional compliments and neck-vein-popping arguments—much to the amusement and approval {and standing ovations} in the audience.
He and cronies would loop thorough the west coast. alternating from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. In SF he was always at the Jack Tar Hotel on Van Ness.
One of the panelists, Bill Broderick was an outstanding electrical PE for a long-standing NYC engineering firm—Meyer, Strong and Jones. I distinctly remember asking him at a conference break in the seventies {…old-bastard-in-training, here} what books he’d recommend—Beeman (1955!) and Smeaton (1977)—that to this day I value highly. Both books are still amazingly valid for electrical plant/institutional power information.
In the mean time, [~1981] NFPA decided they could keep a bigger cut of sales if they “took back” the NEC handbook after a goo umber of editions. Joe McPartland, his son Brian and printings, McGraw-Hill continued after the NPPA takeback, but could no longer include the NEC text in their version. It may still be the case, but the McPartlands refused to add a copyright symbol to the now-trademarked National Electrical Code, “NEC” and {the} “Code,” given the legacy permissions that had existed. For decades Joe was at the top of the masthead of EC&M magazine, until a few years after Intertec bought the magazine, which moved from Avenue of the Americas (5th) in NYC to the Kansas City area. He and a couple of sons formed a competitor to EC&M—called ED&I that quietly [and sadly] folded after a couple of years.
IMO, even without containing the NEC text, the McPartland book is far ahead of the competition.
—McGraw-Hill National Electrical Code HB 24 Ed CD-ROM McPartland/McGraw-Hill—
