Moog Imoogination book advertisement, Contemporary Keyboard 1976

Moog Imoogination Book advertisement from page 34 of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine May/June 1976.

I know I've started more than one post with the line 'I was flipping through old issues of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine when...". Well, this time it starts of eerily similar, but with a 21st century twist:

I was flipping through old posts on MATRIXSYNTH when...

...I came across an old 2007 auction for 'Rare Moog Synthesizer literature' - Imoogination. I recognized that crazy Bob Moog image immediately and looked back over my old issues of CK. Sure enough, I found this ad.

The ad is for the original Imoogination 'book', so the first volume must have come out sometime in late 1975 or early 1976. Since the ad doesn't mention Volume 2, I'm gonna guess it was released sometime after June 1976. The auction states that the first volume of Imoogination was 20 pages and the second volume was 32 pages. Both were done in a newsprint format.

I did a bit more searching to try and find some better photos and sure enough, MATRIXSYNTH had also posted a Flickr set from a 2008 PNW synth gathering that included a few Imoogination literature shots. Here's one image that shows some of the content of the books.

A bit more digging, and I found that GForce Software's Web site had some info on a page devoted to the history of the Minimoog (on which they modeled their softsynth Minimonsta). On that page they include an image of the cover of volume 1 and this description:

"This was one of two newspaper type brochures from 1976, the first of which carries the most wonderful psychedelic front cover asking the eternal question “What is a Synthesizer?”

"Inside are features with Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Milton Babbit, Roger Powell and some fascinating facts about Bob’s background. "

Some more information on the content of these 'books' came from a discussion thread I found on Code404.com:

"The seed of the idea came from the already mentioned 'imoogination' (Moog advertising/propaganda from the 70's) article where some guy was trying to explain why Moog products sounded better than the competition. The accidental phase sync thing just stuck with me for some reason. From memory, some of the other things mentioned included really fast attack times (combined with hopeless vca trim resulting in DC in the output), very high quality filters (yeah right)."

I couldn't find too much more... if anyone knows anything, please send me an email or comment. I definitely have to try hunting those down!