New Projects

 
While we waited for, and consulted with the visiting worker-bees mentioned in my “Problems & Frustrations” post [much earlier today], I’ve been writing the next installment of Idaho history for the South Fork Revue, and collecting more events for the “On This Day” database.

Also, as I waited for an answer from a publisher for the Idaho livestock history book (see THE BOOK page on the South Fork Revue), I started thinking about a new project. Then I was approached with an idea by Skip Myers -- I’ve mentioned him here on the blog before, and have a link to his “Idaho City Events” web page.

By an odd coincidence, he had heard about a request from a publisher to do a photographic history of Boise County (and therefore Idaho City). The publisher, Arcadia Publishing, has a series called “Images of America,” and this would be part of that.

No one at the Boise Basin Museum, nor people they knew, felt comfortable with the notion of tackling such a project. As you can tell from his web page, Skip is fascinated by the history of Idaho City and that region. However, the idea of creating an actual book rather flustered him … so he thought of me.

I already had a copy of Arcadia’s Idaho Falls title and found the concept very interesting -- particularly since I’ve done a fair amount of photo/text composition work with The Retort, the good-sized (18-22 pages) quarterly newsletter I co-edit and desktop-publish for the Idaho Academy of Science.

The Idaho Falls book basically has a page of background for each of its 10 chapters, and the rest is many pages of photographs with (usually) very detailed captions. Although Arcadia prefers to work with a local author, Skip and I felt we could team up for this project. Skip would do the local leg-work on the photos and anecdotes and I would organize the material and write the caption “glue” that holds everything together. (Of course, I do plan to visit over there and examine the materials myself, hopefully within the next month.)

I didn’t bring this subject up before because I wasn’t sure how things would go. Now, however, the preliminaries have gone very well, so I have started collecting references specific to that topic. The references I already had in hand have some information, but not as much as I’d like. (I was researching the livestock industry, not mining.)

Offhand, I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble finding the 180-240 photos they typically want for their books. (Finding ones with good quality might be more of a challenge.) At this point there are no guarantees -- we still have to prepare a detailed proposal and have it accepted -- but I feel it’s definitely worth a shot.

(And I’ll post this as soon as I have my link back. It went down again 10-15 minutes ago. MUCH LATER: After being unconnected all day it’s back. Service man says it could be one of my DSL filters has gotten flakey.)