Editing a Classic Philatelic Book (1)

Ada Prill, The Philatelic Exhibitor

I’ve learned the hard way – editing someone else’s prose is much harder than simply writing new text! When I was offered the job of updating Randy Neil’s seminal Philatelic Exhibitors Handbook, I thought it would take maybe a month. Lots of people said they would help. All I had to do was plug in the new exhibiting rules that took effect in 2001, right? Maybe update the list of national shows? Wrong! How about two years?

The original Exhibitor's Handbook

The first glitch came when I found out that (gulp) Randy did not have any electronic version of his 1995 book. Heck, I even have access to a computer that can read 5 1/4″ floppies, but not even those were extant. I’m a terrible typist, so I gratefully accepted the offer of Subway Stamp Shop, the publisher, to send me an OCR scan. Ummm. Quite frankly retyping the whole book would have been faster than cleaning up the OCR’s work! It had attempted to read text in boxes and text on illustrated exhibit pages, and the result was page after page of gibberish. After deleting the worse of it, I was left with text such as “whythe small cost ofjoining the~AAPE can be some of the best money an exhibitor.— [~om novice to advanced—will ever spend.” This is an actual unedited quote from the OCR scan. Even in the last weeks I was still finding “1" used instead of “I.”

OCR results produced garbled text requiring correction

The next problem was illustrations. Randy’s book was lavishly illustrated, but not one of those illustrations was still available. Probably it turned out to be better that I had to find roughly 300 new pictures, as many of the old ones actually dated from the 1988 First Edition. But it was a daunting task.

I asked for – and received – help from dozens of exhibitors. Janet Klug, Phil Stager, Steve Zwillinger, and Andrew MacFarlane sent me CDs of exhibit pages to choose from, and Tom Fortunato and Joann Lenz offered scans from their web pages. Kirsten Ollies’ Queen Elizabeth exhibit was also available on Tom’s web site. (Of course I checked with her before using the images.) I asked Jeff Shapiro and Steve Suffet for permission to scan pages from the exhibits they sent me for ROPEX 2005. And – again with permission – I downloaded scans of the title pages that George Nicholson, Jim Kotanchik, and Fred Fawn sent for posting on the ROPEX web site. Jonathan Becker sent me a lot of page scans, including one that he had improved, with “before” and “after” versions. Ken Lawrence provided another “before and after” and several other useful images. He also allowed me to use several very useful paragraphs of explanatory material, including the text of one of his posts on the Virtual Stamp Club.

Phil Stager's exhibit page demonstrates great use of different philatelic elements

A few exhibitors, including Ray Stone, Kurt Laubinger, Steve Suffet, Ben Ramkissoon, John Hotchner, Ron Lesher, and Ken Kutz, brought or sent me actual pages or color photocopies to scan. (I wore out a scanner in the process.)

Many others e-mailed me scans: Mark Butterline, Tim Bartshe, Jonathan Becker, Nancy Clark, Lloyd de Vries, David Eeles, Dzintars Grinfelds, Ken Lawrence, Omar Rodriguez, Harlan Stone, Harvey Tilles, and Alan Warren. Vicki Canfield Peters sent me scans of Jim Graue’s pages, and Susan Shapiro scanned pages from Jeff’s exhibits. Nancy Clark illustrated the postal stationery chapter she wrote and then sent me images of some stampless cover pages when I realized that I was lacking those for the postal history chapter.

In some cases I then, unfortunately, had to spend an hour or more cleaning up each illustration, as one of my most important sources had a bad scanner bulb, and there were dark streaks to remove from every scan. In some cases I had to enlarge the page greatly and replace pixels individually. Most of the images, regardless of source and including my own scans, needed some work, if only to increase the contrast. It was very frustrating to me when the printed book made many illustrations that I had painstakingly made more contrasty into muddy reproductions that looked no better than the originals!

(continuation of this article Editing a Classic Philatelic Book Part 2)