Editing a Classic Philatelic Book (2)
Ada Prill, The Philatelic Exhibitor
(continuation of the article Editing a Classic Philatelic Book Part 1)
When I thought I was getting into the home stretch, I realized I needed many more “people” pictures, so I went off to two stamp shows, one a regional (STEPEX in Elmira, NY) and the other national (Philly National) and terrorized judges and exhibitors with my camera. Wonder why there are so many pictures of Doug Clark and Tim Bartshe? They cringed the least when I interrupted their judging work with my picture taking.
Liz Hisey removing her exhibit from the frame
Ed Jackson sent me scenes from Southeastern Stamp Exhibition, and I had previously taken pictures at APS Stampshow and AmeriStamp Expo – just not enough. AAPE Youth Championship Directors Bob and Carol Barr and the Hodge family supplied pictures of youth exhibitors, and I found a CD Vincent Knaus had given me of photos he took at the Youth Championship at NAPEX 2003; Vincent had told me to use them any way I wanted – so I did. Barb Boal sent me pictures of the American Philatelic Center and some from Stampshow. At the very last minute I sent an SOS off to Lloyd de Vries for permission to use his picture of the Air Mail Room at APS headquarters.
Harlan Stone, Omar Rodriguez, Bob Rose, John Allen, Mark Butterline, and Matt Liebson all sent pictures of themselves with their exhibits or computers. Duke Day sent me pictures of his extremely photogenic daughter Elizabeth, who exhibits thematically (horses).
I didn’t want Randy Neil’s book to be without images of some of Randy’s own exhibit pages, so I nagged him mercilessly. Picture by picture, I was able to assemble the 300+ images, each worth a good thousand words, which show rather than tell the reader what exhibiting really means.
Old version of title page for Jonathan Becker's exhibit
Back to the text. I had decided early on that I wanted to preserve Randy’s informal style, which I believe relaxes new exhibitors. His folksy prose is lively and easy to understand. But I did not want to preserve his punctuation, which had irritated me when I used the book some years earlier. I finally did a search on “…” and separated the sentences so spliced. A minor matter, to be sure, but there went a few more days.
New version of title page for Jonathan Becker's exhibit
For much information (such as the aforementioned list of national shows), I came to the conclusion that including specifics would lead to the book being out-of-date and inaccurate in just a few years, so I instead included information about how to find information on the Internet. I hope that APS and AAPE retain their URLs! After (alas) correcting the OCR scan, I decided to cut large chunks of text dealing with hand-lettering of text, as almost no new exhibitors use that method anymore. And the section on word processors needed to be completely re-written, as 2006 word processors are a heck of a lot more versatile than those available in 1995.
Whenever I could, I tried to integrate my work seamlessly into Randy’s text, which meant trying to write like Randy. I found out that using someone else’s style is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I hope that nobody goes through and tries to find which sentences Randy wrote and which I wrote. And if anyone tries and fails, then I have succeeded better than I think I have. In places Randy’s text was very close to what was needed and not really outdated, but events since 1995 had made the subject somewhat more complex. In several cases I appended sub-chapters or a few paragraphs written by others: Alan Warren on first day covers, Tim Bartshe on title pages and synopsis pages, Ken Lawrence on design and layout and first day covers, and Eliot Landau on planning an exhibit and using the computer.
Organization: I decided to put all the general information to help exhibitors get started, such as layout and write-up, in the first part of the book. Then there was a section in which I followed the arrangement of the APS Manual of Philatelic Judging, discussing each division in the order in which it is covered in that book. Last came the chapters such as insurance and how to become a judge. With some trepidation and a LOT of help from John Hotchner, I came up with a final wrap-up chapter on “Emerging Trends.” Fine. I was happy with the outline, but a quick look showed me that I needed a lot of new chapters, not only for the divisions added in 2001, but also for postal stationery and aerophilately, which had not been covered at all in 1995. And the old chapters on individual exhibiting disciplines had to be updated to reflect the new rules, too. 
(continuation of this article Editing a Classic Philatelic Book Part 3)
