What Should a Catalogue Look Like?

Each year the SDSHS Press publishes a catalogue of books that lists all our titles in print and explains a little bit about each one. Everyone is familiar with such catalogues, but lately I’ve started to ponder whether a standard catalogue of books is the best way to go about things.

We see a ton of book catalogues in this office; we receive them from fellow publishers, primarily as a way for our journal editor to see which books she would like to have reviewed in South Dakota History. However, we share them around the office, looking at them with a critical eye, seeing what other presses are doing in our field, as well as looking to see how they are laying out and producing their catalogues.

These other presses produce their catalogues in a dizzying array of styles, shapes, paper weights, formats, etc., but all are essentially along the same lines as the one we publish each year. But is that they best way they can be? At about this time each year I start to begin the preliminary work on our catalogue, and this year I’m going to reconsider ours from top to bottom. Should we use a different shape? paper? style? We’ve had the same basic design for the past 3 years…is it time for a change? Would a “magazine” format work better? Would people read a catalogue if it was presented as a small book or magazine? Would that idea give people more information than they would really like or would it present them with something more tangible and relevant than a simple listing of the books we publish? I’m tempted by the idea of presenting each book in an “article” format, with the pages laid out in a fashion that resembles something more like a magazine. I think such an approach is at least worth considering, but I don’t yet know if I’ll definitely move the project along those lines or not. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, if you have a thought or suggestion along these lines feel free to share it in the comments!

The Ereader Returns

My e-reader and I are back from our wonderful vacation. I have to admit, the e-reader was very handy for travel. It didn’t take up much space or contribute much weight to my carry-on. It was great for filling time while sitting in the terminal, but I found it harder to read by the airplane reading light. I tended to give up and sleep or do crossword puzzles rather than read on the plane.

I didn’t have any trouble with the battery running out, which had concerned me before I left. Of course, there were days when I didn’t read at all, and I made sure the e-reader was completely off when I finished reading, rather than having just the screensaver. I’m sure that helped save the battery. I’m glad I didn’t buy the converter for the country I visited.

My e-reader had wi-fi, but it would have been nice to have 3G as well. Many places we stayed had wi-fi, but it was not free and I would have had to buy the password (which I didn’t). Having 3G would have helped get around that problem.

Now that I am home, I have tried unsuccessfully to finish the book I was reading on the e-reader. Curling up in bed with an e-reader just isn’t the same for me as curling up with a book. I’ll just wait for my next trip to see if Katniss defeats President Snow and the Capitol.

PE

The Art of Letter Writing

It is January 10th, and since the weather has been so balmy here in South Dakota I’m having a difficult time getting into my usual winter shut-down mode! The busy Christmas season, however, has made me want to slow down and read a good book no matter what the weather outside. I’m going to take time to read Dancing with Colonels this month. A quick glance at the letters contained in this book causes me to stop and remember when I took the time to write letters. I used to write a family member every week, and I would expect to receive a letter in my mailbox from one of them. Today I just have them all in a “group” and email a quick note now and then. I think something is missing from the technology we think we enjoy. I’ve saved most of my received letters, and I just learned from mom yesterday that she has saved hers also. She read me a letter I had written when I had toddlers keeping me busy —we both laughed to tears. Now I routinely delete old letters off of my email. I think the impact of this will be felt years down the road. Anyway, maybe after I am done reading this new release from SDSHS Press I will go back to my old ways of writing letters—after I check my email of course.

LN

Book Covers

Kirkus Reviews has this article about their favorite book covers from 2011 on their website today. So, along those lines, tell us which book cover from the SDSHS Press 2011 list you liked the most.

A Preface in 14 Lines

Here’s something to look forward to for the New Year: this summer the SDSHS Press will release the collected dispatches of the Poet Scout. Ho! for the Black Hills: Captain Jack Crawford Reports the Gold Rush and Great Sioux War is edited by Paul L. Hedren, who just published an article of interest in South Dakota History. The forthcoming book is a rich, engaging read, a pan full of colors, if you will, from the early Black Hills and beyond. As the “poet scout” moniker implies, Captain Jack was known for lightening his dispatches with the occasional amusing verse. So in the spirit of Jack, here’s a bare summary of his activities:

John Wallace Crawford headed for the West
In ’75, a correspondent of
The Daily Bee; he watched Crook give the shove
To miners in the Hills, but like the rest,
He soon was back. He met Wild Bill and tried
Some prospecting himself, and frequently
He wrote a verse to send back to the Bee.
And what he did then, pard, you can’t deride:
He joined the Army scouts, and saw Slim Buttes,
And rode a dispatch back, three hundred miles,
In six days flat. He went on to beguile
The public in his trademark buckskin suits.
There’s much more to this interesting guy;
Our book is coming to you this July!

RGH

The Vanishing Post Office

The Winter 2011 issue of South Dakota History is now wending its way to members of the State Historical Society via the United States mail. Mail service, and post offices specifically, have been in the news within the past few weeks as officials debate the ways in which the United States Postal Service might gain a sounder financial footing. Particularly interesting to people in largely rural states like South Dakota is speculation as to which post offices might be closed as part of the postal service’s belt-tightening efforts. Like schools, post offices have long been part of a community’s core. Having a post office makes a place a “real” town. The post office is, in effect, a community center where people come and go not just for letters and packages, but for conversation and camaraderie.

That’s what makes James L. Krysan’s photographic essay in this issue of South Dakota History so timely. During the early 1970s, Krysan began photographing post offices in small eastern South Dakota towns as a hobby. After recording fifty-seven over a period of six years, he set the pastime aside, only to have it beckon him again in the early 2000s. In returning to the places he had photographed a quarter-century earlier, he discovered that seventeen of the post offices were no longer there. In fact, of the 465 post offices that were operating throughout South Dakota in 1970, 340 remained open in 2010, illustrating that the closure trend is not a new phenomenon.

Conde's Post Office, 1975

The new Post Office in Conde, 2007

Krysan’s essay in South Dakota History pairs images from twenty towns, documenting the structures and how they have changed over time, thanks to economics, population shifts, modernization, and changing federal policies. Each post office building has its own unique story to tell, and Krysan’s photographs are one way of saving those that are destined to disappear.

JKO

Photos copyright James L. Krysan

Congratulations to Prairie Pages

The South Dakota State Historical Society Press is incredibly fortunate to have a wonderful local, independent bookstore. Prairie Pages is the store in question. As bibliophiles, the staff here all loves to pop down to the store as often as we can to browse their shelves and say hello. Of course, as a publisher, we also like to pop down there and say hello and see how our books are selling!

Last night was one such night. Prairie Pages had placed an order for a number of books, so I ran them down there at the end of the day and stopped by owner Peggy Stout’s office to say hello. Lo and behold, she had wonderful news: Prairie Pages has been named the South Dakota Retailer of the Year for 2012. Now, this is a big deal and a wonderful achievement, and the SDSHS Press would like to be among the first to offer our congratulations. Peggy and co-owner Kathy Villa and their delightful staff deserve this accolade. Their store is a pleasure to be in, and we enjoy working with them on a regular basis for book signings and other book events.

It is pleasing to see a local, independent business doing well, and it is even more pleasing when that business is a bookstore. We are all too beholden to the power and convenience of the internet, but walking into a well-run bookstore and taking time to meander around the shelves, picking up books, never knowing when you might spot a title you just never knew you had to have. I think anyone who enjoys reading books has probably done that exact same thing in a good bookstore, and I, for one, hope we can continue to do so for a long time to come.

So, support your local, independent bookstore, and maybe, just maybe, more such great places as Prairie Pages will be acknowledged for their hard work. A big hearty three cheers to you, Peggy and Kathy, from SDSHS Press.

Ereaders and Me

I have never been a fan of e-readers. I like the weight of a “real” book and even the smell. I think that using multiple senses (sight, touch, smell) helps me absorb what I am reading. I will be heading off on a long trip soon, however, and my dear children bought me an e-reader to take along.

Admittedly, the reduced weight will be a nice thing. On my last trip, I hauled three books to the other side of the world and back, which definitely added pounds even though the volumes were paperbacks. With the e-reader, I can take more than three books without loading up my luggage.

The e-reader also has Wi-Fi, so I can check the news back home without needing a smart phone or using the hotel computer. And best of all, I don’t have to decide now what I will want to read in a few weeks. The e-reader holds over a thousand books, so I can bring a wide selection of titles and read whatever I am in the mood for.

There are drawbacks, however. The battery is supposed to last a month with the Wi-Fi turned off. But what if it doesn’t? What if I forget to turn the Wi-Fi off? I don’t have a power adapter for the country I am visiting, so what happens if the battery runs out? Will I be left with nothing to read? These are important questions to a serious reader.

There are added costs with an e-reader, too. In order to protect your investment, a case is a good idea. It is also nice to have a power adapter so the device can be charged by plugging it into an outlet instead of a computer (I do have the US plugin). And what about a light, since the e-reader is not backlit like a phone?

Time will tell whether I become an e-reader aficionado or not. At least I will have a couple of weeks to find out.

PE

2011 in Review

You have probably noticed the large number of “Year in Review” articles that spring up during the Holiday season. Well, SDSHS Press doesn’t want to be left out, so here is our own little review of the year that was.

2011 has been an excellent year for us. We’ve worked hard over the past 14 years to solidify our reputation as a publisher of well-written, well-edited, and well-produced history books, and as we prepare to celebrate our 15th year in existence, we published our 50th title!

We’re proud of every single book we have published, of course, but this past year has seen some real gems come through. We’ve branched into new territory in the form of sports history, and Six, the story of small-town football success, has been well received with favorable reviews and plenty of media coverage. We also published a children’s sports history book in the form of Umpire in a Skirt, which tells the story of the first paid, female baseball umpire in the country.

We continued to publish memoir of the finest kind, and Merlyn Magner’s tragic and redemptive Come into the Water: A Survivor’s Story fits neatly into that category. Magner’s story has been one of our best-ever selling books, and it seemed to capture the mood somewhat of this very wet summer when we released it to coincide with the 39th anniversary of the Rapid City flood of 1972. Such was the magnetism of her prose and her subject that more than 300 people showed up at the Journey Museum in Rapid City to hear her speak.

Memoir also formed the basis of the last book we published this year, Dancing with Colonels: A Young Women’s Adventures in Wartime Turkey. This fascinating book of letters from Marge Enstrom during her time in Washington, D.C., and Ankara, Turkey in World War II, is a wild ride of parties, socializing, intrigue, and so many other “modern” notions. Enstrom wrote her letters with vivid portrayals of day-to-day life in exciting times.

Politics has leapt on to all our radars this year in many forms, particularly now as the race to the White House begins to heat up. But politics isn’t just a contemporary act, and we have published two books that deal with the history of South Dakota’s politics. Al Lee’s Principle over Party details the Populist era, a time when South Dakota was on the cutting edge of national political trends and when the state was instrumental in creating new ideas and political processes that have stood the test of time. The Plains Political Tradition takes a more long-term view of politics in South Dakota, but it is also full of accounts of political machinations of the highest order, often in places and in ways that might surprise.

Finally, we continued our mission to introduce children to important aspects of the region’s history and culture. Over the course of 30+ years, author and illustrator Paul Goble has cemented himself as one of the most important children’s book creators of this region. We’re extremely proud to have published Walking Along this fall. This, Goble’s 40th book, compiles six classic Iktomi stories from the Caldecott Medalist, and the early indications are that we have another winner for young readers!

We’ve produced our first chapbook, Why We Love History, and we’re about to publish our second, First Lady Inagural Gowns, which are both inexpensive, fun, and well-written and well-produced short books. We’re excited about the possibilities that chapbooks offer us to explore various aspects of South Dakota history. We also converted more of our list into ebooks, and have begun to produce ebook shorts of award-winning essays from the 41-year lifespan of South Dakota History, our scholarly journal.

In essence, 2011 has been a continuation of all the good things we’ve done in the past few years, as well as a foray into uncharted, but exciting, waters. We continue to produce award-winning books, and we’re striving to bring good history to light in as many ways as possible. We’re incredibly lucky to work in the book industry, and even if it does seem sometimes as though the book may becoming an endangered species, we happen to believe that reading isn’t going anywhere, and we intend to continue publishing history books that you’ll want to read. So, here’s to a successful 2011 and wishing for an even better 2012.

A Love Affair with Books

My love affair with books started when I was an adolescent. My cousin Terry, my brother Doug, and I would spend the time after school at the Carnegie Library, where we terrorized the librarians, each in our separate ways. Terry was precocious and spent his time with the medical books, studying anatomy and whispering to anyone who would listen about how he thought it all worked. Doug drew. He read about famous battles and then in his unique backward style would sketch the battle lines. I loved to watch him; he started from the back of a soldier’s head and worked down and around to the face, sometimes in one continuous line. He used pencil, but often his battlefield might be the margin of the books. As for me, I was a browser—I loved to pick the books off the shelves, stroke the bindings, wonder about titles and content, look at the pictures, puzzle out the publishing history. To me, there was no such thing as a closed stack, and I wormed my way into places I didn’t belong. Those were wonderful afternoons, spent in the warmth of the library during the cold of a prairie winter. The librarians would shush us and scold, but they never frightened us away nor banned us from the reading room.

As I grew older, I became a book collector, and I still love the feel and smell of books, the craft that goes into their construction, and the beauty of illustrations, gilt, and print. With great good fortune, as I got older still, I became a publisher, creating books of quality in design and working with talented illustrators for the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. As both collector and publisher, the advent of electronic books has changed the way I do some things. The most surprising change just manifested recently when I began culling books from my collection. Because my bookshelves tend to overflow, culling becomes a periodic necessity. While I have ebook readers and tablets available at work, I don’t yet have one at home—and as someone who loves to touch the soft leather or nubby cloth of a book, I’m not contemplating the purchase of one soon. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking differently about my library.

I started collecting in college, and many of the first books I owned were paperbacks, so I have many softbacks of the classics—Twain, Dickens, Whitman, and so on—in my collection. Through the years, I have replaced paper copies with hardbound books when possible, but it has always been important to me to have the content available in my library regardless of edition. This time, though, I found myself thinking—well, I don’t need this ratty old paperback; I’ll just get the content online if I want it. The idea makes me sad in a way, but it sure does free up a lot of space so that I can continue to collect the hardbound books and first editions that I love.

NTK