A question. My interest is in small-press contemporary poetry; often it’s frustrating studying the poetry because crucial documents, especially little magazines, are scarce, only available in specialized libraries, & often you’re not permitted to xerox them, or they only have partial runs, & so forth. Many journals were circulated in such tiny runs that barely anyone has seen them–for instance, one crucial mimeographed “worksheet” of the 1960s, The English Intelligencer, was distributed for free among about 20-60 people in the UK. I’m lucky enough to have purchased a partial set (about 1/3rd of the run) for 90 pounds, & xeroxed most of the remainder at Cambridge University Library.
So anyway: I was thinking that it might be welcome to reprint some series of important journals in microfiche format–many 16th and 17th-century books are available in this way at university libraries, & it’s a terrific way of getting hold of scarce books. Would anyone here be able to give me an idea of how easily this might be done, & what costs might be? Minimum print runs? I’m in Canada (if that makes a difference) but I assume that answers to the question will be about the same in the States or elsewhere.
Putting an old book into any microform format isn’t easy. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of doing it without cutting open the binding and photographing each individual page.
Well, actually, many such magazines wouldn’t need cutting open–The English Intelligencer for instance consists of a bunch of foolscap fascicles stapled in the top corner; Poetry Information & Reality Studios went to the trouble of stapling their bundles of A4 leaves three times on the left side. – Hm, I’ve always found computer-only versions of scanned texts rather awkward to deal with…though I suppose, as they say, this is the wave of the future. --N
Along with some friends, years ago, I started a company that did that very thing (only not with poetry).
We found a source in Dallas that could re-print books in that form without destroying them but we ran up a $60,000 bill pretty quick. We sold them retail and were able to (barely) re-coup our costs. Unless you are going to mass distribute them or have a friend in the biz, my experience is that it would be too costly.
Microfiche? Come on it’s 2001 let’s use some better tools.
If you’re serious and the intent is simply to capture the information, a high resolution digital camera with a flexible focus range and 4.4 megapixels of resolution (around $800-$1200) could easily snap a page at a time and have the text and images be perfectly clear without fooling around with poor quality B&W photocopying or some equally crappy, expensive to produce microfiche copy that requires a reader to use. Memory chips can hold 126 or 256 megs and are pretty cheap so you could easily capture 500 pages of image and text or so with one or two chips and dump them to a big hard disk later. If you took a notebook and a camera power supply adapter with you, you could just dump the pics to the notebook hard disk and grind away all day.
You might need some kind of adjustable rig (or a kid) to hold the pages open while you clicked away.
I’m sure that they would be able to give you some serious advice on whether what you propose is viable and on what format would be most suitable. What I would suggest is that you think big - libraries will be much more likely to invest in your product if the coverage you offer is broad and comprehensive. For contemporary poetry, copyright will become a major factor and may well be what makes the whole idea prohibatively expensive. Do pursue the idea as it would be a real service to scholarship.