I often have to copy vintage county directories for my hobby of identifying old aerial photos. Of course I buy a copy of a county directory when I can find it but rural directories from 1950 to 1970 or so are very rare. I’m working in Ohio and for many counties I can only account for a couple of copies. A library in the county may have one and perhaps the historical society. I probably have the largest collection of these books outside the Ohio History Center. Currently I have over 70 county and city directories. I intend to donate this collection (somewhere) when I pass on.
So. For the numerous editions I cannot find one to buy I copy them at a library that has one. They are not huge, running about 40-80 8 1/2" x 14" pages with two book pages on each one. I trim them and have them spiral bound at Copy Max. But my finished book doesn’t look real professional and certainly can’t be stacked with the real books. They are, however, easy to flip through in use.
So how would I print them using real book technology in signatures that can be stacked together and bound? The page order would look like this:
Each sheet of 16 pages would have to be 17" x 24" if I stick to the original printed size. I guess I would have to scan each page and number them in Word? Or something better? And take the file where to print? Can a place like Copy Max print such large pieces of paper with 16 page files with the page numbers scattered about?
This is probably a fools errand and I’m better off with my simple homemade solution. But at least I can ask.
17x24 is poster sized, so just ask any decent copy place that does more than just letter and legal should have no trouble with the printing part.
However, it’s not too expensive to assemble the pieces you need to do it all yourself, assuming you can get hold of some publishing software. Adobe InDesign seems to be a popular publishing program, but I’m sure someone else can recommend alternatives.
I can help out here. I spent 25 years in the commercial printing industry before leaving a dying industry for non-print. Although was was not in our pre-press area, after i moved out of maintenance/engineering i did manage our cutting and folding department where everyday we folded sheets printed on our sheet-fed depatment into 2, 4, 6, 8 12, and 16 page signatures for the bindery. I can definitely “brute force” my way to an answer. First some questions.
What do you want the final bound book to be? Do you want a “saddle-stitched” product (think magazine with staples in the spine holding it all together), a perfect bound book (paperback book), or a case bound (hardback) book?
You said the books you copy are 40-80, 8-1/2" × 14" sheet with two book pages on each one. Do you mean one page on each side of a 8-1/2" × 14" sheet (we call that a 1-up, 2-pager) or are there 4 images per sheet, 2 on each side (we call this a 2-up, 2-pager).
Determine what type of bound book you want (Question 1), and what you want the final size of the book to be (ht x wd). Then we can figure out page imposition.
Even if true, I did not understand 100% what the input data was but it seems to consist of scans. Why introduce Word into the mix?
What do you need to do to the pages (besides imposition)? The original message mentioned maybe having to put in/change the page numbers manually? Is 17" x 24" the original page size, but each page got chopped up into separate scans and you need to reassemble them?
Sounds like you’re after perfect binding (Google), like a hard cover or paperback book. Suggest you speak with a print shop (not a copy shop) with bindery facilities in your area and they can let you know what they require from you. Different shops can have different requirements. Most printers won’t take ‘Office’ (Word) type files, or if they do they’ll charge extra for having to deal with them. If scanning, you’ll want high resolution.
Well, I came up with a much simpler way. Since I already have all the pages photocopied on single sided paper I can cut them up into individual sheets. Then do a paste up on a sheet of poster paper. Then all I need to do is have each signature photocopied double sided onto a sheet of paper making sure that each side of the sheet line up correctly.
The book I copied today is 166 individual pages. Divided by 16 gives 10 and a third signatures. Extra blank pages would be fine.
There’s no reason your spiral bound books can’t be put in with the other books, I see it all the time at historical societies and libraries. They don’t get used as much as books in the ‘normal’ library so should last a lot longer.
I just had a book self published over the summer. I wouldn’t go with a place like Lulu. I did an edit copy from Lulu, and just having it in my house and opening it to use the binding started tearing rather quickly. I found a printing/binding company that the library used and it wasn’t a lot more expensive than Lulu and looked much, much better. I also don’t know if they really add the extra blank pages now as my book is 386 pages and there are no extra blank pages at all.
As for donating them, you may want to make 100% sure the local libraries and historical societies don’t have copies already. I know in the ones that I go to and volunteer at they have copies, and sometimes multiple copies, of them as they get them when they come out. They also get a lot of donations of them and tend to get rid of them when they do get donated. No reason to go through all of the work and expense if they will not be kept.
These earlier county directories are much rarer then anything put out by the phone companies. They were rather expensive and sold individually, not distributed. Many of them are like a mini census. They interviewed the homeowners and list at least spouses, total acreage, acreage under plow, etc. Some list the age and occupation of all household members. One even listed the brand of car the homeowner drove.
There are no address in them for the most part. The publisher conducts their own ground survey and numbers each house and which side of the road it is on. Or they list the mileage from the start of the road. There are only two publishers: Rural Directories Inc and Robinson Directories, both located in Ohio.
Robinson came out every other year starting around 1960. Some counties have a nice run of a dozen issues but most counties were only published a few times. They were sold by subscription so if there was not enough call they stopped printing them.
The Rural Directories Inc versions are the earliest. They published from 1948 through 1954. I have never found a county that had more then 2 issues published. Most have a single issue.
There are few places you can visit and see numerous counties at once except for a few cases where one county will have the adjacent counties issue also. The large regional genealogy centers are about it.
The road listings in the directories are an amazing chronicle of long forgotten businesses. Just pick a US highway or major state highway and read the directory. There are dozens of taverns, diners, motels, tourist cabins etc from one end to the other. Then using various resources I try and locate aerial photos of them. Most are long gone. Others are still there but renamed. But if I can find a photo, then I write a description that stays with the online photo and identifies it for everyone that follows.
I do know the kinds of publications you’re talking about. I have a couple at my house as well as my great aunt worked for an insurance company and when they were bought she kept a lot of them. Some of the ones in Maryland go back to the mid 1880s.
I don’t know about Ohio, but I do know the few places I’ve volunteered at don’t like getting them since they have copies and they will turn around and get rid of them. I just wanted to make sure you don’t go through all this and have them get rid of them in the end.
Now this I’ve not seen in any directories before, but I don’t use them as much as I should. But I’m going to have to look as I have a photo of a car with some people in it. I know the year because of the plate so if a directory tells me what kind of car they had I might be able to prove it was them in the photo.