Purpose, readers’ expectations, project feasibility and standards are the four concerns central to the planning of library exhibition catalogues. If these four are addressed successfully, other issues remain incidental. If there is shortfall in any one of these critical zones, no amount of manipulation of the peripherals can disguise the publication’s weakness.

PROJECT FEASIBILITY

In addition to the text, in addition to the illustrations, two further—and inexorable—realities compound the problem of designing the appropriate catalogue. One is money; the other is time.

Often the most helpful thing a designer or printer can do at the outset is to inform the librarian that a larger budget is required if the institution’s vision of the catalogue is to be made real. To this proposal, there can be but two rational reactions: 1) the budget gets expanded to accommodate the vision, or 2) expectations are scaled down to live within the predetermined sum (by far the more popular alternative). Of course, the question need not have been raised if the librarian had first explored, with a designer and/or printer, the range of viable options for the catalogue and had come to know their cost consequences.

But even after the settled budget has been committed, vital choices remain. “You can have even more pages than you imagined and more pictures too: just lower those bothersome quality standards!” This absurd proposal simply calls attention to the place of quality in the scheme. It will be useful to remember the printing business’s most popular commonplace, “Fast schedule, high quality and low price: each affects the other. The client can specify any two, but never all three!”

And so it is. The clear articulation of quality expectations must become an integral part of the specifications when such details as format, page count, paper, type of binding and quantity are submitted to a printer for that price commitment on which your budget will be based. Quality expectations are expressed by defining the technology of production and by reference to other pieces which the potential supplier has manufactured.

Librarians should tender quotation requests only to those organizations they would trust with the work—those they have reason to believe can meet their quality expectations—and award the work to the lowest among those bidders who appear willing to meet their schedule demands.

But one should not be fooled. The prices assembled will total considerably less than the final payment. After receiving the submitted prices for typesetting, layout, mechanical art, printing and binding, it would be prudent to add allowances for author’s alterations (AAs) in both galleys and pages, and even throw in something for a designer’s change of heart in galleys. I have watched AAs exceed by far the cost of first galleys. Surely cost control means making certain that all who need to see, reconsider and approve the manuscript have done so before typesetting commences. But even with these precautions, it is wise to add at least 60% to the estimated price of composition for protection against charges for AAs—more if an epidemic of afterthoughts is likely once the first galleys are seriously scrutinized.

The budget is developed and committed long before the exhibition opens—often months before the text has been completed. One should allow for a 10% increase of text length beyond first projections. Many detail and niceties will develop as the project gets under way. For this, 10% of the printing and binding totals provides a useful buffer. Other costs to be projected include an allowance for monetary inflation between the day you receive bids and that day months (even years) later when the bills come in. Trade practice permits a printer to under– or over-deliver by 10% of the number of copies ordered. For protection, prices for a basic quantity and “additional units run at the same time” should be requested. the latter is the price at which over-deliveries will be billed. Freight from the bindery to your library must be considered. It should be a matter of pride to bring a catalogue in on budget; it builds trust and makes future publishing projects more inviting to those who dispense the monies.

Time is the other inexorable reality. One must choose between harnessing time or letting things slide until last-minute desperation leaves no opportunity to double-check for errors or to reprint a substandard press sheet.

The trick is to build the schedule backward from opening night, making the same sorts of realistic, protective allowances that were made in the cost budget. If the exhibition is to open February 3rd, delivery of the books should be scheduled for January 25th, with more time in the bindery and pressroom than the binder and printer had asked for. And thus it should proceed backward through time, through submission of mechanical art to the printer in the expectation of page proofs (with time before that for producing the mechanical art) and a generous allowance for typesetting with the various galley recyclings which follow successive revisions once the manuscript has gone to the typesetter. Of course, if the manuscript is presented to the typesetter in the form of word-processed disks, time and money will be saved.

If those writing the catalogue entires have been told to submit manuscript by, say, September 1st, it ought to be possible to get manuscript marked up by the designer and sent to the typesetter by September 10th, right? Wrong. First of all, it’s the rare writer who meets a deadline. Editorial coordinators should always lie to a writer and demand a deadline at least 30 days in advance of when it is absolutely needed. But even that will not provide enough time, because when material arrives and is read, it is often necessary to return the text to the writer for “polishing here” and “Fleshing out there.” A worst-case scenario occasionally occurs when the library director exclaims, “Heavens, we cannot issue this under our imprint: it’s gibberish! Find someone else to write it.” It is then that one appreciates having anticipated such a disaster and reserved time to salvage the situation. All manuscript should be copy-edited so that spelling is corrected and punctuation made consistent with some canon of style. Again, this means more time.

More often than not, of course, after such a protective schedule has been constructed, it becomes clear that work ought to have begun many months earlier, and everyone starts scrambling in desperation. The lesson is: as soon as the project is contemplated, a schedule should be specifically and accurately constructed module-by-module with built-in cushion time. And this should be done before the opening date is set.

This is article first appeared in Volume 5, Number 2, 1990 of Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship (pp. 77–84).