Dear ARLIS-L,
Thanks for all the good suggestions to help us find a "middle way" for the
Wittenborn announcement; I'm sure the 2007 committee will find them helpful.
The email below was originally sent to Terrie and me but David Fogel (of
Worldwide) agreed we could forward it to the list. It is very interesting
to consider the question of the Wittenborn announcement from a vendor's
perspective.
Barbara
On Mar 20, 2007, at 12:46 PM, David Fogel wrote:
Dear Barbara and Terrie,
We've followed the Wittenborn discussion with some interest, and
while we decided not to post the following observations (which I
drafted this morning) on the listserv, we thought they might be of
interest to you and others. Should you see fit to communicate the
gist of these remarks to your colleagues via the list (or present
excerpts from them), please feel free to do so.
Hope to see you in Atlanta!
Best regards,
David Fogel
Worldwide Books
In the recent discussion about the timing of the Wittenborn Award
announcement, several people have suggested that an advantage of a
pre-conference announcement is the opportunity it gives publishers
to display their winning publications in the conference exhibit
hall. Not to put too fine a point on what might seem to be a subtle
distinction, I think it should be mentioned that the publishers of
Wittenborn award winners are, it seems, rarely if ever in
attendance at the ARLIS/NA annual conference, an impression
confirmed by a review of the list of past winners posted on the
ARLIS Web site. Making the announcement before the conference
rather gives book distributors (like Worldwide Books, Erasmus,
Shamansky, Karno and others) the opportunity to highlight these
publications at their booths.
As a book dealer, Worldwide does not have a vested interest in the
timing of the award announcement; indeed, we appreciate the
arguments against an early announcement. When this year's winners
were announced a few days ago, however, we immediately contacted
Hawk Hill Press (a publisher with whom we, and, we imagine, many of
our library clients, were not familiar) to inquire about purchasing
copies of American Indian Horse Masks to bring to the conference.
We look forward to prominently displaying that title along with
Prayers and Portraits from Yale, by now perhaps the preeminent
player in art-book publishing, but a press that in our recollection
has not attended an ARLIS conference as an exhibitor, at least in
recent years. Since in any case neither of these publishers will be
attending the conference this year, it's clear that absent the
early announcement the winning publications would not have been
showcased in the hall.
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