New Frisco Book--Please Read

My name is Greg Stout and I have recently been commissioned by Morning Sun Books to produce a volume called "Frisco in Color, Volume 2." Depending upon the slides I am able to gather, this may or may not be organized in a manner similar to the earlier book written by Greg Sommers and my friend Lou Marre, but since almost everyone has some title or other produced by MSB, you should have some idea what it will look like.

In any event, I am sure that I will need more illustrations than the publisher will be able to furnish, and so I am inviting group members to contribute images that they would like to see between the covers of this book. Because some people have had no experience (or bad experiences) with sending slides off to "some guy writing a book," I thought I would try to address some of the FAQs up front, so....

1. ARE YOU FOR REAL? Yes. Since 1995 I have written ten books for publication, two for White River productions and eight for MSB (the tenth, "Union Pacific Through Passenger Service," is in production now).

2. WHAT SLIDES DO YOU NEED? This will not be a book about facilities, although shots of depots, bridges and major terminal structures will be considered. Mostly, I want images of trains, power and rolling stock. In a MSB book we are limited to around 250 images, so obviously only the best can be used. My personal plea would be for "black and yellow" and passenger slides, as these are likely to be the hardest to come by.

3. DO I GET MY ORIGINAL SLIDES BACK? Absolutely, yes. I am not a slide collector and I have no interest in stealing yours. However, it takes me about a year to write a book and about another 9-10 months for the manuscript to go through the production cycle, so if you can't bear to be without your material for that long, you may wish to have dupes made.

4. CAN YOU USE DUPLICATE SLIDES? If that is all that's available, then yes, I can, but I would rather not. Because they do not scan as cleanly, duplicate images usually wind up reproduced several to a page rather than featured in a spread or a full-page image.

5. HOW ABOUT BOUGHT SLIDES? Al Chione, Trackside Slides and others used to sell (and may still do so) 20-slide sets. I think I probably have every Frisco set ever offered commercially. We cannot use these. We can only use images for which the contributor holds the rights; in other words, you took the picture or you got the picture from someone else with no rights reserved.

6. IF I SEND A SLIDE DO I GET A FREE BOOK? No. However, I have a deal with the publisher that allows me to buy books wholesale, so you can save about $20 if you decide to buy a copy.

7. WHAT INFORMATION DO YOU NEED? Please furnish as much caption information as you can if you decide to submit material. Unless the location and train identity are obvious, and this is seldom the case, the more information I have to work with, the more accurate the book will be.

8. CAN I SEND DIGITAL IMAGES? Maybe, but I would really prefer slides. Also, I can't use B&W or prints.

If you are interested, or have other questions, please feel free to contact me through the group or via my e-mail which is garp1027(at)sbcglobal(dot)net. I know from reading a number of posts on the group site that there is considerable interest in Frisco books, and I am thinking this will be an opportunity contribute to something that will really be cool.

Thanks for your consideration,

GS

 

Charlie:

Thanks for your interest. As we speak I am sitting here with close to 400 images, some scans, but mostly slides. I have selected about 250 that I think will make a good book and have captioned 83 of them. My plan is to have my part of the project wrapped up by late summer or early fall, at which time I will want to recruit a knowledgeable editor or two to look over the manuscript and review the illustrations. After that it goes to the publisher. From there it takes about 8-10 months to cycle through the production process, so I would say a realistic availability date will be late 2012.

As an FYI, I can still use a few more passenger slides, particularly on the River Sub and at Webster Groves.

GS

 

Late 2012 huh? Is it going to be done before the Mayan doomsday prophecy clock runs out?? ))

Tom

 

Tom:

It's a reason to go on living.

GS

 

LOL. Yeah. What they are really not telling folks is that 12-21-12 is really the demise of BNSF and all previous roads will be restored.

 

I suspect this book will have limited appeal among the Mayans.

GS