Books

Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Magazine, Dec 2003 by Dixon, Tom

I sometimes get the question, "Why doesn't the Society produce books like it used to?". In (act it has been some time since the C&OHS produced a book of any substantial size. It was books that really helped make the Society and gave us our first large income staring in the early 1980s and going up until 1995 when we published C&O in the Coal Fields. Subsequently we've been able only to reprint Chessie's Road and C&O Dining Car Recipes-1947.

Because books take a big outlay of money up front, and the return on that money isn't usually realized until at least a year and perhaps more after publication, we haven't been able to do any on our own in recent years. Tb keep C&O titles in print I have done some under the TLC imprint, and in at least a couple of cases the C&OHS has been shown on the title page as Co-Publisher. The Society has bought a quantity of these books up front at a very deep discount, but the outlay has been only a fraction of what would have been necessary to publish the book on our own.

Another thing standing in our way in publishing books is that we have lost any dealer network we had to which we sold books wholesale. This is because one of our largest customers, The Great train Store chain, went bankrupt and disappeared a few years ago, while yet others have gone out of business, or have drifted away.

We would like to get back in the book business, but as you can see it will not be easy. We are working on two books now, in conjunction with TLC: C&O Diesel Locomotives in Color 1949-1972, and C&O For Progress: C&O at Mid-20th Century, 1948-1963. A flyer appeared in last month's magazine, and this month's as well, about these two new books. If we could get 1/5th of the membership-that is, 500 people-to order these books at the special price, we would be in much better shape to start out publishing books again on our own. And, we could publish books from now on if we could get just 1/5th of the membership to buy them at the outset. That used to happen back in the 1980s, when we had far fewer members, so in those clays about 1/3rd of the membership was buying our books early on.

A second tack we're taking is electronic publishing. In this project we hope to reproduce digitally some long-out-of-print C&OHS publications, and in addition to the book as it appeared when it was first published, add more high-resolution photos, that can be printed, and other new and interesting items pertinent to that subject. Watch for details on this next Spring.

My bottom line here is to encourage you to buy C&O-subject books from the Society when they are advertised, and if we can get enough of you doing it (about 400-500 members) we are going to be in very good condition.

The two upcoming titles are new and different. Though there have been many books on C&O showing diesels in color, this is a new approach with different information. The C&O For Progress book covers the very era that everyone seems most interested in, so there is no reason that we should not make this goal for both of these new titles.

Though this is the December issue it will not get out until just after the holidays. I hope everyone had a nice season. We will get the magazine back to an earlier release date in the next couple of months.

Tom Dixon

Chairman and President