Back Issue Sales
Having published over a dozen different periodical titles over more than a half-century, The Augustan Society, Inc., has an obligation to itself and to scholars to make back issues, and reprints from them, available for sale.
Back Stock
The Society has a substantial stock of back issues and reprints. These are stored and ready to sell, with the caveat that many titles have the file copy, a cut-up copy for repro, and copies for sale commingled. Thus pulling items for sale requires some care and knowledge at present.
Ideally, we would separate the backstock into items to retain and items to sell, but time and space make this task difficult at present. That said, sales of back issues is largely a clerical task, and is assigned to HQ staff.
Orders are received primarily through the Augustan Store Website, though a few come by mail. This process assures that all orders are paid for before shipping. The Assistant Treasurer reviews the orders, confirms payment has been made, and passes the order along for pull and shipping.
It is a Membership Privilege that such items are shipped First Class; others may be shipped media rate, or such other rate as may be applicable.
The above process is also used for the sale of new and used books.
Out-of-Stock Items
When an item is out of stock, but held, the procedure is to pull the item for digitizing. When there is only one copy, care is taken to avoid damage to the original, but when multiple copies are held, one may be sacrificed by cutting into separate pages to speed processing.
Pages are scanned using the ScanSnap scanner, which is a duplexing sheet-feed model. The result of this process is a PDF file. When time is short (that is to say, almost always), this PDF file is printed as is and the output sent to the buyer.
The PDF files are then converted to text using Abby software, resulting in an RTF file with poor-quality images. These cannot generally be printed without editing.
The PDF and RTF file are both posted to the AugustanConvert YahooGroup, where they may be accessed by off-site volunteers (or staff, in urgent situations). Their directions are to prefect the RTF file to the extent possible, resulting in an ODT file with the poor-quality images.
Editing the ODT file is presently done by the Editor-in-Chief, but he is trying to train volunteers to do this.
Editing consists of conforming the format of the text to current publication standards to the extent possible, while working to keep the page numbers of articles identical to the original. New images are inserted for the old. These are often taken from the PDF file (which has higher quality), but when recognizable or unimportant, they may be replaced by better quality images taken from the Internet. Heraldic artwork should be colorized, whenever enough blazon data is available, and a copy of such added to the Online Armorial.
Back issues will be redacted only for obsolete addresses, phone numbers, prices, typographical errors, and similar. Postnominals and titles not presently recognized will be permitted to remain. Back issues that use honorifics or postnominals not presently recognized by the Society shall carry a disclaimer on the inside cover, contents page, or such other location as may be available. The text of this disclaimer has not yet been received by the Editor-in-Chief.
Magazine issues that were published as a section of the Augustan Society Omnibus will need to have new covers (and inside front covers with a masthead). These should be modeled on the previous independent issue if extant, on the following independent issue if not, and at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief if neither.
Completed back issues should be compared to the Augustan Store Website to ensure that the contents data on the latter is correct. For genealogical publications, a Surname List should be added to the website at this time.
Once editing is completed on an issue, it will be removed from the AugustanConvert YahooGroup to avoid duplication of effort.
