[Leica] yearbooks

[Brian Reid]

There has been sadness that the LUG yearbook has taken a hiatus.

I think the problem is that very few people understand how much work and 
how much expertise is required to assemble a book like that and meet 
Leica image-quality standards. It sounds conceptually easy, but it is 
very hard to do a good job, and the standards of the existing yearbooks 
were set very high. Jim made it look easy. It wasn't.

Jim Shulman had many years of experience doing yearbook-like things 
professionally. He was very good at it, and he knew exactly what he was 
up against when he first suggested the yearbook. High-end publication 
has not been at the center my career, but I've done maybe 20 or 25 
yearbook-like publications (annual reports, IPO prospectus, catalogs, 
etc) in the past few decades. Usually as part of my job, but a couple of 
years ago I published a 50th-Anniversary yearbook for my high school 
graduating class. Since the entire audience for that book was people 
whose opinion mattered to me, I reviewed my InDesign documentation, 
bought a new SpyderX, and poured my heart into it. I took 2 weeks of 
vacation time to finish it, and all in all I spent maybe 150 hours on 
that task. I had it printed by Lulu. It was excellent. But it was an 
insane amount of work. Probably no one else noticed that I color-matched 
the cover of the 50th-anniversary yearbook to the 1966 original. But I 
had to. Those Heidelberg Versafire digital presses will do whatever you 
tell them, but you have to tell them.

I have no criticism of people who don't have the mixture of skill, 
experience, hardware, and spare time to finish a LUG yearbook. Things 
happen. And many people won't understand how much work it is until they 
get started.

There is a chance that after I retire and sell my house and move 
somewhere smaller and cheaper and get enough sleep every night for 2 
weeks straight, that I might have enough time and energy to take the 
wheel of a reborn LUG yearbook. No promises, but I enjoyed the yearbook 
too.