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I've been called a lot of things in my life, but I never figured
"author" would be one of them. In fact, I hated English
classes so how could I wind up co-authoring a series of books?
Late in the fall of 2003 I was contacted by an editor from
Arcadia Publishing. Arcadia is an east coast subsidiary of the
British publisher, Tempus. They develop pictorial books on regional
and special interest topics. Arcadia had recently published a
book featuring the post cards from the 1933-1934 Century of Progress
Exposition (Chicago) and the book had sold well for them. They
were now interested in publishing other books on World's Fairs
of the past and they were looking for someone with some knowledge
of the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair to author a book for them.
The Arcadia editor had come across nywf64.com in her author search and
now I was being asked if I'd like to do a book on the Fair.
After getting some promotional material from Arcadia I realized,
with relief, that I didn't need to be John Steinbeck. Arcadia's
books run about 130 pages and are primarily photographic in nature.
Chapters have written introductions but the pictures tell the
real story.
Unfortunately for me, copyrights of pictures and material
from the Fair fall into a kind of gray area -- they're not necessarily
in the public domain yet and free for anyone to use, despite
the fact that the Fair has been over for fifty years. Use of
materials for a commercial project like a book would be subject
to some pretty thorough copyright search and clearance. Arcadia
told me that I'd be the one doing the copyright clearance and
that was a project I didn't want to touch with a ten-foot
pole!
Fortunately for me, I'd made the acquaintance of a wonderful
fellow through nywf64.com that I thought might have
a solution to the copyright problem. He is Bill Cotter, a World's
Fair enthusiast from the Los Angeles area. Bill has been collecting
amateur photographs from the Fair for many years. I contacted
him and asked if he would be interested in co-authoring the book
with me and if he would allow use of some of his photographs
as the basis for the book. Much to my delight, he agreed!
Now here it is ... 2014 ... the fiftieth anniversary of the
Fair. And here we are ... in 2014 ... the authors of three
Arcadia books on the Fair. Our latest book, published January
27, 2014 is titled, Images of Modern America: The 1964-1965
New York World's Fair. We were chosen by Arcadia to be
the first book in their new Modern American Images series and
we were honored to be their first book published in color!
Images of Modern America: The 1964-1965 New York World's
Fair is a soft-covered, 96 page book with seven chapters
and an introduction. We have approximately 170 full color photographs
of the Fair ranging in size from full-page views to two-per-page.
Because the book is part of an Arcadia series, we had a very
specific format that we had to follow. For example, all chapters
had to start on odd-numbered pages. Chapter introductions could
be no more than 400 words long. Captions must be between 70 and
100 words. I never thought writing a book would have so many
rules!
Images of Modern America: The 1964-1965 New York World's
Fair is the third book in our trilogy of the Fair. I
think the books do a good job of documenting the Fair photographically
and explaining its place in that era we call "The Space
Age." Our first book, published in 2004, is titled Images
of America: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair and
features 128 pages with more than 200 photos in black and white
from the Fair. Our second book, published in 2008 is titled Images
of America: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair Creation and
Legacy is similar in the number of pages and photos and
tells the story of how the Fair came to be and what became of
the Fair after it closed. The nearly 600 photos in all three
books are never-before-seen images from Bill Cotter's fabulous
collection of 1964/1965 New York World's Fair photographs.
Can it actually be 10 years since we published our first book?
It's very pleasing to us (and to Arcadia) that the popularity
of the first two books have resulted in numerous reprints and
they continue to sell well. It has been a fun learning experience
for me and it was great fun working with Bill Cotter on these
projects. I'm actually very honored that there will be some sort
of legacy of the Fair that will have my name on it. When I started
collecting things from the Fair in Junior High School, I could
never have imagined that it would lead to three published books.
If you decide to add copies to your Fair Library, I would be
most honored. Thank you!
- Bill Young
- nywf64.com
- February, 2014
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An excerpt from Images of Modern America: The 1964-1965 New
York World's Fair
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