The Butterflies of Venezuela

[Jim Reynolds]

Andrew Neild                        Telephone: (0181) 691 5047
The Editor                          Fax: (0171) 284 4417
116 Crosslet Vale                   E-mail: alv at nhm.ac.uk
Greenwich
London SE10 8DL
England
                                    12th September 1996

Dear Sir/Madam

THE BUTTERFLIES OF VENEZUELA, PART 1

The publication of this book has unfortunately been delayed
until November. I wish to apologise for this disappointing
news, although I would like to reassure you that I am doing
my utmost to ensure that this project reaches completion as
quickly as possible and to the highest standards.

This delay is primarily the result of a number of
difficulties at the design stage. These were not apparent
(even to the designer) when the decision was taken to
advertise the forthcoming publication of this work. Our
difficulties have stemmed from the decision to give our
readers the best value for money by including as many
representative specimens as possible in the advertised 32
plates. This has been achieved admirably, for although we
conservatively advertised the inclusion of approximately 750
specimens, we have managed to include almost 1,200 (of which
347, or nearly 30%, are of type status). To accommodate so
many butterflies we decided from the outset to illustrate
half-wing only. Had we decided to produce "standard" plates
with complete specimens (i.e. not half-wing), then
undoubtedly we would have gone to press some time ago. We
have also significantly improved the textual content with a
number of additions: the identification section of the text
has been amplified to include many subspecies from elsewhere
in the Neotropics, and a substantial number of supplementary
notes on nomenclature of a revisionary nature have been
incorporated; the locality data (and in the case of type
specimens, all data) for every figured specimen are included
in an appendix; supplementary half-tone figures are being
included in the introductory chapters; and finally, a large
and detailed map will occupy the front endpaper (with
additional smaller inset maps), and a gazetteer will be
printed on the back endpaper.

You may be interested to hear about the design process for
the plates. This requires the designer  to manipulate the
photograph of every specimen figured in the book, which is a
very time consuming task. The procedure entails digitally
scanning an image of each specimen in high resolution onto a
compact disk. Each specimen requires about 1Megabyte of
computer memory (the equivalent of more than 150 close-typed
pages of A4/foolscap!). Each scanned specimen has to be
placed in a special frame (which does not appear on the
final printed plate). This frame is placed on a page
template which in some cases contains over 60 specimens and
their frames. The caption for each specimen also has a
unique frame. Once assembled, the frames and their contents
have to be arranged, aligned, and spaced. The latter causes
difficulties not just because of the confusing number of
frames, but also because images held within each frame
cannot overlap as each is opaque. These difficulties are
further complicated by the need to work with low resolution
copies on the monitor screen, which by very definition do
not provide the quality necessary to easily detect any
errors. At least three proofs are required to ensure that
each plate has been satisfactorily completed.

Once again I wish to apologise for this delay. Now that I
have more experience of the time required for the design of
each Part of this series, I will be able to avoid premature
advertising in future.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew Neild


PS: I would be grateful to anyone who can provide me with
addresses of multiple user bulletin boards other than taxacom,
entomo-l, and lep-l, so that this message can be forwarded to
as many interested parties as possible. Many thanks.