We like to think that we’re able to handle just about every problem that can come up in the process of publishing a magazine. After all, despite the relatively small size of our staff, we routinely put out six issues of BAR each year while balancing the needs of our sister publication, Bible Review (which also appears six times a year—on alternating months with BAR). To complicate matters, many of our articles come from abroad, as do most of our pictures (you should hear some of the creative conversations we hold in pseudo-English with puzzled museum curators in out-of-the-way places all over the globe). Then, too, we have the further complications of having our graphic designer’s firm halfway across town, our color separator (the people who turn color photographs into digital images) in Idaho and our printer in Minnesota.
Not to complain, of course. Many magazine professionals will recognize all this as simply the way one puts out a publication in the ’90s. But while preparing this issue, we faced a problem that was unusual even for us. For the article on Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found), we wanted to run a picture of Hilkiah’s Palace, an elaborate Roman-era structure near Hebron. We found a good photo in an old Israeli archaeology journal and naturally sought to contact the excavator for the original image. This is where things began to get complex. Somewhere along the line, we were told that the excavator had, alas, died an early death. Truth to tell, dealing with the deceased is not as great a problem as you might at first think. We can usually obtain materials from colleagues or family. In fact, we have several times published authors who had died after they submitted their article to us but before it could be printed.
Our contacts in Israel then delivered some pleasantly surprising news: The scholar may not have died after all, but perhaps his collaborator had. Dead or alive, the scholar we wanted was proving hard to track down. Our deadline was looming ever nearer. We decided to ask Leen Ritmeyer, the accomplished architectural draftsman and author, to make a drawing of Hilkiah’s Palace for us. Unlike the scholar whose status in this world we were unsure of, Leen was—thankfully—very much among the living and practically next door to us, a mere 5,000 miles away in rural England.
As I write, neither the photo nor the drawing is yet in hand. We have two more weeks before we print. A veteran journalist I know likes to say that newspapers are a daily miracle. I can say the same of magazines. Doing the miraculous is not a problem—it’s the impossible that takes a little time.
We like to think that we’re able to handle just about every problem that can come up in the process of publishing a magazine. After all, despite the relatively small size of our staff, we routinely put out six issues of BAR each year while balancing the needs of our sister publication, Bible Review (which also appears six times a year—on alternating months with BAR). To complicate matters, many of our articles come from abroad, as do most of our pictures (you should hear some of the creative conversations we hold in pseudo-English with puzzled museum curators in out-of-the-way […]
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