Sundance is selling off remaining stock, and granted, is not publishing anything new. Dell McCoy is headed into retirement but still operates out of the basement of his Denver home. Dell stopped by several months ago with three custom made boxes containing all the negatives and stripped up page flats, including color separations, for the Rainbow Route. I had these in my office for several months before we transferred them to the vault in the San Juan County Historical Society's archive. Dell did a meticulous job of packing this material and it will be around for a long time. One current problem is that offset printers have just about abandoned film technology for "computer to plate" methods of producing offset plates, so the ability to make printing plates from Dell's material is quickly fading. All of the film for this book was shot on a process camera and it dates back to the 1975 era, yet every piece of film is still very usable at this point in time. Dell also did most of the printing in house on a KORD Heidelberg offset press, and in later years, farmed out most of the printing, either to printers in Denver or Salt Lake City. The oil stained outline of his press can still be seen in the concrete floor in the baggage section of the Silverton depot from the several years Sundance was here in town.
Dell stated to me that the Rainbow Route was his best selling book, and he lost count of how many he printed, but guessed at around 25,000 copies. The success of that book was simple--he had to pad out the material the authors gave him and he included numerous pictures on non-railroad material, like a 2 page picture of the Victorian Silverton school. It is a great picture book of Silverton, and many people bought the book for that reason and endured the railroad stuff. You'll note that Dell carried that theme through most of his books after the Rainbow Route, and the RGS book on Telluride was reprinted because the demand for coffee table books on Telluride buildings and mines was so great, and again, the RGS stuff was incidental to most of those folks.
Dell has scrapped all the film for all of his books for the value of the silver contained in the film. The only Sundance books surviving in film are the Rainbow Route, all 3 of Allen Nossaman's Many More Mountain series (in our vault here in Silverton), and the Crystal River book, and that's Dell's favorite railroad.
I am listed as the "editorial consultant" for the Rainbow Route, and the time I spent working with Dell and Russ is now 35 years ago, but the book still stands tall.
Printing technology has "progressed" from the letterpress printed books like Narrow Gauge in the Rockies (Howell North had its own letterpress plant in Berkeley) and all the early Rocky Club books, to some poorly done offset printed books. As the typesetting gradually improved after the demise of hot metal, the past 15 or 20 years have seen decent work reappear. I sell some on demand books done from scans of the original books in my current business and the quality is not there in my opinion, but then I'm biased from having spent the last 54 years in and out of the printing industry. And to be correct to the prototype, "slick" paper should be referred to as "coated" paper. Halftone reproduction should be done on coated paper regardless of the technology for best reproduction. As an aside, a typical camera shot halftone was done at 133 lines per inch, thus 133 x 133 = 17,689 halftone dots per square inch--I'm not sure how that relates to a 3000 dpi computer scan.
Fritz
