Thoughts on this CD Rom project:
In putting Craig's Georgia O'Keeffe Guide on a CD Rom I tried to keep the feel of the original handwritten loose leaf page book that he made as much as I could. At first I even wanted to keep it all in his handwriting. Having begun my career in lighting and theatre under Craig's tutelage, his printing was something I always admired and practiced to emulate. For drafting it always had just the right amount of neatness but with a style and casualness that I found appropriate for a light plot. Unfortunately Craig wrote a lot in lightweight pencil, that just would not scan very well. Also if I had used all scanned text, I would not have been able to add all the hyper links to the text to help you find things. So I gave up and re-typed much of Craig's text. I did try to leave samples here and there to give people a feel for it.
The images in his book run a huge gamut from bad greyed out xeroxes to some pretty good art book type photos, and of course the 1980's and 1990's photos of the areas taken by Craig and many others. I did the best I could with scanning all of these, but many flaws show up on the computer screen that do not attract the eye in the original book. The most distressing of these is that many photos of O'Keeffe's paintings seem to have been shot off center and thus there is a lot of keystone present. I corrected the worst of these digitally, but ran out of time and patience to fix them all.
Craig was a little inconsistent in his mounting of photos and the titles for them. Some were stuck in with photo corner mounts, some taped with double stick, some just loose in the plastic sheet protectors. I left the corner mounts visible in many images to give a feel for how the original book looked. I also left as many of the painting titles in Craig's hand as I could.
As this is the first version digitally of this guide, you will probably find mistakes, misspellings or other layout issues that bother you. Please feel free to drop me email with you thoughts and I will try to correct them in updates.
With regards to the digital format, I choose html(web page protocol) to allow the most inter platform flexibility. Any web browser on Macintosh, Windows, or even Unix should be able to read and display the guide. This is also up on my web site as well, but unless you are using a DSL, T1 or cable modem I bet it will be too slow for most to get use out of it.
I hope you enjoy this guide, and perhaps get a chance to visit the land of enchantment and see the locations for your self.
Mark Mongold
Weehawken New Jersey, December 17, 1999
mark@mongold.org
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