The cost of pictures

This is a follow-up to my post on obtaining the rights to print newspaper pictures in the biography.

It turned out that newsbank.com did not hold the rights to the material in their archives, but a nice person in their organization looked up who did and sent me an email. (Her name was “Janet Stewart”, and for a crazy moment I wondered why the Farrars were writing to me.)

My preliminary check is that the cost of using the pictures will be $150 to $250 per picture, depending on the size of the print run of the book.

This is a hard blow. There are some great pictures of Isaac in the 60s and 70s that appeared in the papers, but at these prices I probably can’t afford to include more than a couple of them.

This is another “perhaps the horse will learn to sing” problem. I can’t purchase the rights until I can give the rights-holders the name of the publisher, which I won’t know for at least 2-3 years. Maybe the publisher will find it worthwhile to purchase the rights. In the meantime, I’ll note that it’s an issue and move on.

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