Arcadia Publishing wants booksellers to know that it’s not just their grandparents’ publishing company. The Charleston, S.C., company, which is best known for its flagship series, Images of America, featuring old-fashioned sepia-toned book jackets and, inside, vintage black and white images of small towns and cities, is changing with the times. While Arcadia is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its debut title in 1994—Old York Beach (Maine), it’s spicing up its 9,372-title list with the launch of its Images of Modern America series. “We’ve got color: the creative juices of the team are flowing,” Director of Marketing P.J. Norlander says, explaining that Arcadia’s demographic has always been 40–55 year olds; since today’s boomers had a lot of Kodak moments growing up, color photographs resonate just as much as black and white.
Not only is Arcadia experimenting with color, it’s also mixing the nostalgic yearnings of its customer base with high-tech gadgets that make fulfilling those yearnings instantaneous. Arcadia has partnered with Google on the Field Trip app, which enables users to pull up on their electronic devices content relating to the user’s physical location. And now that Google has incorporated Field Trip into its Google Glass wearable headset, all that Google Glass wearers have to say is “Search nearby,” and vintage images and capsule histories of nearby buildings and other landmarks will, literally, pop up in front of the user’s eyes. Arcadia will have Google Glass headsets in booth 1502 throughout the show for booksellers wanting demonstrations.
