Gosh, what a day, a milestone. I toured the printing facilities of Allen Press, a publishing house based in Lawrence, KS, since 1935 (http://allenpress.com/company/history). It is the publisher of many journals, including the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society, which I am the Editor for in 2015 (I am the transition between Roy Beckemeyer who stepped down in summer 2014 and the new editor, Mary Burnett, to start on the volume for 2016). I was tasked with the interim position because so many of the family sections of my beetle project were in limbo. The project is reporting findings from my multi-year inventory in Peru, and has mushroomed into a collaboration with >50 expert coleopterists from around the world. Today, I witnessed the printing of many family treatments that will form Issue 2 of Volume 88. It was pretty exciting to hear the machines going, smell the paper and ink, and meet the AP team that have helped me along in the process of getting manuscripts to printed page. Images swirl in my head–of my students collecting in Peru with me, whirl-pak bags of unsorted specimens coming to KS, hours of labor to process specimens from ethanol to mounted/labeled collection, and then the experts stepping in to figure out what is known about Peru’s beetle fauna from historic literature and sorting out the synonyms to determine the valid names of these species. Now we are ready for a spree of describing the hundreds of new beetle species that we have collected.
Comments are closed.