Janice Harbaugh of Jefferson and Raspberry Ridge Publishing are featured in the
“iowareads” column in the November/December issue of The Iowan magazine.
Harbaugh, doing business as Raspberry Ridge Publishing, has since 2011 preserved books by republishing them. She digitally scans at high resolution vintage books that are in the public domain (published before 1923), corrects the pages to enhance the clarity, and then publishes them.
One of her earlier projects was to republish a cookbook done as a fundraiser for the Culture Club of Jefferson in 1910. Read about that project here.
In The Iowan, editor Dan Weeks focuses on Raspberry Ridge’s books of vintage maps of Iowa. Weeks describes the four books as “a visual treasure and a landmark-by-landmark description of how not to get lost in the Iowa countryside of a century ago.”
The original publication of the maps was supported by advertisers, and their ads portray life in pre-World War One Iowa. Businesses then were just learning of the money tourism can bring. Weeks included a quote from one ad: “Where a tourist’s dollar is as good as any other.”
Harbaugh has also reprinted countless vintage postcards, several of which show Jefferson and Greene County locations.
The books mentioned in The Iowan and other Raspberry Ridge republications are available at Amazon.
