‘Shelby Farms Park: Elevating a City’ takes Gold
A big coffee table book — “Shelby Farms Park: Elevating A City” — has been honored by the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
The 272-page book published last year tied for the Gold Award in the South – Best Regional Nonfiction category.
The book celebrates and chronicles the 3,200-acre park’s 100-year history and especially the $52 million “Heart of the Park” improvements completed in 2016.
The book was written by Smart City Consulting’s Tom Jones, published by Memphis/New Orleans-based Susan Schadt Press and underwritten by more than 100 “friends and admirers” of Barbara Hyde. She is chair and chief executive of the Hyde Family Foundation and former Shelby Farms Park Conservancy board chair and master plan committee chair.
While Jones is credited as the author, design professionals, consultants and top park staff contributed chapters. Photographers Justin Fox Burks, Timothy Hursley, Alex MacLean, Murray Riss and Phlip Thomas provided the big images.
The award is not one of those payfor-recognition schemes.
“We get about 5,000 total entries from the complete range of independent publishers: one-book authors to univer-
sity presses,” Jim Barnes, editor and awards director for Independent Publishers, said in an email.
“We judge books by rating them on six criteria, typically by a panel of five judges who all have many years of experience in various fields of publishing and bookselling,” wrote Barnes, who is based in Traverse City, Michigan.
The categories are: first impression, design, originality, use of language, message delivery, and relevance.
“The Shelby Farms book captures the spirit and tells the story of that amazing park very well, both visually and verbally, scoring above average in all six criteria, and especially well in Design and Relevance,” he wrote.
“There were 30 entrants in the South Regional Non-Fiction category, with tough competition from many other well-designed and well-written books.”
The Shelby Farms book tied for Gold in its category with “Picturing Mississippi, 1817-2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise”by the Mississippi Museum of Art (University Press of Mississippi).
“Shelby Farms Park: Elevating a City” ($80) is available at Novel, the park gift shop and through Amazon. Because it was underwritten, all proceeds go to the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy.