Making Horses Pretty on Paper
During decades of creating equine sale catalog pages, Robin Glenn amassed impeccable equine records while utilizing ever-expanding technology to create page-making tools that anyone can use—and a company that AQHA bought.
If you’ve ever had to dig through mountains of information to locate and compile the data you need (if you’re old enough, just think back to the faded-green-covered volumes of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature that you pored through in the library to write your term papers!), you can appreciate how labor-intensive Robin Glenn’s job was when she started creating sale catalog pages for Out Front Sale Company 48 years ago.
“Back then, building a sale catalog was a process of looking up a horse’s family tree in the old green stud books and writing it out on a form,” Robin says. “Then I’d open reference books that included chart books for racehorses—organized by year, which meant looking up each year’s races separately. Then I’d look up the horse’s sire and dam and their race records—also individually, year by year—as well.
“Next, I’d write the pertinent information on a yellow tablet, then type it up for the printer. The typesetter would retype it and run out proofs on a typesetting machine that took at least five minutes per page. We’d mark any mistakes with a blue pen that didn’t show up in print, and the errors got corrected. The text was laid out manually for the press, and the graphics for ads were also manually pasted on. I’d mock all that up and then photos had to be made using transparencies, which were mailed to the printer with the rest of the job.
“There was no fax, no email, no records in the very beginning, although we could get very abbreviated records by mail by the early 1980s and online records by the mid-90s. Those were run on a dot matrix printer that hammered night and day. When we were making a catalog, I’d get up every four hours to start another file of records printing. In the very early days, a 100-horse catalog would take weeks of working night and day, seven days a week.”
Technology has brought the process to comparative lightning speed. “Now we produce a 1,000-horse catalog in a few weeks,” she says.
While building those catalog pages, Robin also built a dream team that has merged their talents to create and maintain huge databases of pedigree, race, and performance records with an unparalleled degree of integrity. From those databases, they built electronic services to aid not only themselves, but also…
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