The Vision

Mary Wingfield Scott published Houses of Old Richmond in 1941 and Old Richmond Neighborhoods in 1950 and these books are still the bibles of Richmond architectural history.

In 2011 we published Winkie including some of her previously unpublished writings and other articles about her. This was a private printing and distributed to a limited number of people.

In January 2012, Apple announced their iBooks, with iBooks Author to create interactive books and their iBookstore to offer these for iPad users.

The iBooks allow anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch books, with photo galleries, videos, interactive displays and more. These books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.

Our vision for ‘Project Winkie’ as we are calling it, is to move all three of these books into iBooks and offer them for free in the iBookstore. This is strictly a labor of love and we want to bring Winkie and her books to life and to have people all over the world read this.

The first step is to scan the books to get the text and photographs into a digital form that we can use for the books. However, these are not books in the traditional sense. We have recordings of Winkie reading Diddie, Dumps & Tot, and Uncle Remus. In Winkie, she mentioned watching Mountain Top burn in 1903. This was a hotel on Afton Mountain, and nobody seemed to have any photos. There was an engraving which we located. And then Kate Roy Christian mentioned that she had a lot of photographs. It was owned by her family. There were a lot of photos and we included two photos in Winkie, but we can now put them all in the Winkie iBook as a photo gallery that you can navigate through with the swipe of a finger. We have many photos of Winkie and also movies of her at family reunions. We have recordings of Elizabeth Bocock talking with her brothers and sisters. All these and more will go into the iBook.

Also we want to make a link of this history with the present and to make it more interesting. The printed books were limited to the photographs that could be printed, and there are over 500 photos in the Valentine Museum from Heustis B. Cook, and only a small fraction of these were included in these books. There are also many family photos of people who lived in the houses, and with iBooks, we can let the reader ‘visit’ the houses, learn about the people who lived there and see photos of them. While many of the houses have been demolished, Winkie was a pioneer in promoting the historic preservation and restoration of historic houses. We would like to include modern updates to what has happened to the buildings—for example, the Pohlig Box Factory has been converted to apartments and is now a vibrant, living building. We want to include all those stories as well.

If you watch the presentation of iBooks, it is easy to see where all this might go. I've had the experience of creating two major pieces of software, WildTools for PowerCADD and Benchmark for aircraft performance testing and analysis. Whenever I have gotten started on a project like this, I try to get as many talented people as possible involved—I think of it as putting fertilizer on a brain farm—and over time the project takes on a life of its own and it ends up going far beyond your wildest imagination at the beginning. I'm sure this is going to happen with Project Winkie, and I look forward to getting as many people involved as possible. Let's everyone chip in and see what we can create.