Bibliography

Organised by citation tier, then by subject.

This is a consolidated list of the substantive sources named across the book's forty-one further-reading lists. Each chapter's list is fuller, more specific, and annotated; this exists so that a reader can see the whole evidential base of the book at once, and judge it.

📜 The three tiers, restated.

Tier 1 — verifiable published sources. Real books, papers, standards, and public data. You can check every one of them, and you should.

Tier 2 — attributed professional practice. Real, widely-used, and not centrally documented anywhere. Planning ratios, consumption figures, staffing norms, and pricing bands live here. They are honest reports of what practitioners do and they are not evidence.

Tier 3 — illustrative and constructed. Every wedding, client, vendor, venue, planner, and figure in this book's examples. Labelled as such wherever it appears, and listed at the end of this document so that nobody can mistake one for a source.

Tier 1 — Verifiable Published Sources

The profession

Allen, Judy. Event Planning: The Ultimate Guide to Successful Meetings, Corporate Events, Fundraising Galas, Conferences, and Conventions. Wiley. (Ch.1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13) Allen, Judy. The Business of Event Planning: Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Successful Special Events. Wiley. (Ch.1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8) Bailey, Preston. Design for Entertaining; Preston Bailey's Fantasy Weddings. Bulfinch / Little, Brown. (Ch.1, 4) US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook — "Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners." bls.gov. Free, and the only rigorous public data on the occupation in the US. (Ch.1, 41) Events Industry Council — published standards, industry research, and the CMP body of knowledge. (Ch.31, 41)

Clients, conversation, and negotiation

Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Penguin. (Ch.8) Voss, Chris, with Tahl Raz. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Harper Business. (Ch.2, 3, 6, 8) Patterson, Kerry, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. McGraw-Hill. (Ch.2, 3, 5, 7) Schein, Edgar H. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler. (Ch.3) Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press. The source of "emotional labour," and the book that names the cost §41.5 counts. (Ch.3, 27, 41) Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. On reciprocity, and on why a referral given outperforms one requested. (Ch.1, 38)

Judgment, decision-making, and error

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Ch.2, 6, 10) Thaler, Richard. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. Norton. (Ch.6) Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Metropolitan Books. The single most directly applicable book on this list to Chapters 26, 27, and 40. (Ch.26, 27, 40, 41) Weick, Karl E. "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster." Administrative Science Quarterly, 1993. On what happens to a group when the plan stops describing the situation. (Ch.28, 41) Klein, Gary. On premortems, and on recognition-primed decision-making. (Ch.28, 40) Bainbridge, Lisanne. "Ironies of Automation." Automatica, 1983. Short, decades old, and still the best thing written on what automation does to the human left in the loop. (Ch.39) Gollwitzer, Peter M. On implementation intentions — if-then plans, and why they outperform resolutions. (Ch.39) Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach, for Hofstadter's Law. (Ch.25)

Space, design, and the built environment

Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. Anchor. Proxemics, and the reason 36 inches is a number rather than a preference. (Ch.11) Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Project for Public Spaces. Observational method, applied to how people actually use a space. (Ch.11, 29) Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books. (Ch.4, 19) Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin. (Ch.4) Peña, William, and Steven Parshall. Problem Seeking: An Architectural Programming Primer. Wiley. Discovery, from the discipline that formalised it. (Ch.4) Holmes, Kat. Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. MIT Press. (Ch.29, 41) Mace, Ronald, and the Center for Universal Design, North Carolina State University. The origin of universal design as a term and a practice. (Ch.29) Illuminating Engineering Society. The Lighting Handbook. (Ch.18) Davis, Gary, and Ralph Jones. Sound Reinforcement Handbook. Hal Leonard, for Yamaha. Usually shelved as "the Yamaha handbook," which is how Chapters 18 and 22 refer to it. (Ch.18, 22)

Contracts, law, and risk

Adams, Kenneth A. A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. American Bar Association. (Ch.8) AIA standard agreement documents (American Institute of Architects); the RIBA Plan of Work. Read as models of scope definition, not as event contracts. (Ch.2, 4, 8) Law Commission of England and Wales. Celebrating Marriage: A New Weddings Law (2022). Worth reading outside the UK for how clearly it states what a marriage law is trying to do. (Ch.20) Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (US), and its 2023 amendment; and your own jurisdiction's analogue. (Ch.35) Your jurisdiction's primary sources, which are the only ones that matter: the marriage statute and the registrar's or county clerk's own guidance · alcohol beverage control authority · dram shop and social host statutes · fire code on assembly occupancy and means of egress · the data-protection regulator's small-business guidance · and the tax authority's treatment of service charges and gratuities. Print them and date them. (Ch.6, 9, 20, 39)

Production, safety, and scale

NFPA 101 (Life Safety Code) and NFPA 70 (National Electrical Code), particularly Article 525 on temporary installations, US. (Ch.13, 18, 34) The Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events, UK. The industry standard reference; not free. (Ch.34) Temporary demountable structures guidance from national engineering and events bodies. A marquee is an engineered object with a wind loading and a competent person attached to it. (Ch.13, 34) The Incident Command System (ICS) — current documentation. A single named incident commander, explicit span of control, formal handoffs. (Ch.28, 34) Clinical handover protocols — SBAR / ISBAR, or your national equivalent. The best-studied model of transferring responsibility for something that matters. (Ch.26, 40) The US Army's After Action Review doctrine. The origin of most of what Chapter 30 does. (Ch.30) Goldratt, Eliyahu M. Critical Chain. On buffers, and where they belong. (Ch.25, 34) Published investigations into crowd incidents. Hard reading, and the most useful material in this book's safety lists. (Ch.34) Aviation checklist and CRM literature — Degani and Wiener on cockpit checklists; crew resource management on authority gradients and challenging a superior. (Ch.26, 27, 34)

Economics, business, and markets

Akerlof, George A. "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970. The foundation of Chapters 37 and 38: a market in which the buyer cannot assess quality. (Ch.37, 38, 41) Granovetter, Mark. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology, 1973. Why acquaintances rather than close friends produce opportunities — Chapter 38's referral network, from 1973. (Ch.12, 38) Weiss, Alan. Million Dollar Consulting; Value-Based Fees. McGraw-Hill / Wiley. (Ch.2, 37) Christensen, Clayton, and the Jobs-to-be-Done framing, including the milkshake example. (Ch.4) Work on credence goods — services whose quality cannot be assessed even after consumption. The formal name for this profession's central commercial problem. (Ch.37, 38) Dunbar, Robin. On social group sizes. (Ch.5) Introductory managerial accounting, on cost behaviour, budgeting, and variance analysis; and any small-business treatment of cash flow versus profit. The single most under-read topic by people starting service businesses. (Ch.5, 6, 7, 36) Queueing theory, introductory. Why four desks and not three (Ch.31 B.7). (Ch.11, 31)

Sustainability

Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. "Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers." Science, 2018. The source for the protein-dominates-transport finding. (Ch.35, 41) The GHG Protocol, and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard. Where an event becomes a line in somebody's disclosure. (Ch.31, 35) Government-published emissions factors — DEFRA/BEIS (UK), US EPA, and equivalents. Free, comprehensive, and better than any calculator. (Ch.35) NOAA historical hurricane tracks database. Actual climate records, searchable, free — not "average" figures. (Ch.33)

Ceremony, tradition, and etiquette

Primary liturgical and religious texts, from the tradition's own authority — for example the Catholic Order of Celebrating Matrimony. The chapter's rule is that you establish, from the authority, and propose nothing. (Ch.20, 21) Post, Emily, and current Emily Post Institute editions; Debrett's. Read as documents of a particular class and period, which is what they are. (Ch.19, 21) Reid, Michael S., and the UC Davis Postharvest Technology Center. Published postharvest materials on cut flowers — fact sheets by species covering vase life, ethylene sensitivity, storage temperature, and pretreatment. Free, and the authoritative source. postharvest.ucdavis.edu (Ch.17)

Music, images, and rights

Performing-rights organisations — PRS for Music and PPL (UK); ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR (US). Who is licensed, for what, and who is liable if nobody is. (Ch.22) Sless, David, and the Communication Research Institute, on information design and testing documents on real readers. (Ch.19)

Accessibility and data

National accessibility legislation and its design standards — ADA (US), the Equality Act and Approved Document M (UK), the ACA (Canada), the European Accessibility Act. Chapter 29's six mobility numbers come from these and they vary by jurisdiction. (Ch.29) Your national deaf organisation, on hearing loops and how to test whether one works. (Ch.18, 29) Your data-protection regulator's small-business guidance, and specifically its guidance on health data. Dietary requirements are health information. (Ch.39) First-person accounts by disabled people of attending events. Not industry guidance. This is the reading Chapter 29 says matters most and it is on no professional list. (Ch.29)

Tier 2 — Attributed Professional Practice

Real, widely used, and not documented anywhere you can cite. Every figure below is a starting point for a conversation with a supplier, not a specification — and where this book states one, it says so.

Planning ratios and norms

Bar consumption — two drinks in the first hour, one per hour thereafter; 15–25% of any room not drinking; five glasses per 750 ml bottle; ice at 1.5 lb per guest. Chapter 15 states plainly that this model has no published evidence base. (Ch.15) Catering staffing and service timings; over-preparation of 10–20% as standard. (Ch.14) Space per person by configuration; 36-inch circulation; 32-inch doorways; dance floor at 2–3 sq ft per dancing guest at ~40% of guests. (Ch.11) Sanitation ratios — 1 per 100–120, 1 per 75, 1 per 50–60 with servicing. Frequently regulated, and the local requirement is often stricter. (Ch.34) Production ratios — trailer unload with and without a dock; strike at 40–60% of build; minimum call ~4 hours; turnaround 8–10 hours; meal rules. Get the specific terms in writing, because the schedule is what triggers the costs. (Ch.34) Ceremony, cocktail-hour, and dinner durations; transition times at scale; the 50–60 minute attention ceiling. (Ch.20, 25, 31) The banquet multiplier, and the practice of quoting exclusive of service and tax. (Ch.6, 31) Attrition, F&B minimums, cut-off dates, walk clauses, and resell credits in hotel group contracts. (Ch.31) Registration throughput — ~45 seconds staffed, ~12 self-serve. (Ch.31) Cost per dollar raised bands; gala revenue-stream shares; paddle-raise structure. (Ch.32) Guest conversion at ~52% for destination weddings versus ~87% domestic. Direction reliable; number not. (Ch.33) Gratuity ranges. Explicitly US-shaped, among the most regionally variable figures in this book, and not a standard. (Ch.30)

Business practice

Billable-ratio bands of 35–50% (year one) and 55–65% (established). Observed, not measured. (Ch.36) Per-client unbillable overhead of 12–18 hours regardless of fee. (Ch.36, 37) Enquiry-to-booking conversion of 20–35%; warm venue referral at ~35%. (Ch.38) Deposit, retainer, and engagement-letter practice in professional services; trust-accounting rules in adjacent regulated professions. (Ch.7, 36) Contracting vendors to the couple rather than to the planner or local partner. Practice, and not universal. (Ch.33) Reference-check design, structured interviewing, supplier scorecards, and vendor risk registers, borrowed from procurement. (Ch.12) Records-management and software conventions — the folder tree, date-first version naming, an archive folder. Borrowed, not invented here. (Ch.39) Film and television call sheets; theatre get-in and film unit-move practice. A real call sheet is the most useful single artefact in Chapter 26's reading list. (Ch.13, 26, 34)

Tier 3 — Illustrative and Constructed

Everything in this section is invented. It is listed so that no reader can mistake any of it for a source.

The people and organisations. Alicia Reyes and Sam Whitfield · Rosa Reyes · Elena Reyes · Beatriz · Danny and Tomás · Bill, Hana, and Nadine Whitfield · Marisol Vega · Marguerite Osei and Sundown Provisions · Devin Okonjo and Ridgeline Bar Co. · Trey Bankole and Bankole Sound · Marisa Wrenfield · Tullo Lane Growers · Rev. Aurelio Castellanos and Fr. Emmanuel Rusike · Wildrye Farm and Sara Beaumont · Harvest & Thyme Catering · Priya Raghunathan and Northwind Semiconductor · the Cascadia · Fairhaven Children's Hospital · Tessa Nkemelu and Diego Salcedo · Ximena Rul Bravo · Adriana Fonseca-Marín · Noor Haddadi · Halina Voss · Delphine Mbeki and Marbury Hall · Adaeze Ubuka, Ronan Petrosyan, and Kwabena Mensah · Cecilia Adeyemi · and every other named individual in this book.

The events. The Reyes–Whitfield wedding · the Northwind sales kickoff · the Fairhaven gala · the Riviera Maya destination wedding · and every scenario in every exercise, quiz, and case study.

The numbers attached to them. The $42,000 budget and its $299.22 return · the $540,000 Northwind budget · Fairhaven's $906,000 and $1,235,000 · the eleven-year earnings arc · **the $10.18 hourly rate** · and every figure in every worked example.

All of it is internally consistent and none of it is a record of anything that happened. Where a constructed example makes a claim that could be mistaken for evidence, the chapter says so at the point it is made — and Chapter 41's further-reading list goes further, marking which of the book's own methods are the author's and which are borrowed.

A closing note on the evidence

The honest summary of this bibliography: the strongest sources in it are not about weddings.

Gawande on checklists, Weick on Mann Gulch, Hall on proxemics, Akerlof on lemons, Granovetter on weak ties, Poore and Nemecek on food, Hochschild on emotional labour, Bainbridge on automation — eight papers and books, none written about this profession, and between them they carry more of this book's argument than everything written about event planning combined.

That is not a criticism of the trade's literature. It is a description of a young profession that has not yet written its own evidence base — and it is the reason Chapter 30's finding log and Chapter 39's systems audit are in this book at all. The data that would improve this field does not exist because nobody is keeping it, and the only people who can keep it are the people doing the work.