What will I spend to license historic images? I want to license illustrations (drawings, paintings, maps) for a black and white scholarly book. The fair use approach looks impractical, so the rights holders will dictate the terms, as yet unknown to me. In another question I learned that I will only contact them once I have a publisher lined up. Presumably there will be no licensing budget in my book deal. I need to know what images I can afford to use.

Roughly how much do authors pay to republish archive materials? Do quoted licensing costs tend to vary depending on which publisher is involved?

Here are some of the institutions that hold and license images potentially useful to my project: Bancroft Library, California State Library, Getty Images, Huntington Library, Santa Barbara Mission Archive.
The answer to this question is content, item, and archive specific I'm afraid. No one here can give you a ballpark figure without detailed information...and you assembling that detailed information will give you your answer. Some things that the figure may depend on:


If you are using an archive's scan of the image or if you are using an image that you, yourself created while visiting the archive
What country you are publishing in
How old the archival material is
If the rights holder has academic rates or waves fees for scholarly books (as they assume you aren't going to make a profit on it)
How many images you're going use (5? 50? 500?), though even with a number there's no way to estimate (see 1–4)


The way forward is to email all of the institutions, ask them for their publication policies and charges, and work out how many images you're willing to pay for based on that. So for example, for the SBML you're looking at giving them $45 per image and a copy of your book, see: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/224541_7ae89e7b824c4dc69d1739111fa71070.pdf