If you're lucky enough to have tickets for Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa tonight, don't be surprised if you find Adam Scharff reading over your shoulder.

"Yeah, I like to do that," Scharff admitted.

He's not being nosy, though. Scharff is hoping to hear feedback on the Super Bowl program, which he and others at H.O. Zimman Inc. of Lynn have been producing since 2004. That was the year Adam Vinatieri kicked a 41-yard field goal with four seconds remaining to lift the Patriots to a 32-29 win over the Carolina Panthers.

Occasionally, Scharff's unscientific focus-group testing pays off.

"At Super Bowl XXXVIII [Patriots-Panthers in Houston], we turn around and, after the game, we see a guy with a ring on his finger, a Super Bowl ring," said Scharff, H.O. Zimman's associate publisher. "It's way after the game. We're just waiting for the traffic to die down, just hanging out, and it turns out to be Tom Brady's father. So we start talking to him and he's very nice, and we told him why we were there and who we were, and he said, `Oh, I liked [the program]. I gave it to somebody.' So that was pretty cool."

Not bad for a small publishing company (21 full-time employees) on the Lynnway, where the views from the second-floor offices stretch from Lynn Harbor to the Boston skyline.

In June 2003, H.O. Zimman acquired the contract from the National Football League to produce the programs for its Super Bowl and Pro Bowl. Zimman beat out several competitors, including Sports Illustrated, based on its track record of producing programs for top tennis events, including the US Open, the Fed Cup, and the Davis Cup.

The company also had decades of experience producing Football programs. The first was for the 1939Lynn English-Lynn Classical showdown, which sold at Manning Bowl for 15 cents. Zimman also had Football experience with Harvard University, the company's longest-term client, going back to the early 1940s.

John Veneziano, who left Harvard after 14 years as sports information director to become the Super Bowl program editor at Zimman, develops editorial content for the books, which can be like "a 1,700-pound gorilla."

"I think until you see it, there's a healthy amount of worry, whether it's a typo or some other mistake," said Veneziano, who lives in North Reading but grew up in south Jersey as an Eagles fan.

"Now, I thumb through it in about 10 seconds and say, `Oh, it looks great."'

The real challenge each year for Joshua Zimman, the company's publisher
"I hope we can sell enough advertising. That's always my reaction, because my business is a total gamble," said Zimman, a Marblehead resident. "First we have to make a deal that we have to guarantee money and production [to the client], so we have to pay them, and then we have to go out and spend a lot of money on production. I have to pay all my people. I have to pay all my costs, and hopefully, sell enough advertising to make it all worthwhile. And in this economy, it's very hard."

Nearly 100 of the 240 pages in this year's program for tonight's game between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers are devoted to advertisements, which is the typical ratio. For Zimman, page 71 is his favorite, touting the halftime show featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

"I drove around in college with a huge Springsteen sticker on the back of my car." Zimman said.

As the creative director, Cheryl Lampert begins planning each book the previous summer. She took special pride when H.O. Zimman acquired the NFL contract.

"What was really nice for me personally was the NFL seeing the US Open program, because that's one of the projects I handle design for, beginning to end," said Lampert, a Lynn native who now lives in Chester, N.H. "That led them to us and to the contract, which was pretty cool."

Although the company works on the program throughout the year, the work intensifies at the beginning of the Football season, reaching a critical mass during the playoffs.

"The real crunch is when there are eight teams left," Zimman said. "We create this scouting section for all eight teams, just in case."

As teams are eliminated, Zimman and his staff eliminate the mock "just in case" pages, and fine-tune pages for the remaining teams until the final two combatants are determined two Sundays before the Super Bowl. Late on the night of Jan. 18 and into the early morning hours of Jan. 19, the final pages were sent electronically into the prepress system at a Wisconsin printing plant. Programs were then printed, bound, boxed, and trucked to Arizona, Pittsburgh, Tampa, and points in between.

Scharff, Veneziano, and Suzanne Naudin, the program's lead designer, traveled to Wisconsin to oversee the printing.

"I remember back to the first year and it was like five or six the Monday morning after the championship games," Scharff said. "The books were just beginning to bind, and I was by myself. I was watching the books roll off, and what I focused on was the red dot in [the] H.O Zimman Inc. [logo]. ... It was a very emotional moment for me because I've been here 25 years, so I know all of that history, and I know the people that have been there, and you can't have a higher-profile sports program. ... This is the Super Bowl. So that was kind of a moment for the company, and for me to be there was great."

Like Veneziano, Naudin joined the company when it acquired the NFL contract. A native of Ontario who spent her early years in Brazil, she said she wasn't much of a Football fan prior to her current job, but has learned fast.

"How many people can say they design the Super Bowl magazine?" she said. "That is a one-of-a-kind publication. The sacrifice of my life is tough. You don't really have much of a life starting in September. You work long hours. The holidays don't really exist. The responsibility is huge because of the accuracy. There's no time for repair work; the accuracy has to be right on. But we have always had a perfect track record."

Nearly a million programs were printed this year, compared with about 750,000 in H.O. Zimman's first year in 2004. But it wasn't until a pile arrived at the Lynn offices on a recent Thursday morning, just four days after the conference championship games, that Zimman and his staff could take a deep breath.

Later that day, Veneziano began planning story ideas for next year's Super Bowl program.

SIDEBAR:

SUPER BOWL XXXVIII

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