Developments

Book-buying is an interestingly emotional business relying on attraction, recommendations and emotion just as much as it has to do with interest in finding out what happens next as you turn the page. That’s what’s made publishing so interesting over the last few years bringing back The Whicharts or ‘Ballet Shoes for cynics’ as I’ve heard it summarised and Five Farthings a lovely family story of first love and 1930s London which deserves to be back in print for the first time since the 1930s. I’m pleased that collectors are willing to buy paperbacks over their usual preference of vintage hardbacks, but I know I need to develop an ‘electronic list’. It isn’t, sadly, economically viable to produce hardbacks with a dustwrapper, so I combine the best and most readable vintage fiction with contemporary technology to publish quality paperbacks with a heavier-weight paper and resilient glued-in binding.

I'm still hard at work with the final rights negotiations for Titles 3 and 4. The shortlist for Titles 5 onwards was reduced by quite a considerable number after a Christmas holidays reading vintage fiction and discarding many ideas. I prefer to reprint the rare, but I also want them to be readable by the collector and, ideally, by any keen reader of fiction today. I wondered about Freda C. Bond for a Christmas 2012 release, but found her books to be tissue-thin in terms of plot, though the number of adventures per chapter exceeded all parody of the GO genre. One request has been to investigate bringing Pennington back - I'll report back on that as soon as I can.