The Announcement

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We have now received the book in Cambridge — and we think Clays Ltd have done a superb job! Any flaws you notice will be of the author’s making; Clays have printed to the last foreign font and idiosyncrasy the typeset text that Sam&Sam submitted to them.

I cannot praise highly enough the efficiency of Georgina Aldridge, Sales Executive in Clays London office, and Jodi Foulgar, Account Controller at the works in Bungay, who with their respective teams have taken us through the whole complex process since 19 October last year. They always responded in real time and with real courtesy. They are two of the most professional people I have ever worked with. Clays are famous for their attention to detail and for me this was exemplified by Jodi personally ringing me from the factory floor to check exactly where I wanted the 150th anniversary ‘bellyband’ positioned round the book. The designer and I had thought one thing, but her team’s judgement was better. I understand now why Clays are the U.K.’s No. 1 monochrome printer.

We are well into packing and despatching the advance copies, review copies and preordered copies. As I said in my previous post, this process will be complete within six weeks. The official publication date is still 7 September. That is when the first reviews should appear and the web-page will be available for buying copies online.

I feel I should stress that this is a limited edition. If demand exceeded supply, we would reprint with Clays as a hardback. However, I would first need persuading that the demand was sustainable. We have always said that when the limited first edition sold out we would go into Amazon paperback and Kindle. The whole purpose of a limited edition, of course, is to give a book a future rarity value. Please consider investing in that now! Pre-publication copies can be bought by contacting me direct through my website http://patrickmileswriter.co.uk/. They cost £30 postage free, but from 7 September will cost £32.95 including postage. An invoice with directions how to pay will be sent with the book.

Naturally, a lot of people will attempt to buy the book through Amazon (although they should be able to find Calderonia and the Sam&Sam checkout easily enough on the Web). Some copies will appear on Amazon and ABE in due course, but Amazon’s commission precluded our selling the limited edition through them.

Nielsen offer an ‘Enhanced BookData Service’ that helps position the ‘Metadata’ about your book deeply worldwide. It is pricey, but I shall probably have to go for it. I am also enormously grateful to John Dewey, Harvey Pitcher and other ‘indie’ publishers for their advice about sales to Slavonic libraries, academic institutions, and individuals.

The key date, of course, is 2 December 2018, George Calderon’s 150th birthday. I am hoping to give talks and sign copies around then at bookshops in Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews. Before that, at Armistice time, Andrew Tatham and I plan joint presentations on the theme THE WAR IS OVER: HOW DID WE COMMEMORATE IT AND WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT? at which we shall offer our respective books. Watch out for details of these events later in the year on this blog.

Sam2 had hoped to feature above the actual cover of the book, with its gold ‘foiling’ of George’s name, but the gold proved too dazzling for a computer. At a very late stage, incidentally, I had to abandon the idea of gold-foiling the thin frame of the photograph on the back (Autumn tea at Emmetts, 1912), as the ‘movement tolerance’ for it was 1 mm, which might have meant it came out skewed. The real purpose of our image today is to display the front jacket flap ‘blurb’. It may surprise some readers that Martin Shaw described George first as a mathematician, but there is an explanation…in my book!