Greetings to everyone from a Festival packed Edinburgh.

The long awaited US tour details (or at least most of them) are now available at last. Typically they became available while I was away on a business trip to London last week or I would have sent this on Thursday or Friday. The details so far are as follows (dates in US format)

New York, NY
Barnes & Noble Union Square
33 E. 17th St.
10/13/97, 7:30 pm

Washington, DC
Chapters,
1512 K. St., NW
10/14/97, 7:00 pm

Boston, MA
Waterstone’s,
181 Newbury St.
10/15/97, 7:30 pm

Philadelphia, PA
Borders Book & Music
1727 Walnut St.
10/16/97, 7:30 pm

Coral Gables,
FL
Books & Books,
296 Aragon Ave.
10/27/97, 8:00 pm
Fairway, KS
Rainy Day Books,
2812 W. 53rd St.
10/28/97, 7:00 pm

Denver, CO
The Tattered Cover,
1628 Sixteenth St.
10/29/97, 7:30 pm

Orinda, CA
Orinda Books,
276 Village Square
10/30/97, 5:00 pm

Corte Madera,
CA
Book Passage,
51 Tamal Vista
10/30/97, 12:30 pm

St. Louis, MO
Location and date to
come

So, a little shorter than expected and no dates in Canada at all, or in Chicago where I’d expected there to be one. I’ll try and find out if there are any more still to be announced but I suspect not. Disappointingly Random House haven’t yet been in touch with me as
they had promised. The dates are taken from their new web pages at

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/dunnett/

They are nicely put together with some good content, although most of you will recognise the “Message from Dorothy” 😉 The historical notes are useful although perhaps too much to take in for a newcomer to the period, and the “Reading Group Guides” sound a bit dry and academic to my ears – too many memories from school I guess!!. However they certainly deserve credit for trying to stimulate discussion.
Anyone spot their own contribution to the readers letters section?

There is another Dunnett page which has appeared recently at Romance Communications Magazine http://www.romcom.com/dunnett/ and yes, that same message comes up yet again 🙂 Some nice colour scans of the covers and some basic promotional info is pretty much all it contains but it’s well enough done. Maybe I’m a bit sensitive but I do find the link to our pages which simply says “more information” without any clue that you are going to another site, just a little bit cheeky.

I’ve had a few messages enquiring about something called the “Autographed Copy Day One’ list” that we were supposed to have. Well, I can perhaps understand where this might have been deduced from but let me say straight away that it doesn’t exist!!

To put the record straight the situation is simply this. Everyone who has ordered Caprice and Rondo from us will, all being well, get a signed copy. Dorothy always comes in to sign all our copies of the new titles (and often the reissued ones as well) before we send them
out to you all. There are usually signed copies left over since obviously we order more than just the reserved copies, and anyone ordering after release gets them until we run out. Since Dorothy usually also does an in-store appearance and signing session not long after publication, we usually get some more extras then as well.

Maybe I should make more of this aspect and “shout it from the rooftops” as our unique selling point, but I haven’t done so for two reasons.

Firstly, most of our “old” customers who ordered from us before the email contacts sprung up, already knew this, and most of you who I swapped messages with over the last 2 or 3 years either got told in person or seemed to pick it up, so I didn’t think it was necessary.

Secondly, I’m always uncomfortable making promises for someone else, and as I’ve said to a few of you individually, I have a nightmare vision of one day Dorothy falling ill or something at the critical time and not being able to come in to do the signings. (As it is she will only just be back from the US tour when the books appear and with the ever growing number of orders I would think it’ll take her a couple of days to get through them all. I just hope there is no repeat of the TLWL debacle with that Brussels shop getting their copies early and selling thembefore the publication date). That being said, She’s never failed to come in yet and I know that she’d never willingly miss it – she does appreciate all of you a very great deal.

“Companion”

Some slightly odd news on the Dorothy Dunnet Companion. One of our UK correspondents noticed copies for sale in a remainder bookshop in the midlands. I’ve been in touch with their head office and the deputy buyer is trying to get hold of copies for us. They apparently don’t deal with Michael Joseph so they didn’t come from them. Perhaps they were sold on to them by a wholesaler (although we thought we’d been round all of them) who perhaps has also supplied copies to the Canadian distributor that Duthies has received stock from. I hope to have more news about this by later this week.

UK Signing Sessions

I’ll be trying to get details of Dorothy’s C&R promotional visits in the UK but I am off on holiday for two weeks from the 23rd August so it will probably be after that before I can distribute them.

Ohh and one more thing about my holidays.
As my wife is visiting an old friend from Orkney who now lives in Sweden, I’m going to be on my own this year on my latest visit to Slovenia. Lots of time for climbing mountains, photography and reading. I once confessed to one of you a long while back that I hadn’t read any of Dorothy’s books myself and that I seldom read (or have the time to read) any sort of fiction. I did read the Companion to get an idea of the background and fill in my general history a bit. Well, I kept dipping into some of the books on my desk on the rare occasions I had time for a tea-break, and finally decided I had to read Game of Kings. You guessed it – Queens’ Play is in my suitcase!! 😉

very best wishes to you all

Bill