Greetings from a chilly but sunny Edinburgh
First of all thanks to everyone who wrote after my last newsletter. I may not have managed to reply to all the messages before I went on holiday – apologies to anyone I missed but it was very hectic right up until I went away. Many of the messages I received mentioned my “secret” of being a novice Lymond reader and were often very amusing and helpful, so thanks again to you all for that. Some of you asked me to give you my impressions of Game of Kings and Queens’ Play (the latter of which I finished during the holiday) and while I’m not entirely sure I should be taking up everyones time and bandwidth with my own reactions to the books I’ll try to do so next time if no one minds. Suffice it to say for the moment that I enjoyed them both a great deal.
Dunnett Companion
However the purpose of this newsletter is primarily to keep everyone informed about the position of the Dorothy Dunnett Companion, which as you all know has not been available from Michael Joseph for some months.
I’m happy to say that a couple of UK Dunnett fans alerted me to the fact that a chain of remainder shops in the English midlands were selling copies of the Companion at a cut price. Before going on holiday I had made some enquiries, tracked down the company concerned and managed to persuade them to supply us with 30 copies. These arrived just before I got back, and I’ve since been trying to collate all the orders and enquiries we’ve had for it in the last few months. I know that some people have managed to get copies from Duthies in Canada whose web address I’d given earlier, and I’ve tried to weed out anyone who is known to have got one this way.
Rather than message each person individually I’m listing below those who I think may still want copies and would ask each person on that list to let me know whether they still do. (I’ve added a small number of people to the mailing list who weren’t already on it for this reason – if any of you want to be dropped from the list again after we sort this out just let me know.) If I’ve missed anyone out who has previously ordered the Companion please let me know and I’ll check it out. I’m trying to make sure that everyone gets copies in correct chronological order to be fair to you all.
Once I’ve had replies and know how many copies – if any – are left over I can take any fresh orders, of which I’ve had a few this morning.
The list of people who placed orders/enquiries by email or by the StockSearch system is as follows:
(list deleted)
Since we had to pay the same price as the remainder shop is charging (UKP 5.99 believe it or not!!) plus carriage charges, we’ll be charging UKP 10.00 (still a lot better than the full price of UKP 17.99) plus postage. I hope everyone is happy with this.
The one thing I haven’t been able to establish is where the books were came from, but I do know that they can’t have come from Michael Joseph as the remainder chain doesn’t deal with them. So far I haven’t heard or seen any copies being sold in any other part of the country so maybe it was a one-off batch that some wholesaler had sold off. It’s still not clear how the distribution chain still had copies to supply Duthies in Canada when it couldn’t supply us here, but maybe there is a connection. It’s not clear at the moment whether we’ll be able to get any more after this batch but I’ll make further enquiries once we’ve sorted this lot out.
Other developments
Not too many other items this time, but one thing to mention is the change of web address of Marzipan and Kisses – it’s now on Jean Clissold’s site at
http://www.rowan.studio.bilp.org/Marzipan/dunnett1.htm
and it includes a discussion forum where you can leave messages while visiting the page.
Since we (at last!!) have a colour scanner to call our own I’ve added some more book jackets to our web page which brighten it up a little, though I’ve used thumbnails with links to larger versions in order to keep the loading time down. Most of you still seem to find the speed of loading sufficiently fast but I wonder if there would be a desire for a pure text version for those with slow connections? Just a thought. Does anyone think there should be potted descriptions of the basic plots of the books/series? – that’s just one of the suggestions I’ve received in the last few months. Would anyone be brave enough to write them? – I certainly wouldn’t feel qualified but I don’t think repeating the publisher’s own blurbs would serve any purpose. One person even suggested eventually having separate pages for Lymond and for Niccolo!! Comments welcome.
More news next time as we get closer to the release of Caprice and Rondo.
very best wishes
Bill