This file is a formatted recreation of one of the first of the the old newsletters I sent out from James Thin. Purely for archive purposes.

*** Greeting to all our Dorothy Dunnett enthusiasts ***

Notice I don’t say warm – it’s freezing here in Scotland. Lovely and warm a few days ago – 6 degrees warmer than usual – now it’s snowing!!

I’ve been trying to get this newsletter written since I got back from a Windows NT course and a holiday 10 days ago, but things just keep changing, and Craig is now on holiday as well, so excuse me if I crib the odd sentence from the web page that I just amended.

There is some very good news for the US based fans….

Dorothy is to visit the US on an author tour in the autumn, to coincide with the reissuing of the US editions of the Lymond Chronicles. The dates aren’t all fixed yet according to Dorothy’s agent who I spoke to today, but it should be around September. I’ll post details as soon as I get them.

I’m told that the first of the US reissues (Game of Kings & Queens’ Play) have now been released in parts of the US and it appeares that the second two will be brought out in July with the last two in September. This raises the unusual situation of these last two being available in the US before the UK editions which have been put back to November. (The first four volumes had been well behind the UK publication schedules.) Now some of you in the US may have ordered Ringed Castle and Checkmate from us expecting that the UK editions would be out first. If you have, and would now prefer to go for the US editions just let me know and we’ll cancel those orders.

I expect that the UK editions will now come out at the same time as Caprice and Rondo, which will make for a nightmarish logistical exercise, but rest assured that we’ll do our best to get C&R to you all as quickly as we can. There are already nearly 200 copies reserved and there’s still 6 months to go!

Unfortunately there is also some bad news for everyone

The Dorothy Dunnett Companion is “Reprint Under Consideration”

We got a report last week that the “Companion” was out of print, and I immediately got in touch with the editiorial team at Michael Joseph. Thankfully it is not yet out of print – which would mean it would not be coming back – but it is reprint under consideration, which is almost as bad. Basically this means that they have no copies left and no plans to reprint it unless they receive sufficient orders to suggest that it is worthwhile. My impression was that we were the only people selling copies in reasonable numbers and it would need quite a lot of orders to persuade them that it would be economic. This is a great disappointment as I had been hopeful of persuading them to ask Elspeth Morrison to produce a second edition once the Niccolo series is finally complete. We have been in touch with all the wholesalers in the UK over the last few days to try to find any last copies but without success. We’ll just have to hope that more orders are placed with Michael Joseph over the next few months. We had a number of orders for it during the time between us running out and getting the report, so sorry for the disappointment to those concerned.

On a brighter note we have managed to get hold of a few more copies of the “Music for Lymond Niccolo and the Medici” cassette after a couple of months delay, which will at least let us fulfill the orders that we have outstanding. Since the contact for the Edinburgh Renaissance Band now seems to be back in town we’ll try to get hold of some more copies as well.

I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of you who were on the Romantic Times tour when it reached Edinburgh recently, as I had to hand deliver a copy of one of the books that had been damaged in transit, so that Dorothy would be able to sign it when the tour met up with her for dinner at Grosvenor Hotel. Dorothy of course looked stunning – I wish I knew where she gets her energy. I was surprised to find myself introduced to Diana Gabaldon who was also on the tour, as I had recently swapped emails with her about setting up a small web page on her books. I hope that those of you who were on this trip had a lovely time.

If you’ve looked at the web page recently you’ll have seen that I’ve been expanding things a little with the Author’s Gallery – though of course Dorothy still takes pride of place 🙂 I’d be interested to know what you think of this, and also whether you’d like to see the web site made more visually appealing. I’ve tended to keep things simple up to now in order to keep it fast, and most of the comments I get agree with this policy, but I am getting the occasional message suggesting that a more modern design is in order. What do you think – simple and fast with maximum information or pretty and maybe a bit slower? All suggestions gratefully received.

I should mention that we are going to have to move our web pages to a different provider in the fairly near future, as our current one is changing the nature of their business. Since we have our own domain name this shouldn’t cause too many problems, but make sure that any bookmarks that you have are pointing at the alias http://www.jthin.co.uk (/dunnett.htm if you are going straight to that page) rather than the full server address (http://www.almac.co.uk/business_park/thin/

It also might be as well to stop using the old email address james.thin.ltd@almac.co.uk and use the newer one to which it is aliased enquiries@jthin.co.uk as I’m not sure if that alias will continue to work after the transfer to the new provider. Craig will answer any book enquiries or orders on both that or on orders@jthin.co.uk

Most of you know about the StockSearch ordering system on the web page, and most of you seem to get it to work ok. However it seems that in certain circumstances it refuses to connect to the search section. If any of you run into this problem I’d be grateful if you could let me know what error message you get as we haven’t been able to duplicate the problem here. Thanks
very best wishes to you all

Bill