We are getting ready to send our latest book, "Ursula - Pain and prejudice" by Ursula Sherratt to the printers, held up only by the fact that the laminating machine used for our covers at The Finishing Touch works is being serviced. When that's done, we hope all systems will be "go"! At the same time we will also be producing the second reprints of "Tales of the Cut" and "Pinafore Street" .
Invitations have been sent out for Ursula's book launch at the High Street Centre, Rawmarsh, Rotherham on Tuesday, November 21 from 3-5.45pm, and we have our fingers crossed for a good crowd of her friends to turn up and support her. If you would like to come along to the launch, please contact us.
The book is a very moving autobiography and deserves to be well-received. It will be the last Léonie Press book to be written by someone other than Anne, and with its sombre theme of war, prejudice and personal courage, it seems a very fitting swansong.
We returned from France at the beginning of October so that Jack could attend an important meeting in our village of Hartford. A couple of days after we got back we had a phone call from our neighbours to say that there had been a violent storm and we had lost ten tiles from our barn roof. We hope that our friend Michel down the road, who is a roofer "on the sick" and has a HTML for heights, will be able to mend it for us. Otherwise Jack may have to fly back to Limoges airport for a spot of DIY.
Saturday, 16th and Sunday, 17th September, 2006 - European Heritage weekend
During the European Heritage weekend, we manned the church in St Dizier and put on an exhibition of its history for the benefit of visitors from further afield. The church has recently been named a national monument and has wonderful paintings on the ceilings and walls. The fact it was going to be open only made it onto the offical national website around midnight on September 15th/16th so it is not surprising that only one person from further than 1 kilometre away stopped by to visit it - a lady from Clermont Ferrand on a dash round the churches of the Creuse. However, a great time was had by all as Michel suggested exploring the belltower and studying the bells. He took "rubbings" using aluminium foil and a scrubbing brush, and we were able to find out who had made them. A search of the internet proved that the bell founders, in Orleans, are still going strong after 300 years! So we now have a new research project to get our teeth into...
Sunday, 20th August, 2006
We have just taken down the photographic exhibition that we have staged at the Salle Polyvalente at St Dizier la Tour for the public holiday of August 15th and the following few days. Our two previous exhibitions were of old photographs of the commune, provided by the residents but this year the mayor asked Anne to photograph the heritage of the commune - the wells, fontaines, lavoirs, ponds, streams, lakes, bridges, crosses, chicken houses and road markers. She took about 500 pictures and picked out the 70 best and most artistic ones. Some of the others will also be used in a factual book to describe the "patrimoine" of St Dizier la Tour. Past surveys done by local government history functionaries have been perfunctory to say the least, especially given the richness of the material available. Preparing the exhibition has taken up a significant part of most days for Anne over the last four or five months.
Tuesday, 8th August, 2006
Because of the volume of material which is being published world wide the ISBN system is running out of numbers to allocate to new work. As a result an enhanced 13 digit ISBN is being introduced and becomes mandatory from 1st January 2007. Jack is working through converting the ISBNs for all our books to the new system. If ordering one of our books via a bookshop it would be wise to provide them with both the new and the old ISBN for the forseeable future.
He has also become aware that some of our pages left something to be desired if you are using Mozilla Firefox as your browser, so he is also rectifying those defects as well. Our apologies if you have been suffering from missing characters or other display problems.
And finally, we have always charged postage and package at cost which is shown on each book's page and on the order form. If you order more than one book and the actual cost of the parcel is significantly less than you sent by totalling the p+p for each book we have returned the excess. However, as our UK customers should be aware, from 21st August 2006 Royal Mail is introducing charging by size as well as weight which may well make it very difficult to anticipate the cost of posting more than one book per package - we will have to see how it works in practice and may have to revise our p+p costs.
Tuesday, 25th July, 2006
We arrived back tonight from several hectic months in France and are thrilled to announce the birth this evening of Isabel Grace Loader, our third grandchild, and the first baby of our elder son Alex and his wife Michelle. She was born at Leighton Hospital, Crewe and is absolutely gorgeous (of course!).
Tuesday, 18th July, 2006
Jack Orrell's book "I bought a boat (and ended up with 24)" is now on sale and we have contacted all those who bought his first book "It's muck you want!" and expressed an interest in the second one.
Thursday, 16th March, 2006
There hasn't been much sign of the sabbatical yet! Anne has been busy with books that we had promised to do, reprints and the book of photos from the
second exhibition we put on last August in the commune where we have our house in France. The latter went to the printers a couple of weeks ago and we hope to have the proofs to check shortly. We are off to France at the end of the month.
Jack Orrell's second book "I bought a boat (and ended up with 24)" went to the printers earlier in the week but it won't be launched until July. Jack and Sheila have just moved house and have had a rather traumatic time - there was a blizzard on the day they moved and when Jack went into the kitchen the next morning the main water inlet pipe had burst and the kitchen was flooded - and it was a Saturday!
Kingsthorpe Bookshop told us today that the second reprint of "Kingsthorpe - A royal manor explored" is continuing to sell well with a sixth of their stock having gone already.
Mum, Michelle with baby Isabel.
Anne gets a chance of a cuddle with a one day old Isabel Grace Loader