A very happy and healthy New Year to all Calderonia readers old and new! (And if you are entirely new, please consider subscribing [immediate right], which does not mean paying anything, it just means that you will automatically receive each new post via email.)
Since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius was published on 7 September 2018 I have had to concentrate on selling copies through this blog, rather than on writing my usual variety of posts. Sales have not gone badly — we have made triple figures and have less of a hill to shift — but I have also learned some new and unwelcome truths about ‘indie’ publishing since that date; truths that I shall draw together in a future post. We fight on through the twenty or so more months that I reckon it will take to sell the limited edition out and then produce a (revised) Amazon paperback edition.
Meanwhile, surprising though it may sound, the first printed reviews are just appearing. If you click here, you will be able to read Michael Pursglove’s long and very gratifying review in the New Year issue of East-West Review (click to enlarge). This is quite a steamy issue, as it also reviews Bryon MacWilliams’s book about the traditional Russian bath:
An exotic cover (‘Russian Venus’ by Boris Kustodiev, 1926)
Where sales are concerned, may I just add that we are selling a limited number of copies through Amazon, Blackwell’s in Oxford, the National Archives bookshop at Kew, and Daunt’s Edwardian bookshop in Hampstead, but of course the main line for buyers of all descriptions is through the Sam&Sam website. Polite people keep asking me: ‘I assume I can buy your book at Waterstones?’, but I really think that is a euphemism for: ‘I don’t want to shell out £30 and if I imply I only buy from Waterstones you won’t know whether I’ve bought one or not’! Actually it will not appear at Waterstones, because such an arrangement would leave me with only about a 30% return on each copy.
I will always feature the book and reviews on future posts, but I assure you that I shall now be gradually returning to ‘normal’ blogging, probably just weekly. Obviously, there will be far less about WW1. I will start by reprising a favourite subject: new and old biographies…
SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY RECEIVED SO FAR
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon, 1912
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
‘Normal’ blogging will resume
A very happy and healthy New Year to all Calderonia readers old and new! (And if you are entirely new, please consider subscribing [immediate right], which does not mean paying anything, it just means that you will automatically receive each new post via email.)
Since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius was published on 7 September 2018 I have had to concentrate on selling copies through this blog, rather than on writing my usual variety of posts. Sales have not gone badly — we have made triple figures and have less of a hill to shift — but I have also learned some new and unwelcome truths about ‘indie’ publishing since that date; truths that I shall draw together in a future post. We fight on through the twenty or so more months that I reckon it will take to sell the limited edition out and then produce a (revised) Amazon paperback edition.
Meanwhile, surprising though it may sound, the first printed reviews are just appearing. If you click here, you will be able to read Michael Pursglove’s long and very gratifying review in the New Year issue of East-West Review (click to enlarge). This is quite a steamy issue, as it also reviews Bryon MacWilliams’s book about the traditional Russian bath:
An exotic cover (‘Russian Venus’ by Boris Kustodiev, 1926)
Where sales are concerned, may I just add that we are selling a limited number of copies through Amazon, Blackwell’s in Oxford, the National Archives bookshop at Kew, and Daunt’s Edwardian bookshop in Hampstead, but of course the main line for buyers of all descriptions is through the Sam&Sam website. Polite people keep asking me: ‘I assume I can buy your book at Waterstones?’, but I really think that is a euphemism for: ‘I don’t want to shell out £30 and if I imply I only buy from Waterstones you won’t know whether I’ve bought one or not’! Actually it will not appear at Waterstones, because such an arrangement would leave me with only about a 30% return on each copy.
I will always feature the book and reviews on future posts, but I assure you that I shall now be gradually returning to ‘normal’ blogging, probably just weekly. Obviously, there will be far less about WW1. I will start by reprising a favourite subject: new and old biographies…
SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY RECEIVED SO FAR
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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