All of a sudden things went right with Amazon, and we have received our first customer copy of What Can We Hope For? Dialogues about the Future. The book is ONLY available from Amazon, i.e. by print on demand. This is because we could not have coped with printing and storing a large imprint and handling all the marketing and sales on top of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. We are expecting another fifteen authors’ review and complimentary copies soon.
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
One thing that is not visible from Amazon’s images of the cover, of course, is how big this book is, so I ought to jump in now and say it is a pocket-size paperback of standard format 111 x 178 mm. And at the last minute, after the third and final proof, Amazon required us to add nine pages with text to make it up to a hundred, so we had no alternative but to textualise these blanks simply as ‘For Notes’.
The shortness of the book has enabled us to keep its price to £5, which John Polkinghorne always wanted as a means of broadening its appeal. The last commercial publisher whose contract we rejected wanted to charge £12.50!
We hope you will be as pleased as we are with the printing of the book. Frankly, I would have preferred a slightly larger font, but at the time we thought we had to fit the text plus notes and index into significantly less than 100 pages, so we experimented and arrived at this font size.
The biggest challenge for printers is trimming, and Amazon are clearly no exception, so there will perhaps be a millimetre or two variation there. The second biggest challenge (we had the same problem with Clays) seems to be getting the outer page margins and central ‘gutter’ the width the publishers have stipulated…
I will leave Sam2 to deal with the typesetting and printing issues in an imminent post. My job is to get the review copies out now, with some delay, and assure you, first, that you should find this book interesting, and second that it is much more of a theatre script than a dry interview!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
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
George Calderon c.1901
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Publication!
All of a sudden things went right with Amazon, and we have received our first customer copy of What Can We Hope For? Dialogues about the Future. The book is ONLY available from Amazon, i.e. by print on demand. This is because we could not have coped with printing and storing a large imprint and handling all the marketing and sales on top of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. We are expecting another fifteen authors’ review and complimentary copies soon.
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
One thing that is not visible from Amazon’s images of the cover, of course, is how big this book is, so I ought to jump in now and say it is a pocket-size paperback of standard format 111 x 178 mm. And at the last minute, after the third and final proof, Amazon required us to add nine pages with text to make it up to a hundred, so we had no alternative but to textualise these blanks simply as ‘For Notes’.
The shortness of the book has enabled us to keep its price to £5, which John Polkinghorne always wanted as a means of broadening its appeal. The last commercial publisher whose contract we rejected wanted to charge £12.50!
We hope you will be as pleased as we are with the printing of the book. Frankly, I would have preferred a slightly larger font, but at the time we thought we had to fit the text plus notes and index into significantly less than 100 pages, so we experimented and arrived at this font size.
The biggest challenge for printers is trimming, and Amazon are clearly no exception, so there will perhaps be a millimetre or two variation there. The second biggest challenge (we had the same problem with Clays) seems to be getting the outer page margins and central ‘gutter’ the width the publishers have stipulated…
I will leave Sam2 to deal with the typesetting and printing issues in an imminent post. My job is to get the review copies out now, with some delay, and assure you, first, that you should find this book interesting, and second that it is much more of a theatre script than a dry interview!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
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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