On 16 June this year the website www.samandsam.co.uk, which had existed since 2018, disappeared from the Web. Here is a reminder of what the splash page looked like:
The header for the old Sam&Sam site.
A selection of books from the old Sam&Sam site.
I refused to waste much time over who had perpetrated this, because I realised it was a blessing in disguise. I had been dithering too long for my Russian publishing partner’s good about severing his public association with me; now I had to do it. So I am setting up a new imprint which will be exclusively based in Britain.
What to call it?
Well, I once explained the origin of Sam&Sam on Calderonia, so you can see there that not only did the Sam bit back in 1974 stand for ‘self’, as in samizdat (self-publishing), but each of the two publishers, Russian and English, had written sonnets under the name of Samuel Goathead, purportedly a Jacobean poet. So I thought old Sam&Sam should transmogrify into The Goathead Press. Its website will be available in November. Sam&Sam will exist as an exclusively Russia-based and Russian-owned imprint.
The Goathead Press’s logo will be far removed from that of Sam&Sam, which had as its motto (in Russian) ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’. The new logo will be the goat’s head that I drew on the frontispiece of the 1975 edition of Goathead’s sonnets, to which the great poet obligingly set his hand. The spade and rake symbolise Goathead’s early life as a gardener, and his Latin motto means ‘I never give in’.
Frontispiece to 1975 edition, Goathead Press logo at top
For the world’s enlightenment, we will publish a facsimile of the 1975 Complete Sonnets of Samuel Goathead on Calderonia in a fortnight’s time. When I was providing the ‘originals’ of my co-publisher’s Russian sonnets of S.G. in Moscow nearly fifty years ago, I also gave him a copy of the Signet Classic edition of John Donne and inscribed it thus: ‘Take, O friend, and savour it,/This book of poems by my favourite — /Whose reputation, though, seems bloated,/ When you compare him with Samuel Goathead.’
The Goathead Press will continue to sell books in Russian published by Sam&Sam in Russia, but will concentrate on its own and other small presses’ new English-language titles. The ‘Who we are’ blurb will say that the Goathead Press is ‘owned and managed exclusively by Patrick Miles and James Miles in Cambridge, UK’. Serendipitously, Jim tells me that in the language of his generation GOAT stands for ‘Greatest Of All Time’…
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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
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon, 1912
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
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Announcing: THE GOATHEAD PRESS
On 16 June this year the website www.samandsam.co.uk, which had existed since 2018, disappeared from the Web. Here is a reminder of what the splash page looked like:
The header for the old Sam&Sam site.
A selection of books from the old Sam&Sam site.
I refused to waste much time over who had perpetrated this, because I realised it was a blessing in disguise. I had been dithering too long for my Russian publishing partner’s good about severing his public association with me; now I had to do it. So I am setting up a new imprint which will be exclusively based in Britain.
What to call it?
Well, I once explained the origin of Sam&Sam on Calderonia, so you can see there that not only did the Sam bit back in 1974 stand for ‘self’, as in samizdat (self-publishing), but each of the two publishers, Russian and English, had written sonnets under the name of Samuel Goathead, purportedly a Jacobean poet. So I thought old Sam&Sam should transmogrify into The Goathead Press. Its website will be available in November. Sam&Sam will exist as an exclusively Russia-based and Russian-owned imprint.
The Goathead Press’s logo will be far removed from that of Sam&Sam, which had as its motto (in Russian) ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’. The new logo will be the goat’s head that I drew on the frontispiece of the 1975 edition of Goathead’s sonnets, to which the great poet obligingly set his hand. The spade and rake symbolise Goathead’s early life as a gardener, and his Latin motto means ‘I never give in’.
Frontispiece to 1975 edition, Goathead Press logo at top
For the world’s enlightenment, we will publish a facsimile of the 1975 Complete Sonnets of Samuel Goathead on Calderonia in a fortnight’s time. When I was providing the ‘originals’ of my co-publisher’s Russian sonnets of S.G. in Moscow nearly fifty years ago, I also gave him a copy of the Signet Classic edition of John Donne and inscribed it thus: ‘Take, O friend, and savour it,/This book of poems by my favourite — /Whose reputation, though, seems bloated,/ When you compare him with Samuel Goathead.’
The Goathead Press will continue to sell books in Russian published by Sam&Sam in Russia, but will concentrate on its own and other small presses’ new English-language titles. The ‘Who we are’ blurb will say that the Goathead Press is ‘owned and managed exclusively by Patrick Miles and James Miles in Cambridge, UK’. Serendipitously, Jim tells me that in the language of his generation GOAT stands for ‘Greatest Of All Time’…
ADVERTISEMENT
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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