Unbound Catalogue Autumn 2022 by Unbound

Autumn 2022

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The Pyjama Myth / Sian Meades-Williams 978-1-80018-096-3 / £12.99

Poguemahone / Patrick McCabe 978-1-80018-111-3 / £20.00

Wokelore / Hardeep Matharu (ed.) 978-1-80018-125-0 / £12.99

Villager / Tom Cox 978-1-80018-134-2 / £16.99

Women on Nature / Katharine Norbury (ed.) 978-1-80018-141-0 / £12.99

The Ethical Stripper / Stacey Clare 978-1-78965-133-1 / £10.99

Underdogs: Acceleration / Chris Bonnello 978-1-80018-088-8 / £9.99

SPRING 2022 HIGHLIGHTS

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Unbound c/o Runway East 20 St Thomas Street London SE1 9RS Tel. 020 3997 6790 www.unbound.com @unbounders Head of Sales Julian Mash julian@unbound.com Head of Rights Ilona Chavasse ilona@unbound.com Head of Communications Rina Gill rina@unbound.com To order any of the books in this catalogue please contact your PGUK rep. If you’re unsure who that is, contact Julian Mash at julian@unbound.com

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Dear Reader, Welcome to our autumn 2022 catalogue highlighting titles published between July and December. As usual you will find features and interviews with authors at the front, followed by a full list of titles including ISBNs and publication dates at the back. What an autumn we have ahead! We are beyond excited to publish Jim Moir’s Birds on 1 September. Jim – best known for his comedy alter ego Vic Reeves – has gained acclaim and popularity for his startlingly beautiful paintings of birds. We have gathered 100 of them into a beautiful hardback volume, with a foreword from Chris Packham. You can learn more about the paintings and Jim’s love of birds by turning to page 6 for an interview with Jim by Unbound’s co-founder and publisher John Mitchinson. Later in the autumn, on 10 November, we publish Clangers: The Complete Scripts 1969–1974. The Clangers memorably spoke in a language played on swannee whistles. No one expected them to have scripts – but they did. This hardback book contains those never-beforeseen scripts, lavishly illustrated and with forewords from Michael Palin and Maggie Aderin-Pocock. The previously unseen scripts sit alongside writing from Daniel Postgate – son of Clangers creator Oliver Postgate – exploring the inspiration for and lasting cultural impact of the show, as well as new and historical photographs, Peter Firmin’s original illustrations, Oliver’s handwritten musical notations and more. November sees Jackie Morris unveil the first two instalments of her beautiful new Accordion Books series. An Accordion Book doesn’t open, it unfolds. One side is filled with beautiful watercolour images of an animal: sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest. The other is filled with text – poems, descriptions, invocations – inspired by the same animal. Together they work as spells to summon the animal’s spirit. Jackie has painted them using antique watercolours, some from boxes which hadn’t been opened for over 150 years, woken from their slumber with a single drop of water. The series begins with Fox and Otter, with more to follow in 2023. In October we publish Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom by Simon NapierBell, a true legend in the music business. This is the book his fans have always hoped he’d write. His previous bestsellers lifted the lid on the industry, combining brilliant analysis with unforgettable stories of fame and wild excess. But those books hardly scratched the surface. Now,

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at long last, he’s turned the spotlight on himself. Music critic and writer Mark Ellen put it succinctly when he said: ‘Never has anybody had so much fun, remembered it so precisely and made so much sense of it all.’ There are stories of the stellar acts Simon has managed – from the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan to Wham! and Sinéad O’Connor – and there’s also the wisdom gathered from a louche existence of clubs, restaurants, gigs, award ceremonies, bankruptcies, booze and sex, both gay and straight. You could call the book ‘How to Use the Music Industry to Create a Lifestyle’. You might equally call it ‘How to Use Your Lifestyle to Gain Access to the Music Industry’. Other highlights of the season include Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop. Publishing in November, this is a full-colour illustrated history of the store that changed gaming for ever, as told by its founders – not to be missed! The Decade in Tory hits shops in October. It is written by Russell Jones, the man behind @RussInCheshire on Twitter, who publishes a regular breakdown of the government’s regular breakdowns under the hashtag #TheWeekInTory. The Decade in Tory is his first book: a scathing, hilarious, comprehensive and absolutely true account of the decade of Tory rule from 2010 to 2020. In September we are thrilled to be publishing Lost & Found, an illustrated treasure trove of folk tales retold by Elizabeth Garner – stories that have nurtured, sustained, terrified and enthralled her in equal measure. Some are taken from the books of her childhood, some are remembered, and others she has discovered in her reading over the years. The stories are coupled with stunning artworks by Phoebe Connolly. November sees the publication of Blood on Satan’s Claw, a novelisation of the cult folk horror film penned by its original screenwriter Robert WynneSimmons, with haunting woodcut illustrations from Richard Wells (Damnable Tales). It is published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the film, which along with The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General is widely regarded as part of the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror classics. These are just some of the highlights of what promises to be our best autumn yet. If you are interested in ordering any of the titles listed here, please speak to your PGUK sales rep or email julian@unbound.com. Until next time, happy reading. Julian Mash, Head of Sales

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CONTENTS Away with the Birds: An Interview with Jim Moir

The artist also known as Vic Reeves discusses his new book of 100 bird paintings

Clangers

A sneak preview of what’s to come in our collection of never-before-seen scripts from the beloved children’s TV programme 11

Accordion Books: Fox and Otter

The Kate Greenaway Medal-winning author and artist Jackie Morris on the story behind her exciting new series

An extract from @RussInCheshire’s fiery comedic takedown of a decade of Tory rule

An extract from the new frank and fascinating memoir by legendary pop impresario Simon Napier-Bell

Some exclusive archival photos from our illustrated history of Games Workshop, the store that changed gaming for ever

One of fifteen folk tales retold to be cherished in the present and future

A new graphic novel version of Michael Rosen’s fan-favourite story

An extract from the forthcoming Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes

An in-depth illustrated look at the most interesting cases from medieval coroners’ rolls

Award-winning journalist Richard Moss takes us on a journey back to the origins of indie video gaming

Tips and tricks for working from home, from this slacker bible

This enchanting historical novel tells the story of the young revolutionary who was the inspiration for Degas’ celebrated sculpture

An extract with stunning woodcut illustrations from this novelisation of the classic folk horror film

The second and final instalment of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel

The first-ever collection of the letters of M. R. James, master of the English ghost story

July to December 2022

The Decade in Tory

Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom Dice Men

Lost & Found

You’re Thinking About Tomatoes

Hush-Kit’s Top Ten Worst British Aircraft Unfortunate Ends

Shareware Heroes

Shirk, Rest and Play Little Dancer

Blood on Satan’s Claw

The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Vol. II Casting the Runes

New Titles: Autumn

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AWAY WITH THE BIRDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM MOIR If you are one of the six million British people who regularly go bird-watching, you won’t need much persuading to add Jim Moir’s beautiful new book to your collection. The artist also known as Vic Reeves has painted a sequence of one hundred watercolour portraits of his favourite birds, from the avocet to the yellowhammer, which Unbound will publish as Birds in September. Here Jim talks to Unbound’s publisher, John Mitchinson, about his rediscovery of a childhood passion. John Mitchinson: Were you always a lover of birds? Jim Moir: Yes, as a very young child I had a passion for birds and aircraft. The lure of flight was obviously very strong. This was a world without video games and me and my friends were obsessed with egg-collecting. Now, of course, I know just how illegal and wrong it is, but it was that which turned me onto birds. I spent most of my youth with my head stuck in hedges looking for nests. Did you go out with binoculars? Yes, my father gave me a pair he’d used in the Second World War. He’d served on an aircraft carrier in the Baltic. When he gave them to me he told me that the last time he used them he’d been watching narwhals in the Baltic. The main thing I remember is their weight – I think they must have been carved out of lead. I never managed to carry them very far. What’s the appeal of birds? I think it’s that they are so unlike us – I mean they can fly for a start – and they seem to work at a much quicker rate than humans. It’s like when 6

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Yellowhammer Emberiza citronella

you see a magpie tugging at a carcase on the road, and they seem to wait until the very last minute to move away. Apparently, it’s because their eyes process light more quickly than ours. So, colour and light look different to birds and they experience time in a different way, too. Did you always draw and paint birds? I must have drawn them when I was younger but what I mainly remember is drawing aeroplanes. I rediscovered birds in my fifties. I’ve always painted what I’m interested in and birds began to interest me more at that time. I think life is circular – you return to things and if you lived for ever, you’d notice the same things coming up again and again. Do you draw the birds from life? Birds never sit still – that’s part of what I love about them – so, no. I do take pictures of them but I also use good images from the internet. It 7

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pays to be honest. Even with a landscape, light changes. With a bird, there are even more variables. I don’t think you could paint a real bird from life – unless it was dead. But is your approach to paint them as accurately as you can? There’s no evidence of the Dadaist and surreal quality of your other paintings. When I started painting the birds I did them in an exaggerated style, almost like caricatures. But I’ve gradually come to realise I get a real kick out of making them as realistic as I can. And I think I’m getting better and better at painting them. I’m exploring watercolours, which are new to me. It’s exciting. With watercolour there’s a certain amount of technique and skill but also quite a lot of luck. Some of the paintings go through a stage where they are quite touch and go, but they usually seem to work out. It probably helps that I really don’t mind sitting and watching paint dry! Is painting your main job now? Yes – I actually now make more selling my art online than I do from performing [his online shop is https://vicreeves.tv]. And I love it. I might do some acting for fun, but for a living, I paint. I’m building a new studio next to the house – that’s how serious I am! And will there be more birds?

Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus

There will: there’s no stopping me until I get bored, which isn’t going to happen. I’m working on some big versions – owls and blackbirds on seven-foot-high pieces of paper – which I’m excited about. If you want to see colourful creatures running

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around, I’d much rather watch birds than footballers. I think a lot of people just like looking at birds – like Chris Packham says in his introduction to the book, it’s an instinctive thing. Some people like looking at porn, I like looking at birds. Do you have a favourite? The bullfinch. They’re always skulking in bushes and they’re unpopular with gardeners because they eat the buds of fruit trees, but I like the shape and colour of them. They are unjustly maligned birds; I find them a very cheering presence. Are there any bird books that inspired you? Lots, but my favourite is All the Birds of the Air by Francesca Greenoak. It was published in the seventies and tells the stories Hoopoe Upupa epops behind the names and nicknames of birds. We’ve put a little fact for each bird in my book and it was a good source for those. The goldfinch, for example, was sometimes known as ‘the sheriff’s man’ or ‘the friend of the tailor’. If you were a bird, which would it be? Probably a woodpecker because of my extraordinarily long tongue. And my wife Nancy and I always refer to ourselves as great crested grebes (a bird famous for its elaborate courting rituals). Like grebes we enjoy the ritual of outdoor discos. Nancy comes bird-watching with me and can recognise quite a lot of birds now. 9

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You’re donating some of the profits from the book to the RSPB. Does that make you a roving ambassador? I probably am now, aren’t I? I think they do a great job and I suppose my idea for the book is that as well as being full of lovely paintings, it’s still small enough to fit inside the pocket of a cagoule or Barbour. I like to think of people using it, maybe not as reference but as inspiration, or a pleasing accompaniment to their sandwiches.

Mallard Anas platyrhynchos

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Find Birds on page 98

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CLANGERS The Clangers memorably spoke in a language played on swannee whistles. No one expected them to have scripts. But they did. Within an ancient barn nestled in the heart of the Kent countryside, Smallfilms founders Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin created one of the most beloved BBC children’s series of the twentieth century: Clangers. Clangers: The Complete Scripts 1969–1974 is the ultimate collection of scripts from the original two series of the show in one lavishly illustrated volume. These previously unseen scripts sit alongside new writing from Daniel Postgate – son of the original creator Oliver Postgate – exploring the inspiration for and lasting cultural impact of the show, new and historical photographs, Peter’s original illustrations, Oliver’s handwritten musical notations and more.

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A froglet, Granny Clanger and the Soup Dragon. All photographs: © Johnny Ring

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Oliver Postgate at work.

The Firmins’ shed, where the magic happened.

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin on the Clangers set.

All photographs: © Daniel Postgate

Find Clangers on page 106

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ACCORDION BOOKS: FOX AND OTTER An Accordion Book doesn’t open, it unfolds. One side is filled with beautiful watercolour images of an animal: sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest. The other is filled with text – poems, descriptions, invocations – inspired by the same animal. Jackie Morris has teamed up again with Alison O’Toole, designer of The Lost Words and The Unwinding, to create stunning objects that double as spells to summon the animals’ spirits. Here Jackie describes how she came to paint the first two books in this exciting new series: Fox and Otter.

Small, to be carried in the pocket as a talisman, the Accordion series are part book, part art object, part meditation, perhaps part prayer. Each one unfolds from its form as a book to become a frieze that can stand on a shelf, window ledge or mantelpiece, or live in a frame. The first two, Fox and Otter, celebrate these wild creatures in image and word. 18

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I made the images using pigments that have lain dormant for 150 to 200 years in beautiful boxes. These are old sets from the early days of watercolour paint cakes, fascinating antiques that tell so many stories – of the craft of the early colour men, the development of watercolour. They come from a time when the focus of manufacture was beauty, from the box to the blown-glass water dishes, the ceramic palettes and the cakes themselves, imprinted with unique designs. They’re so often only seen in museums, but I’ve been collecting sets to use, freeing the pigments from their slumber to dance in the light, woken with the kiss of water: sleeping beauties.

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Find Fox and Otter on page 107

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THE DECADE IN TORY Russell Jones – the man behind @RussInCheshire’s #TheWeekInTory on Twitter (177k followers) – is no stranger to writing regular breakdowns of the government’s regular breakdowns. Written with all of his signature scathing wit, The Decade in Tory is an inglorious – and entirely true – comedic take on the decade of Tory rule from 2010 to 2020: Cameron’s pledge to tackle inequality, which reduced UK life expectancy for the first time since 1841; the bewildering storm of lies and betrayals that led to Brexit; the ineffectual response to Covid-19; interminable failures in health and education reform; and much, much more. ‘A Perpetual Vortex of Agitation’ At Christmas 1834, Robert Peel delivered his Tamworth Manifesto, laying down the founding principles of a new politics for Britain. His movement would not undertake radical, sudden changes but would embrace a ‘careful review of institutions’ and deliver ‘judicious reform’ once it was certain its plans would ensure ‘the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’. It would bring about constancy, responsibility, substance and modest change; no longer would Britons live in ‘a perpetual vortex of agitation’. With that pledge to the nation, Peel conjured into life the modern Conservative Party. At the end of 2020 we reached the milestone of ten successive years of Conservative rule. During that decade, there have never been more than 365 Tory MPs. This book names 153 of them in its by-no-meanscomprehensive account of demonstrable lies, relentless incompetence, epic waste, serial corruption, sexual and physical assaults, official police investigations, illegal drug use, excessive alcohol consumption, addition to registers of sex-pests, anti-democratic practices, abuse of power, dereliction of duty, hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, and repeated attempts to instigate the mass-slaughter of small woodland creatures. 21

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That’s almost half of them. Tory MPs, I mean, not woodland creatures. And that number doesn’t even include the various lords, donors, councillors, relatives, mistresses, tarantulas and advisors swept up in the maelstrom of transgression and despondency. Imagine if you worked at a union at which over 40 per cent of senior officials had committed those offences. Can you begin to conceive of the political, media and public outrage? For God’s sake, we had a month of shouting when Diane Abbott drank gin from a can on a train. Whereas under the Tories we’ve trashed international norms, breached election law countless times, lost most of our global allies, auctioned our democracy to the highest bidders, crashed our health service, undermined our educational system, demolished our welfare safety net, weakened our military, ruined our credit status, killed 120,000 people before the pandemic even began, and condemned our young to a desperate future. Tory rule has brought about the slowest recovery from a recession since records began. State debt rose by 40 per cent before factoring in Covid. And then the inept and late decision to prioritise the economy over health in a pandemic led to Britain having one of the highest death tolls on earth, but also the worst economic performance of any major economy.

THE GOVERNMENT HANDED OUT TOWERING PILES OF MONEY THAT WOULD STRETCH – QUITE LITERALLY – INTO OUTER SPACE; NOT ONCE, BUT OVER AND OVER AGAIN Meanwhile the government handed out towering piles of money that would stretch – quite literally – into outer space; not once, but over and over again. Party donors got it. Friends in the media got it. Landlords got it. Chums from Eton got it. It seemed the only thing stopping us becoming a banana republic before now was EU regulations about bananas. Yet even before the pandemic, for the rest of us life expectancy was falling. Investment crashed. Racism soared. Homelessness rose 250 per cent, and we’ve gone from 40,000 people needing food banks each year to 2.5 million. In that decade we’ve had three prime ministers, not one of whom started the job having won an election. There have been ministerial resignations by the hundred, and MPs doing a grand tour of every scandal you can imagine, and several you really don’t want to. They started with basic lies and hypocrisy – which no longer raise an eyebrow, let alone demand an honourable resignation – and moved swiftly through a Heinz 57 varieties of terrible behaviour. 22

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They ran two national referendums – or three if you’re in Scotland, in which case: run, run like hell. In one of those referendums the Tories campaigned against their own promises of democratic reforms; and the other became the most pointless, divisive and damaging political rupture in living memory. As for the second half of the Conservative and Unionist Party’s name – Unionist – most of Scotland don’t want to be ruled by the British government, and nobody, literally nobody, in Northern Ireland voted for a Tory MP at all. The fact that the general public is so ignorant or accepting of this should be a cause for national shame. It’s become normalised. For most of his time in public life, people chuckled at Johnson antics, and his jokes are still the highlight of many news reports. Yet it’s not just him: the depth of anti-talent on the Tory benches is simply horrific. Whether you like their politics or not, we once had a heavyweight Tory cabinet that included Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten, David Mellor, Virginia Bottomley, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke and John Major. Now we have Liz Truss, Grant Shapps, Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel; and we count ourselves lucky Grayling and Williamson have finally gone. How did it come to this? We must be mad. I mean that quite literally, because in a rational country David Cameron would have remained where he started: the PR guy for a local daytime TV channel. Theresa May would be the deputy head of a primary school in special measures. Nigel Farage would be a shift manager at a branch of Wetherspoons in Cleethorpes, and Boris Johnson would be a children’s entertainer on administrative leave pending the outcome of a serious enquiry.

WE AREN’T IN A RATIONAL COUNTRY: WE’RE IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE RULES NO LONGER APPLY But we aren’t in a rational country: we’re in a country where the rules no longer apply. The last decade has been indistinguishable from a rollercoaster drawn by M. C. Escher, composed entirely of nauseating descents. Meanwhile the nation has heaved a weary sigh of relief at the demise of each iteration of their pointless, ghastly ministers, only to see each one replaced by something even worse – and then voted for them all over again.

Find The Decade in Tory on page 105

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SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM Simon Napier-Bell is a legendary figure in British pop, best known for managing acts such as the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan and Wham!. He is also the author of bestselling, widely acclaimed books about the music industry. In his frank and fascinating new memoir, Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom, he turns the spotlight on himself at last, telling the story of an extraordinary life lived to the fullest. The following extract from the book details a 1974 encounter with Elvis Presley, who a few years earlier had a hit single with ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’, a song Simon co-wrote. When Elvis recorded ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’, lots of people thought he’d spoiled it. I thought it was brilliant, a perfect example of how a different singer can give the same lyrics a completely different meaning. Though, actually, Dusty’s version had already done that. When Vicki Wickham and I wrote the song we weren’t thinking romantically. It was 1966, the height of Swinging London. We were part of a young set whose principal objective every night was to go out to dance and drink and shag. In the new world of the pill, sex had become easy and casual; romance for the most part took a back seat to a kaleidoscope of changing partners. Sitting in the Scotch of St James or the Ad Lib around 2 a.m., the title of our song became a pulling line. It meant, ‘For heaven’s sake, you don’t need to worry that we don’t really know each other. Let’s just go home together and have some fun. You won’t have to say you love me or anything like that.’ Which was more or less what we meant when we wrote the lyric. 24

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But Dusty took our lyric of sexual freedom and turned it into heartbreak, begging her lover to stay around even if true love wasn’t really what they felt. And it certainly worked. It was number one all over the world.

WE WERE PART OF A YOUNG SET WHOSE PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVE EVERY NIGHT WAS TO GO OUT TO DANCE AND DRINK AND SHAG Then Elvis came along and changed the meaning again. I loved the way he gave it a macho twist – the guy who’s embarrassed by his girlfriend’s constant desire to talk about romance. He’s sort of shrugging it off; doesn’t want to go there. ‘For God’s sake, girl, do we really have to talk about all that love stuff? Just stick around and do what’s needed and we’ll get on fine.’ He even took the tempo faster, almost at a gallop in fact, as if he was trying to get this embarrassing love chat out of the way as quickly as possible. I first heard he’d recorded it when I was in RCA’s offices in New York in 1970, and saw a test pressing. By then he’d already given his first performance of the song in public, at the Las Vegas Hilton during his annual month-long residency. A few years later I went there specially to see his show. Afterwards, persuaded by Kit Lambert, who’d come to Vegas with me, I went backstage to say hello to him. I really didn’t want to; it wasn’t the sort of thing I usually did, but Kit insisted. ‘He’s one of those few people you really can’t turn down the opportunity to meet.’ So while Kit went off to the bar, probably to score some smack, which is why he wanted me to leave him alone for a few minutes, I pushed my way to the front of the auditorium and found the pass door to backstage. In America, these are the moments when an English accent works wonders. I explained to the bouncer that I was one of the songwriters of Elvis’s new hit, and I was in. Once inside, though, I became nothing more than just another fan. Outside Elvis’s dressing-room door there was a lengthy queue, mostly of middle-aged women, thirty- to forty-year-old housewives with bluerinse hair and autograph books in their hands. Like the well-behaved Englishman I was, I didn’t queue-jump, I stood in line. When I eventually reached the front, I didn’t have an autograph book to push towards Elvis for his signature so I shook his hand and said, ‘Hi, Elvis, I just want to say how much I loved the way you sang “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”. I’m one of the co-writers.’ 25

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‘Good song,’ he muttered, then moved towards the next person in line. Suddenly I heard my voice say something more. ‘Do you think I could have a gold record?’ It was such an embarrassing thing to say, I couldn’t think where the words had come from. Elvis didn’t even blink; he just turned to Colonel Parker who was standing behind him and said, ‘Hey, Colonel – give the kid a goldie’, then got on with signing the next autograph. A kid? I was thirty-five already. It must have been my youthful British politeness. I stepped across to the Colonel who asked for my address and I handed him my business card.

IN AMERICA, THESE ARE THE MOMENTS WHEN AN ENGLISH ACCENT WORKS WONDERS. I EXPLAINED TO THE BOUNCER THAT I WAS ONE OF THE SONGWRITERS OF ELVIS’S NEW HIT, AND I WAS IN Two weeks later, back in Paris, it turned up. A gold American 45 rpm mounted on red velvet in a gold frame with a plaque underneath saying, ‘Thanks for a great song. Elvis.’ And a week later the invoice arrived. One hundred dollars, made payable to Colonel Parker’s company. I didn’t know it at the time but selling gold records to anyone who wanted one − which was probably half the people in the fan queue every night − was one of the Colonel’s sidelines. A hundred dollars doesn’t sound much now but there’s been seven times inflation since then. In those days a gold record wouldn’t have cost more than a tenth of that to make, so at fifty a day shipped to any fan who wanted one that was another million a year coming in. Anyway. Paying for it in no way lessened the pleasure of getting it.

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Find Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom on page 102

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DICE MEN Since 1975, Games Workshop has been a cornerstone of the UK gaming industry. From the launch of Dungeons & Dragons in the back of their van to creating the Fighting Fantasy series, co-founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson give an account of their remarkable rise for the first time in Dice Men, the fullcolour illustrated origin story of the iconic store that changed gaming for ever. It never seems like the right time to start a business. There’s always a good reason to put off the big decision to go it alone. Jumping into the unknown in the 1970s during a period of economic stagnation could be viewed as foolhardy, but we were too young to worry about that. Steve, John and I had run-of-the-mill, white-collar jobs. We were small cogs in big machines on career paths we didn’t really want. The idea to start our own company first cropped up during one of our many ‘beer and a board game’ sessions after work at our flat. And when Steve began writing reviews of board games for Games & Puzzles magazine, we all got even more interested in the idea. So, one day, we did. It was January 1975.

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Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, in the ‘bread-bin-sized’ office in Shepherd’s Bush in 1976.

April 1978, the opening of the very first Games Workshop premises – to everyone’s surprise, a queue formed round the block!

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Dungeons & Dragons, a first edition.

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White Dwarf magazine, a glossy step up from the original Owl & Weasel newsletter, marked a crunch point in the development of the business.

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The openings of shops in Manchester in 1982 and Derby in 1987, with a bit more fanfare.

A lot of time has passed since 1975. Games Workshop has grown from its humble beginnings to become the iconic global company it is today, listed on the London Stock Exchange, a FTSE 250 company with a market capitalisation of more than £3.5 billion. Who would have thought that a company which started out as a part-time mail-order business selling obscure board games from a modest third-floor flat could be worth that much? Dice Men is the story of the rollercoaster early years. Roll 3d6 to start!

Find Dice Men on page 108

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LOST & FOUND Drawing from traditional stories of the past, the fifteen treasured folk tales in this stunning illustrated collection have been reimagined by Elizabeth Garner to be preserved and cherished in the present and future. True to tradition while speaking directly to the modern world, the stories in Lost & Found share common threads: the heroes and heroines who stray from the safer paths in life and find themselves in unknown worlds; the mysterious object whose purpose is revealed when true magic is most needed; the truth of the inner self that is found when all hope and love seem to be lost… ‘The Coal Companion’ Jack’s time was up. He’d touted and tricked his way across the length, depth and breadth of this world, and all the Other Worlds besides. There was only one road left for him to take and there was no turning back. It was a cold October evening and dusk was falling as Jack crested the brow of the high hill and the lights of the village unfolded before him, shining bold and bright – like a cache of constellations cradled in the lap of the land. There at the far side of the valley was his cottage, with smoke pluming from the chimney. Jack could see himself, warming his tired bones by the fire, sharing his mixed fortunes with his Old Mother. He picked up his pace accordingly. At the bottom of the hill the track curved about a corner and Jack was going too quick to stop himself. There was a big black bag lying in the middle of the path and Jack’s boots met it. He went tumbling head over heels and landed up on his back, winded. Then the bag spoke. ‘More haste, less speed, my friend.’ 32

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The bag unfolded itself and became a man. He was dressed in a long dark coat and had hair as black as coal. ‘There’s no getting away from it, Jack,’ said the Stranger. ‘All your deeds and desires have been weighed up and counted and the scales have fallen accordingly. It’s my home, not yours, that we’re heading to.’ Jack stood silent for a moment, making his own calculations. Then he grinned. ‘Fair’s fair,’ Jack said. ‘Only a fool would try to flee his Fate or fight against it.’ He held out his hand and pulled the Stranger up to full standing. The Stranger dusted down his coat and fished a tall black hat out of the ditch and fixed it upon his head. ‘I have but one favour to ask,’ said Jack. ‘A drink at the inn before we set out on this great adventure together.’ The Stranger smiled. His teeth were white and sharp. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘After all, you have an eternity of hot and thirsty work ahead of you.’ Jack and the Stranger linked arms and they matched stride for stride as they went marching down that dark path into the village. The inn was lit up like a lantern, guiding them in. When they crossed the threshold, the room fell silent and the faces that turned to them were faces of men that Jack knew. Men he had taunted, thwarted and troubled. Jack had not a single friend amongst them. The Innkeeper stepped forward, placing one hand upon Jack’s elbow and another on the latch of the door. ‘It’s been quiet times without your company, Jack,’ he said. ‘And that’s the way we’re keeping it.’ Jack shrugged aside the hand that held him and slung his arm around the Innkeeper’s shoulder. ‘It’s not trouble I’m bringing,’ said Jack. ‘But fair reckoning. All the wrongs I’ve done to all you good folk, I’ve come to put them right.’ The Stranger slipped away into a dark corner unseen and watched on as Jack emptied his pockets. There were the lesser grievances and the greater ones, and Jack paid out on all without question. 33

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He paid in coins that were familiar and coins that were not. He paid with the ordinary objects of his trade – the woodknife, the whistle and the whetstone. He paid with the strange articles that he had gathered on his travels – a ruby ring, a golden egg and a fistful of shining black beans. He ordered a flagon of ale for every table, then another and another until all argument was forgotten. It was a long night and a merry one. But when the first glimmer of dawn came creeping over the hill, the Stranger stepped forward and took Jack’s coat from the peg. Jack turned and whispered into his ear. ‘I know, good Sir, that you have a liking for a wager,’ said Jack. ‘I have a proposition that I think you will find of great interest.’ The Stranger leaned in closer and listened as Jack set out his scheme. The inn was fit to bursting. Jack had heard tales about the men who had supped at the Stranger’s table and the consequences that followed. It was a simple matter of payment, of setting the coin that settled the evening’s accounts. The Stranger threw back his head and laughed. ‘It takes a Devil to know one,’ he said. ‘You and I are cut from the same cloth, Jack.’ All that Jack asked of the Devil in return – for the Stranger was indeed none but he – was a little more time in the world that he loved so. A little more adventure and a little more company. Then he would accept the Fate and the fire that was his due. Jack and the Devil argued out the arithmetic and came to an arrangement. Each man’s soul measured out a month. They counted up the crowd and concluded upon ten more years for Jack and a great deal of good sport for the Devil in the meantime. They shook hands upon the agreement. Then the Devil turned swiftly on his heel, faster and faster, as if dancing to a wild reel that only he could hear. In the blink of an eye, there was a shifting and shrinking and the Devil was transformed into a golden coin, spinning on the boards at Jack’s feet. There caught on the face of it was Satan in his true form: horns, claws, hooves, wings and tail. 34

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Jack held the Devil tight in his fist and made his way over to the Cooper, and in return for another flagon of ale borrowed the use of his hammer and two bracket nails. In his hand, the Devil kicked and clawed, and the golden coin began to bend and buckle, but Jack held on tight. Laughing at the absurdity of the instruction, the Cooper hauled Jack up onto his shoulders and carried him through the cheering crowd. Jack halted him at the threshold. The boundary. The place that was neither in nor out. His palm began to blister as the golden coin burnt with the heat of the Devil’s breath, but still Jack held on tight. Jack took the coin, the hammer and the nails and set them to the lintel. Three sharp strikes fixed the first bracket to the horizontal. Three more and the second was set against it crosswise. ‘Amen!’ cried Jack as he jumped down. The Devil, caught in the coin within the cage of the crucifix, cursed, cried and pleaded. The drinking men sobered suddenly and were sore afraid. But Jack stood firm and set the Devil’s eternity against his own. He would free the Devil on one condition. That when Jack’s time came to depart from this world, the Devil would not claim him. There would be no howling Hell for Jack. He would fashion his own Fate. The Devil twisted and turned against each and every word, but there was nothing to be done except to swear true to the agreement – before an inn full of wailing witnesses. Jack prised apart the Devil’s fixings. The golden coin fell. There was a flash of fire and there stood Satan in his full demonic glory, his wings spanning the width of the room and his horns spiking the beams. He let out a great roar and the boards broke apart beneath the boots of the cowering crowd. The condemned men went hurtling down to Hell, cursing Jack’s name as they fell. The boards snapped shut and there, scattered across the floor of the deserted inn, were all the articles of fortune that Jack had shared out amongst those hundred and twenty simple souls. 35

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Jack filled his pockets and strode out along the empty lanes, laughing all the way to his Old Mother’s door. Jack was not accustomed to living beyond the moment, so whether or not he counted out the passing of the full ten years that followed I do not know. But one morning, he woke to find the broad blueness of the sky leaching away as he looked upon it, like a lake running dry. The green pastures withered to greyness. The men with whom only the night before Jack had shared food and fire, song and story, turned to ash at his touch. Then tumbling down into this wide world of nothing came a golden ladder. Jack set his foot upon the rungs and pulled himself up hand over fist, whistling as he went. At the top of the ladder there were the gates of pure pearl. Old Peter was sitting beside them, and they were opened just an inch for a spry Tailor, who slipped through as quick and sharp as a thread through the needle’s eye. Jack saw his opportunity, took his hammer from his belt and slung it at the gap to stop it. Old Peter laughed, and so did the chirruping cherubim at his shoulder. ‘It is only through a life of prayer, piety and purpose that a man may enter the Kingdom of God,’ he said. ‘It is no place for the likes of you.’ Then he took up the hammer and hurled it directly at Jack. Jack fell head over heels over hammer and landed back in that grey world. That boundary built of mist and melancholy. It was no dwelling place for a man like Jack. A man made for company and adventure. So he took up his hammer once again and set it to the ashscaled earth and pummelled away at the land until it broke. Jack jumped into the cracked chasm and went down laughing. He landed on a bed of hot coals. There were the broad black gates. The Devil was sitting beside them, sharpening his instruments. Jack presented his argument. The Devil had said it himself, he and Jack were cut from the same cloth and what fine companions they might be, what tricks and tortures 36

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might they devise together. Hell was Jack’s rightful place and he was ready for it. The Devil laughed, and so did the ink-eyed imps at his shoulder. ‘You would turn my entire empire on its head in an instant, Jack,’ he said. ‘The nine locks of Hell will remain forever closed against the likes of you.’ The Devil took up a burning coal and hurled it directly at Jack. The force of the blow threw Jack upwards, back into the pale, dead land. The chasm sealed shut behind him. Jack cradled the caught coal to himself for comfort. Then he saw lying beside him was a dried-up old turnip, the withered stalk sprouting like a tuft of hair from a wrinkled brow. Jack took out his woodknife and set to work. He carved out his own double, with a great grinning mouth and eyes wide with mirth and mischief. He set the glowing ember inside the hollow head, tucked it beneath his arm and strode out across the barren land. Jack still walks that wasteland, pacing out his eternity with his coal companion. Except for the one night a year where boundaries are broken, thresholds can be crossed and out becomes in. On All Hallows’ Eve, Jack comes creeping, lantern in hand, into the gloomiest places of this world – the depths of the forest, the marshes and the moorlands. Some folk say that he is offering adventure, lighting the way to buried treasures. Others say that he means to guide us all down to purgatory alongside him for the sake of company. Only one thing is certain. If you find yourself lost and lonely in the depths of the night and you see a light dancing at the edge of the darkness, best turn your back upon it and walk on.

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Find Lost & Found on page 101

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YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT TOMATOES In 2005 beloved children’s author Michael Rosen published You’re Thinking About Tomatoes, and we are proud to now be publishing the story in a new graphic novel format with original illustrations by Cole Henley. It follows the adventures of Frank, who has one last chance to prove to his headmaster that he can stay out of trouble on his class trip to Chiltern House, a stately home with a dark history. With the help of some new friends, Frank will uncover how the house’s owners came to possess its priceless treasures, for the secrets of the past can never truly stay hidden…

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Find You’re Thinking About Tomatoes on page 87

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HUSH-KIT’S TOP TEN WORST BRITISH AIRCRAFT If you want something done slowly, expensively and possibly very well, you go to the British. While Britain created the immortal Spitfire, Lancaster and Edgley Optica, it also created a wealth of dangerous, disgraceful and diabolical designs. In defining ‘worst’, we’ve looked for one, or a combination, of the following: design flaws, conceptual mistakes, being extremely dangerous, being unpleasant to fly or obsolete at the point of service entry (and the type must have entered service). Grab a cup of tea and prepare for ire as you read about ten machines they wanted your dad, grandad or great-grandad to fly to war. 10. Blackburn Beverley ‘The Beverly Hellbilly’ A mere year separates the service entry of the Beverley (1955) and the US’s C-130 Hercules (1956), yet sixty years later one of these is still the best tactical transport − serving with many air forces around the world − and the other only exists in the form of a single lonely museum piece standing in the cold in a village near Hull. There’s a reason for this. The Beverley had four Bristol Centaurus engines capable of generating a total of 11,400 horsepower pulling a fully loaded Beverley weighing 135,000 lb; the C-130A had a maximum weight of 124,200 lb and had 15,000 of turboprop horsepower to move it. The Centaurus also powered the abysmal Firebrand, the pitiful Buckingham and the technically brilliant (but conceptually wrong-headed) Brabazon − and, for the sake of fairness, the superb Sea Fury. Lockheed threw vast resources at getting the Hercules right (so much so that the great Kelly Johnson thought the project would sink the whole company), whereas Blackburn used warmed-up Second World War technology and a dawdling development time to produce an 46

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aircraft that was at best mediocre and which played its own small part in teaching the world that America was better at making aeroplanes. In defence of the Beverley, it performed well in austere conditions and could be procured without spending foreign currency reserves. 9. Supermarine Scimitar ‘Red Beard’s scabbard’ Take an aircraft so dangerous that it is statistically more likely than not to crash over a twelve-year period – and arm it with a nuclear bomb. Prior to this, ensure one example crashes and kills its first Commanding Officer, in front of the press. There you have the Scimitar. Extremely maintenance-heavy, an inferior fighter to the Sea Vixen and a worse bomber than the Buccaneer, the Scimitar was certainly not Joe Smith’s finest moment. It was the last FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) aircraft designed with an obsolete requirement to be able to make an unaccelerated carrier take-off, and as a result had to have a thicker and larger wing than would otherwise be needed. Only once did a Scimitar ever make an unassisted take-off, with a very light fuel load and no stores, and then just to prove that it could be done. 8. Panavia Tornado F.Mk 2 ‘The Timcat’ The Tornado interceptor was a very British development of an international aircraft. In the 1970s the British Aircraft Corporation pushed heavily for an interceptor variant of the Tornado (a ground attack aircraft). The government and partner nations were sceptical that this project would be the low-cost, low-risk, high-performance fighter promised, so BAC massaged the facts a little, deliberately understating what a huge undertaking it would be. Essentially they took a heavy airframe optimised for low-level flight, with engines optimised for low-level flight, with a radar optimised for attacking ground targets from low-level flight, and attempted to turn it into an interceptor

Tornado F2 © BAE Systems

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intended to attack bombers at medium and high altitudes. To add to the fun, it was decided to develop an extremely ambitious new radar, despite Britain not having created an advanced fighter radar since the Lightning’s fifties-technology AI23 (the Sea Harrier’s Blue Fox was a low-performance set derived from a helicopter system). Despite its ‘F’ designation, and the euphemistic ‘interim’ description, the F.Mk 2 did not have a functioning radar and lacked several other vital components for a modern fighter. The centre of gravity issues caused by the absent radar were solved with a large chunk of concrete ballast satirically dubbed the ‘Blue Circle radar’ after a cement brand. Despite the Tornado’s terrible high-altitude performance and poor agility, huge amounts of money and time led to the F.Mk 3, which eventually matured into a capable weapon system. Quite how many F-15Cs could have been bought for the cost of the Tornado Air Defence Variant programme is a question many RAF crews moaned to themselves as they struggled to refuel at altitudes higher than the Post Office Tower. 7. Gloster Javelin ‘It’s not time for T’ It takes a special kind of genius to make an aircraft with a delta wing and one of the highest thrust-to-weight ratios of its generation subsonic, but that’s what Gloster did. The Javelin entered service in 1956, the same year as the dreadful Convair F-102, but even the disappointing American fighter would have smashed the Javelin in a drag race. After a mere twelve years in service, the RAF dropped the type. Unsurprisingly no export orders were received for the ‘Tripe triangle’. 6. Blackburn Firebrand ‘Fleet evil’ The story of the Firebrand torpedo fighter is a rotten one. The specification for the type was issued in 1939, but it was not until the closing weeks of the Second World War that it began to enter service. Despite a luxuriously long development, it was an utter pig, with stability issues in all axes and a tendency to lethal stalls. There was a litany of restrictions to try and reduce the risks, including the banning of external tanks, but it still remained ineffective and dangerous to fly. Worse still, instead of trying to rectify the problems, the FAA started a witch hunt of those pilots who dared to speak the truth about the abysmal Firebrand. Only two Firebrand squadrons formed, of which the flying complement was heavily, if not entirely, made up of qualified flying instructors, suggesting only the most experienced pilots 48

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could be trusted with this unforgiving monster. 5. de Havilland Sea Vixen ‘Vixen vapour rub’ The observer sat below and to the right of the pilot in what London estate agents would refer to as a spacious luxury living area; in reality he sat in a cramped space in virtual darkness in a ‘coal hole’ notoriously difficult to escape from.

Blackburn Firebrand © BAE Systems

The Royal Navy’s Sea Vixen fighters were death traps. One hundred and forty-five Sea Vixens were built, of which 37.93% were lost over the type’s twelve-year operational life. More than half of the incidents were fatal. The Sea Vixen entered service in 1959 (despite a first flight eight years earlier), two years later than the US Navy’s Vought F-8 Crusader. The F-8 was more than twice as fast as the Sea Vixen, despite having 3,000 lbs less thrust. The development of the Sea Vixen had been glacial. The specification was issued in 1947, initially for an aircraft to serve both the FAA and the RAF. The DH.110 prototype first flew in 1951, and one crashed at the Farnborough airshow the following year. This slowed down the project, which was then put on hold as the DH and the RN focused on the alternative DH.116 ‘Super Venom’. Once the project became prioritised again, it was substantially redesigned to fully navalise it. Then, when the Royal Navy gave a firm commitment, it requested a radar with a bigger scanner and several other timeconsuming modifications. All of which meant it arrived way too late. Its peer, the F-8, remained in frontline service until 2000; its other contemporary, the F-4, remains in service today. The Sea Vixen retired in 1972. Fifty-one Royal Navy aircrew were killed flying the Sea Vixen. 4. Saro Lerwick ‘Fat Boy Swim’ Despite possessing a decidedly cuddly aesthetic the Lerwick was a killer, difficult to handle in the air or on the water, and a miserable combat aircraft. Recommended to be scrapped in 1939, the Lerwicks were pressed into service due to the lack of any alternative and of twenty-one built, eleven were lost, ten in accidents and one simply 49

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disappearing. Its main problems were the old chestnuts of lack of power coupled with an inexplicable lack of stability. The Lerwick could not be flown handsoff, a serious flaw for a long-range patrol aircraft, SARO Lerwick © Teasel Studio nor could it maintain height on one engine. It was prone to porpoising on landing and take-off and possessed a vicious stall. Add to this the structural concerns (the floats regularly broke off) and a woefully unreliable hydraulic system, and it is amazing that the diminishing number of Lerwicks managed to remain in use until the end of 1942. 3. Blackburn Botha ‘Botharation’ Another great Blackburn design, the Botha was damned by a chronic lack of power. Its poor performance meant it was never to enter service in its primary role as a torpedo bomber. Had that been all, it would have been nothing worse than an obscure mediocrity, but Blackburn had cleverly made it extremely difficult to actually see out of the aircraft except dead ahead. This posed something of an issue for an aircraft now intended for reconnaissance and the Botha was supplanted by the Anson, which it had been supposed to replace. Passed to training units, the Botha’s vicious handling traits conspired with its underpowered nature to produce a fantastic number of accidents. Yet somehow it soldiered on until 1944 and a terrifying 580 were built. 2. Blackburn Roc ‘Death metal Roc’ (or ‘A Bad Day at Blackburn Roc’) The Roc was a fairly innocuous flying machine. However, as an example of the wrong concept applied to the wrong airframe to produce a useless combat aircraft, it is hard to beat. The ‘turret fighter’ that was so inexplicably popular in Britain just before the war was most memorably realised in the Boulton Paul Defiant, an extremely well-designed machine (considering) that did surprisingly well given that it had to lug around a draggy, heavy turret to no good purpose. The Roc, by contrast, was lumbered with a massively over-engineered airframe – a legacy of its being derived from a dive bomber – had a less powerful engine and was over 100 mph slower. How an aircraft that could not attain 200 mph 50

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was expected to survive, let alone fight, in 1940 is one of the enduring mysteries of the early war period, as is the fact that its only confirmed ‘kill’ was a Ju 88, one of the world’s fastest bombers. 1. Blackburn Twin Blackburn (or TB) ‘The conjoined flip-flop’ Apparently named after a disease, the TB was a bad aircraft that could not perform the one task it was designed for, and thus set a precedent for many Blackburn designs to come. The Twin Blackburn nevertheless saw service for a year or so before it was finally put out of its misery and all nine examples were scrapped. Intended to destroy Zeppelins, the floatplane TB was supposed to climb above them and drop explosive Ranken darts on any insolent dirigibles foolish enough to approach its precious airspace. Unfortunately, the poor underpowered Twin Blackburn was unable to drag itself to airshipoperating altitude, even after its deadly cargo of explosive darts had been cut by two thirds. Furthermore, the structure, which consisted of nothing more complicated than a couple of B.E.2 fuselages lashed together with a new set of wings and a vast amount of hope triumphing over experience, was not very rigid and the action of warping the wings flexed the poor TB so much it could end up turning in the opposite direction. The observer sat in one fuselage, the pilot in the other and communication was impossible except through waving, presumably to prevent either expressing to the other their true opinions of the designer of this radical machine. As if that were not enough, the wooden floats were mounted directly below the rotary engines. Rotaries drip out a lot of oil and as a result the TB’s floats would often catch fire. It would be nice to say that despite all this the TB inspired the fantastic Twin Mustang, but of course it didn’t.

Find The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes on page 111

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UNFORTUNATE ENDS From the creator of Twitter’s hugely popular Medieval Death Bot, this illuminating collection takes an in-depth look at some of the most interesting cases on medieval coroners’ rolls. From the bizarre to the mundane, each death tells a tale from a dangerous time to be alive – and even to die – giving us a rare, first-hand glimpse into everyday existence for the common people of medieval England. Read on for an example of one of these tales, which are simply too ridiculous or heartbreaking to not be spun again for the modern ear.

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DEATH BY PISS The Death of Philip de Asshendone

from Calendar of Coroners Rolls of the City of London

f you’re ever in London on Foster Lane near the church of St Vedast, you may want to pay respects to Philip de Asshendone, a man who was beaten to death on 8 December 1321 for attempting to help a stranger. The street was called St Vedast Row back then, and during the hour of vespers – around 4 p.m. or so in winter – a man named William, son of Henry atte Row, was there, pissing into a urinal. But he wasn’t just pissing – ‘he cast [his] urine into the shoe of an unknown young man’, the report says, ‘and because the latter complained, the said William struck him with his fist’. So, a pretty straightforward interaction here. William pisses into another man’s shoe, who understandably hates that his shoe is being pissed in, especially given that his foot is currently in that shoe. But William hates that this guy hates it, so he punches him. This causes the pissed-on man to drop

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the ‘pollex’* he was holding in his hand to the ground. Philip de Asshendone is our nearby Good Samaritan in this scene, and steps in to ‘upbraid’ William for pissing on and then punching another man. But William is having none of it. He wants to piss in other men’s shoes and he won’t hear any grief about it. So he does what any completely sane piss-lover would do: ‘he straightway pick[s] up the staff and feloniously [strikes] the said [Philip]† over the forehead, inflicting a mortal wound an inch long and penetrating to the brain.’ Philip falls to the ground, where he is picked up by ‘unknown men’ and taken to the hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate.‡ There he has his ecclesiastical rites and then lingers ‘until Saturday after the Feast of Circumcision, when he died at the third hour of the said wound and of no other felony’. This puts his death at 1 January 1322, an entire twenty-four days after the beating. What happened to the unknown man whose shoe got pissed in is unknown. As for William, he gets sent to Newgate Prison. And we can only hope that the unknown man’s shoe was the last he ever pissed in.

* Probably a poleaxe, which is just what it sounds like: a long pole with an axe head on the end of it. † The report erroneously states that William strikes William with the staff, when it is clearly Philip that has been hit by William. ‡ Founded in 1197 and originally known as Blessed Virgin Mary without Bishopsgate. Through the years it’s also been called New Hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate, St Mary without Bishopsgate and St Mary Spital – ‘spital’ here being old slang for ‘hospital’.

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SHAREWARE HEROES In Shareware Heroes, award-winning journalist and historian Richard Moss – author of The Secret History of Mac Gaming – takes readers on a journey back to the origins of indie video gaming: the 1980s, when the shareware model shook up and changed the industry forever. Though commercial game distribution was starting to squeeze independent creators out of the market, a network of renegades was creating a hidden games publishing market that, at least for the first several years, had no powerful giants. This is the story of that brief yet seismic period of gaming history: a time of opportunity and promise which offered a glimpse of the digital-first age to come.

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HIT SPACE BAR TO CONTINUE

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AR E

Introduction Twenty-five-plus years ago – aeons, on the timescale of the modern Internet – we didn’t have a single, simple, all-encompassing term to describe games published outside of conventional brick-andmortar retail channels. There was no one generic name for independently made online-distributed games. Instead, there were several overlapping, unsatisfying terms. For a period of the 1980s, we called them bedroom coders. But that really only worked for the teenage whiz-kids who made their names with a few solo-created hits, and not the mortgaged 30-something garage tinkerers or the 20-something side hustlers. As a term it failed also to acknowledge the significant out-ofthe-bedroom effort required to have a successful release – going to computer shows and swap meets, running demonstrations for magazine editors, packing and duplicating games for mail orders, and so on. It made success sound simple, almost a matter of luck. The music industry had ‘indie’ or ‘independent’ labels and the movie industry had independent film, but it would be years before anybody thought to apply the word to games. Instead, from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s, we described them primarily according to their distribution model: commercial games were sold in boxes at retail stores, budget games were low-cost commercial games, freeware games were free to play and distribute non-commercially (but the author 58

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SHAREWARE HEROES

retained their copyright), public-domain games were free games where the author released their copyright, and shareware games were… well, there were a lot of shareware models, but essentially shareware games were free to try with a requested voluntary payment if you wanted to keep playing them. (And often public domain was mistakenly used as a catchall to describe the three non-commercial models all together.) Shareware was the dominant of the three non-retail forms, and the one that best approximates what we call indie today. And it was a revolutionary concept – the idea that you could download a program off the nascent Internet, try it, then pay if you like it. Its proponents all said that one day all software would be sold this way; its detractors laughed in their face, astounded at their apparent naivety. But slowly, little by little, shareware proved itself not only viable but also (potentially) profitable – before suddenly the term went extinct and the word ‘indie’ took over. This book is about how (and why) shareware rose to prominence and then disappeared from common vernacular, but it’s also about more than that. It’s a book about people – the everyday heroes who made this revolution happen. Some of them got rich; many of them didn’t. All played their part. The meteoric rise of indie games would come later, but here we see something of a dress rehearsal – a practice run wherein the kinks of independent marketing and distribution and sales and development of games could be smoothed out and tested with some of the best and worst games ever made (and lots of things in between). In telling this story of a counter-cultural movement that changed both the games industry and the software business at large, I’ve tried to provide a solid cross-section of what was happening. I wanted to explore not only the big sweeping changes and innovations that drove shareware to prominence but also 2

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INTRODUCTION

the personal stories, the minor victories, and the disappointing failures. There were literally thousands of shareware games, so I never had any hope of covering everything – but I hope I have at least provided a sense of what it was to be making and publishing games over the Internet back when the Internet was in its infancy (and before social media and microtransactions rewrote the rules again).

A note on sourcing In the process of writing this book, I interviewed and consulted with several dozen people who were involved in the shareware scene. But memory is fallible, and many people were unavailable, dead, or couldn’t be located, so I also turned to a raft of other sources to help me form as complete a picture of the history as I could. I pored over Usenet archives, dug up old and defunct websites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, consulted articles and interviews and databases published on extant websites, read old magazines and newspapers, bought and borrowed old books, searched for archived documents, and, of course, studied the games themselves. (Though unfortunately one critical resource – the 1980s CompuServe forums – appears to have perished completely, which left a gaping hole in the early shareware history.) I tried as much as possible to keep track of all these sources and have compiled those records into a page on a website – which you can find at sharewareheroes.com/sources (also available in DOCUMENT FORMATS [TK] on the Internet Archive at URL [TK]). Many of my web-based sources are also linked to from a database I made to help me write this book, with listings of various key people, games, and companies from the shareware games scene. You can find that at ragic.com/sharewareheroes 3

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AN EXPERIMENT IN ECONOMICS

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Developer Spotlights Ambrosia Software TAGLINE:

None 1993

FOUNDED:

1992–2018 Andrew Welch (founder), David ‘Cajun’ Richard (technical service manager), Matt Burch (game developer), Ben Spees (game developer) KEY GAMES: Maelstrom (1992), Escape Velocity (1996) YEARS ACTIVE IN SHAREWARE: KEY PEOPLE:

Ambrosia was to the Mac shareware scene what Apogee was to the PC: the cutting-edge publisher of cool games that made professional shareware development seem attainable. Their Maelstrom and Escape Velocity games in particular stood out among the best shareware on any platform. FUN FACT:

For almost the entire company’s life, they

shared an office with a smack-talking parrot called Hector (who doubled as enforcer of the 30-day trial limits). 293

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SHIRK, REST AND PLAY Have you forgotten how to relax and enjoy yourself? Do you run around in circles mistaking dizziness for happiness? Your troubles are over, because Shirk, Rest and Play gives you the means to take control of your destiny, to turn your back on obligation and conformity, or at least hide from them in the toilets for a bit. Authors Andrew Grumbridge and Vincent Raison have assembled a comprehensive illustrated guide for aspiring layabouts, containing all the tips, shortcuts and (de)motivation you need to get more out of life by doing less. In this extract from the book, they discuss the perils of working from home and offer some suggestions for tactical slacking. Once simply the place where we slept, ate and argued with family, the home is now, we’re sorry to say, also becoming a theatre of work. In some ways, this could be considered a step forward. You’re not in the office, for a start. Not only can no one hear you scream, no one can see you skive. Save your screaming for the office. But one ubiquitous technological development, accelerated by the response of businesses worldwide to COVID-19, threatens the status of the home as your private sanctuary and erodes that feeling of aloneness that makes being at home during the day so special. We are referring to video conferencing. Left untamed, Zoom, Teams, Hangouts and the like can be a disaster for the modern shirker. Not only are you expected to join conference calls at a moment’s notice, but now you have to actually dress for them as well, at least above the waist. Our Roxy played a blinder on this one. Spotting this encroaching danger early, she not only complained bitterly to anyone who would 63

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Roxy working from home

listen about her (non-existent) ‘intermittent home broadband issue’, she also actually wrote to her local MP about it and sent a screenshot of the response – complete with Houses of Parliament letterhead – to her boss, with a furious note asking if she could somehow intervene. Now, when she is working from home, her boss knows not to bother her with requests for video meetings, lest she is again asked to get involved in lengthy correspondence with our legislators. A reminder that bosses, too, are often keen on the path of least resistance. Talking of bosses, Ivan Osman’s ‘Zoom in the Room’ gambit – in which he brings a gravitas to his team meetings by gracing them with his virtual presence – is worth a mention. It’s a simple enough ploy to utilise Zoom’s background facility to show a scene of, say, your study, even though you may be on the beach. That’s entry level. But Osman takes this one step further by using a background image of his home office with him actually in the picture, sitting at his computer, looking directly at the camera. His brooding, unmoving on-screen presence, giving his staff the silent treatment, has dramatically upped the problem-solving abilities and productivity of his department, while he’s in the kitchen eating hot buttered crumpets. As ever, Osman has a slightly different take on Teams and other collaborative work tools. He loves them. By judicious flicking between 64

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various statuses on his phone (‘Busy’, ‘Be right back’, ‘In a meeting’, ‘Fuck off’ and, every once in a while, ‘Available’, for example) he is able to give the impression of a man hard at it, day and night, wherever he may be. ‘Keep the collaboration to a minimum. Especially with bosses. They’re always after something,’ he confides. ‘I carry in my pocket the facility to always be “working” even when I’m on the golf course or a nine-day cruise to Singapore with my mother.’ Of course, if you work for yourself, working from home is already one glorious orgy of tea, biscuits, YouTube, masturbation and snoozing. Well done. But for the ordinary corporate employee, what was once a much-cherished opportunity for some me-time on the payroll is in danger of being ruined by log-in checks, keystroke monitoring and Trigger-happy Tina in marketing setting up another meeting to approve keyring designs. No, these days, it’s probably safer to do your napping at work.

Find Shirk, Rest and Play on page 99

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LITTLE DANCER Paris, 1878. Ballet dancer Marie van Goethem is chosen by the unknown artist Edgar Degas to model for his new sculpture: Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen Years. But Marie is much more than she seems. By day she’s a ‘little rat’ of the opera, contorting her starving body to entertain the bourgeoisie. By night, she’s plotting to overthrow the government and reinstate the Paris Commune, to keep a promise she made to her father seven years earlier. As Marie watches the troubling sculpture of herself come to life in Degas’ hands, she falls further into the intoxicating world of bohemian, Impressionist Paris, a world at odds with the socialist principles she has vowed to uphold… Read on for an extract from this enchanting debut novel by Melanie Leschallas. PROLOGUE Tuesday, 23 May 1871 Montmartre, Paris Halfway up Rue Lepic, on the eastern side where the narrow cobbled street snakes sharply to the right before climbing steeply up to the heights of Montmartre, there’s a small, tumbledown house jammed between two much larger ones, like an afterthought. Serge van Goethem, a Belgian tailor, lives here with his wife and two daughters. Gigi van Goethem has not slept. She lay on her bed in her underclothes once the monstrous sound from the mitrailleuse, that infernal newfangled volley gun, down on Place Blanche finally stopped at around three or four in the morning, and nearly dropped off. But then her neighbour, Emma Béranger, rapped on the door to share a cup of wine and whisper the latest news between sips. The order is that nobody must leave their house until further notice. Batignolles has fallen, Clichy too. Only the eastern districts are holding strong. Thirty thousand Versaillais are approaching from the west. Dabrowski is dead. Emma 66

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must have seen the look on Gigi’s face because when they’d drained the cup Emma put her arm around Gigi and assured her that there was still hope, that neither of their husbands’ names appeared on the latest list of fallen citizens. It’s over, Gigi had muttered to herself as she peered through a broken blind and watched Emma run across the street back to the bakery. It’s over. Later that day Marie van Goethem is sitting under the kitchen table watching her mother make soup for her father and the other Communards who should surely be here very soon. Her mother looks strange. Her body is slumped forward over the cooking pot and one of her hands is braced on the draining board as if she’s in pain. It makes Marie’s empty stomach sink to see the bow of Gigi’s apron wonky and half undone, the damp strands of red hair snaking down her long pale neck. Usually, her hair is piled up and perfectly pinned with three pearltipped hairclips. There used to be five but the other two went to the pawn shop a month or so ago. ‘Marie, will you please stop bloody dreaming. Be a good citizen for Papa, ma petite. Come and help me chop these vegetables. I’ll let you have the sharp knife.’ ‘Why can’t Antoinette do it?’ ‘She’s with Emma and Paul over at the bakery. And anyway you need to start learning how to cook.’ Marie feels too heavy to move. ‘In a moment, Maman.’ Steam blooms up from the pot. A whiff of stewed vegetables mingles with burning oil from the lamp on the mantelpiece and some other smell she can’t quite place. It’s so quiet. Usually, at this hour, there would be the low rumble of carts going to the market, hammering starting up from the building works at the top of the Butte de Montmartre, the smug trit-trot of scrubbed horses taking barouches to their masters on Boulevard de Clichy. This silence unnerves her. ‘When will Papa be home?’ No answer. Marie’s copy of Fantine is propped up on her knee. Her father gave it to her as an early sixth birthday present a week ago. Before he went off to fight, he used to plonk her on his knee and read her a few paragraphs every night. Marie can’t read yet, but she has been learning to form letters at the new school set up by the Commune. Marie traces the inlaid gold letters on the spine of the book with her finger, breathes in the smell of leather mingled with Papa’s pipe smoke and 67

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prays that he comes home soon. The floor is hard and cold but there’s nowhere else to sit, apart from Papa’s chair and it would be wrong to sit there. All the other chairs have been taken to the barricade at the Porte de Montmartre along with Gigi’s beloved mahogany dresser. The dresser belonged to Gigi’s grandmother and has always been too big and too ornate for every apartment and house they’ve lived in, too bourgeois. At least that’s what Serge, Marie’s father, muttered as he and three comrades carted it out last week. Marie hugs her knees to her chest, lays her head on Fantine and watches the light filtering in through broken shutters, making patterns on the wall where the dresser used to be. Oh well, soon it will all be over. She will go with her father to collect Gigi’s dresser from the barricade. The shops will open up like spring flowers and the world will be full of light again. Papa’s chair is still there by the unlit fire and soon he will come home and fill it. Perhaps if she imagines him sitting there hard enough, she can make it happen. Marie longs for him to burst in sighing and exclaiming at the injustice of the world. He’ll throw his hat on the table, kick off his boots, rub his eyes, collapse into the chair, lay his dear head in the worn halo near the top, his fingers worrying at the holes in the winged back right there where he used to stash his tailor’s needles. She’ll wait until he lights his pipe then jump onto his lap and try to spot some words she knows while he reads to her. A yelp wakes her. Her own yelp. The gunfire has started again. ‘Don’t worry, little one,’ says Gigi. ‘That’s way over at Porte Maillot. Papa says that barricade is almost as strong as ours.’ Yesterday Madame Béranger from the boulangerie bustled in with half a loaf of bread and kept shaking her head and whispering to Gigi about barricades falling all over the city and ‘firing squads’. ‘What’s a firing squad?’ Marie asks from under the table. ‘You and your incessant questions.’ There’s hardness in Gigi’s voice now. ‘I’m losing patience now, Marie. Marie! This is your last warning. Get your bony fucking arse off the floor and do something useful for once.’ Marie hates it when Gigi shouts. Time to get up. She kisses Fantine and leaves the volume under the table for safekeeping, stretches her arms above her head, yawns loudly to show she’s not scared and starts chopping next to her mother. A carrot darts out from under the knife and Marie flinches, thinking her mother will shout at her again. But Gigi just stares blankly into the pot as she stirs and seems not to notice. It’s hard to see in the slices of sunlight that come through the barricaded window… 68

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BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW In 1971 the film Blood on Satan’s Claw gripped and terrified audiences with its tale of a medieval British community besieged by its corrupted children. Along with The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, this cult classic gave birth to the genre that would become known as folk horror. Now, fifty years after the film’s release, comes a novelisation by the original screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons. Featuring lino-cut illustrations by Richard Wells (editor of Damnable Tales), this book will thrill fans of the original film and newcomers alike. Read on for an extract from Blood on Satan’s Claw.

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‘The Witch Hunts’ Meanwhile, in the village of Chapel Folding itself, fear was spreading. Groups of self-styled witch-hunters had sprung up, intent on revenge, but the objects of their fury, Angel Blake and her growing group of worshippers, had disappeared into the woods and were nowhere to be found. Despite all the efforts of the Squire and his men to put a stop to witch-hunting, and to claim that the devil worshippers had been defeated and had left the area, they remained a constant presence in people’s minds, and accusations of witchcraft were widespread. The village folk lived in fear that their children would suffer the same fate as Ellen Vespers’ children, and stories of other missing, mutilated or murdered people were soon becoming a commonplace phenomenon. With the fear came the anger, and when the Squire failed to bring things to order, bands of vigilantes were formed who were merciless to those that they suspected of having what they called the ‘Devil’s Skin’. Not all the devil worshippers were without remorse. Rachel Downes, one of the two Downes sisters, who had once been a devout Christian, was plagued by nightmares after witnessing the murder of Cathy Vespers, in which her sister Margaret had played a part. She was torn in two between the enormous attraction of the new-found cult and the guilt which she felt at betraying the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. For other cult members there was no turning back, as if they were to do so, they knew they would automatically be condemned to hell by the church. She however had one hope, and that was the leniency of the Reverend Fallowfield. She had heard that he had been freed after a wrongful imprisonment, and knew him to be a gentle man, perhaps capable of showing her a way out of the trap of sin into which she had fallen. She went first to the rectory and found the place locked up. The windows were all dark and there was a heavy padlock on the door. It looked as if there had been no one living there for some while. She walked around the building in despair. She felt the judgement of God had come upon her like a thunderbolt, and she could find no place of refuge. Hoping against hope, she then ran to the church. She found it quite empty and bare, with none of the usual decoration that might have suggested a recent service. The Reverend Fallowfield was not there either, and there was just one small woman in black, at prayer in a distant pew. This was Nell Swift, the mother of Dorcas Swift, praying for her vanished daughter. Rachel waited for her to rise and leave. They 70

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shared a half smile as she passed because they vaguely knew each other. As soon as she had gone, Rachel herself went forward towards the altar. She fell on her knees, sobbing and begging God’s forgiveness for what she had done, and the terrible scenes she had witnessed as a follower of Angel Blake. She chanted the Latin words miserere mei over and over. But she was not yet alone. Nell Swift had not left the church. She had long suspected Rachel and her sister had defected from the true church to join Angel Blake and her crowd of unbelievers, and what she now heard, hidden behind a pillar, confirmed her worst fears. She did not wait to hear the whole of Rachel’s horrifying confession, but crept out so as not to disturb her, and climbed to the room from which the bells were rung. After finishing her prayers, Rachel prostrated herself on the ground in front of the altar and lay there for some while, when she heard a single bell tolling above her again and again. She could not imagine what this might mean. Surely it did not signify a church service. She rose. The sound of the bell seemed to ring all around her, growing ever louder, as if passing judgment on her. When she tried to leave the church the significance of the bell became clear. A rabble had gathered outside and they were out for her blood. Nell Swift had told them what she had said, and they needed no further evidence to condemn her. They carried her, screaming, and hung her from the nearest tree. Soon a search party was sent out to look for her sister, Margaret. Within a couple of days of searching there was a hue and cry because Margaret had been seen down by the river, fetching water. An angry mob was hastily assembled, of which not only Nell Swift but also Angel’s own father Bill was a member. He continued to maintain that his daughter was an innocent who had been seduced by others, and although there were few who believed him, they were glad to employ his help in hunting for witches. He was good at it, and unremitting in his efforts. They were all united in fury as they formed a ring around the unsuspecting Margaret and closed in for the kill. Because of the river, and her big dress making swimming all but impossible, Margaret had nowhere to turn…

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THE CARPET MERCHANT OF KONSTANTINIYYA, VOL. II In this second and final instalment of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel, artist and writer Reimena Yee weaves a tale that takes apart the ‘vampire as other’ trope and explores the redemptive power of forgiveness. Zeynel, a carpet merchant turned vampire, leaves Istanbul and travels across the West in search of a new home. He settles in a quiet English town, where he is confronted by a fad for all things Turkish – but not as he knows it. When the vampire responsible for Zeynel’s death appears at his door, begging for forgiveness, Zeynel must decide whether he can make peace with the past before everything he has built begins to unravel…

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Find The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Vol. II on page 93

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CASTING THE RUNES M. R. James is best known today as the master of the English ghost story. The popularity of his fiction has kept it in print since the first collection was issued in 1931, but for all this success, his lifetime’s correspondence has remained inaccessible in a Cambridge University archive – until now. This first-ever collection of his personal letters has been meticulously curated, transcribed and annotated by Jamesian scholar Jane MainleyPiddock, offering unprecedented insight into the mind of a writer adored for his stories who himself has long remained in the shadows. Read on for a letter from early in the collection, in which a young Montague writes to his parents from Eton College. Dear Parents,

Feb 26. 1877

Your affectionate offspring takes up his pluma with the full intention of telling you all he can. He is well and takes his drinks regularly. He takes his porter into hall and drinks it at dinner.1 He thinks that on that point you need not be anxious. He has not given the idea up fairly (as he always remembers) but will do so in a few minutes. I am getting on all right with work so far, have called out for joyeus and am very serene. Today it has been howling and windy and raining & it is beastly out of doors. 1

It might surprise modern readers that James’s mother, Mary Emily, would have been pleased to read that her fifteen-year-old son was ‘taking his drinks’ (porter, or dark beer) with dinner regularly. However, then, the act of drinking water would have been unthinkable as well as potentially fatal, as they were living in an era when water was drawn from a system that was not treated. Usually it was taken from local pumps, which would have been sources for cholera, typhoid (the disease that killed Queen Victoria’s husband Albert in December 1861) and dysentery, among other strains of bacteria. Porter and other beers therefore were widely drunk by Victorians as a safer choice to accompany their meals.

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A fellow in the in the V form, at Cornishes, by name Nugent-Bankes has published a book about Eton everyday life.2 Rather stupid altogether among others he brings in Godding, myself, & e. Rawsons.Worthers who right (in the preface he says If any are certain he sees himself portrayed in this book...I hope he will not be offended by the unconventional likeness!!!!) In the book he mentions various tradesmen of Eton Merrick, atkins by name & describes a visit to their shops insulting isn’t it? [Best] Rawlins is a good beak to look up to. I like him. He sets good Sunday R’s. Many thanks for all three of your letters, which I received safely & perused with interest. I got a letter from Sydney on Saturday. I am glad you saw him. Godding has just returned from day leave. He has had “a break week, up from the [illegible] and ees feeling much better” for he has been residing in an open carriage for about forty minutes in the sands. It has left him feeling less dreadfulike. I do not think that that Godding gets on very well. I do not think he is going in for finals. When he said he was not, everybody came round and knew jayeaux. they were so glad he was not going in for trials. I heard him in an awful din. (I did not express my joy on that occasion). He has taken to weeping at the least thing now. I don’t think of answers. I hope [Gracy] Gracey is feeling better. But presumably she hasn’t yet been out. I did a beautiful beautiful map last week of north Italy. The only 2

The book that James mentions, by ‘Nugent-Bankes’, was G. Nugent-Bankes’ A Day of my Life, or Everyday Experiences at Eton (1877), written while the author (an oppidan or a boy who lived and boarded in the town as opposed to at the school) was still a pupil. In the letter, James dismisses the book as ‘rather stupid altogether’ and as ‘insulting’ to the local shop-keepers whom Bankes profiles. However, age, time and distance seem to have mellowed James’s outlook on the tome, as in his own biography Eton and Kings, the now sixty-two-year-old Don pronounces it as ‘most truthful and excellent reading’.

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faults were that I made too many lines of latitude. But it was very nice job. I do not yet know how much I got from the Trials for marks. I am going to drop from this hard work. French next in school. I am pet of Rather a fat beak who said I was “forte” in French and had I ever habite ai France? Miscellaneous. one of the Dons went out of Chapel last night with his nose bleeding. B P Chapman preached in the morning. Rev J J Hornby in the evening. A theme this morning, words consisted of “I will wash etc” very fine. Evening and something else. Services altogether very good.

Thynne has been swiped off his ladder

Poor Thynne.

Ever your affectionate

M R James

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Autumn Titles

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0 12:20

July

YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT TOMATOES

MICHAEL ROSEN with illustrations by COLE HENLEY A graphic novel adaptation of Michael Rosen’s fan-favourite story about colonial history Frank and the class are going on a school trip to a stately home. But once they arrive, Frank finds the exhibits start to come alive. A young girl steps out of a painting, an Egyptian mummy climbs out of his sarcophagus, an irritating dog acts as a tourist guide. Bit by bit, the characters tell the story of how this stately home came to be quite so stately – and it’s not a pretty tale. Laughter, sadness, tragedy, hope and a belief in the collective strength of the underdog combine with a sense of history in this graphic novel adaptation of the classic story by Michael Rosen.

Title: Pub date: Format: Price: ISBN: Rights:

You’re Thinking About Tomatoes 07/07/2022 Hardback £14.99 978-1-80018-144-1 World/Audio/TV & Film

FICTION Michael Rosen has been writing books for children since the early 1970s. His most famous collaboration, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, has sold over 8 million copies worldwide. From 2007 to 2009 he was the British Children’s Laureate. @MichaelRosenYes Cole Henley is an illustrator, recovering archaeologist and maker of websites based in Somerset. @cole007

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July

CHILDREN OF LAS VEGAS

True stories about growing up in the world’s playground TIMOTHY O’GRADY with photographs by STEVE PYKE

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… but what happens to the people who grow up there? Over forty million people a year travel to Las Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits. Timothy O’Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there: the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers – young people who had borne witness to this strange city all their lives. Here, through short essays, portraits by renowned photographer Steve Pyke and ten witness testimonies, O’Grady pierces the city’s glittering facade. ‘Brave, honest, articulate stories . . . A modern fairy tale’ Martina Evans, Irish Times

Title Pub date: Format: Price: ISBN: Rights:

Children of Las Vegas 07/07/2022 Paperback £9.99 978-1-80018-138-0 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Timothy O’Grady is the author of three novels – Motherland, I Could Read the Sky and Light – and three works of non-fiction: Curious Journey, On Golf and Divine Magnetic Lands. Steve Pyke is one of the world’s leading portrait photographers. His work is held in permanent collections from London’s National Portrait Gallery to the New York Public Library. Insta: @pyke.eye 88

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July

THE INCOMPLETE FRAMLEY EXAMINER The Book of the Website of the Newspaper THE EDITORS

Celebrating twenty years of the spoof local newspaper from the team behind the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups In 2001, fans of the internet were introduced to scanned pages from spoof local newspaper The Framley Examiner. Packed with humdrum and preposterous news stories, classified ads, local business features and headlines that seemed to have been typed while asleep, it skewered the banal madness of small-town existence, perfectly encapsulating the British national character. This book, published to mark the website’s twentieth anniversary, compiles the very best of the paper in a single full-colour volume. ‘Packed with hard laughs’ Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) ‘Some of the funniest, cleverest satirical pieces of writing in the world’ Aisling Bea, creator of This Way Up

Title: The Incomplete Framley Examiner Pub date: 07/07/2022 Format: Paperback Price: £16.99 ISBN: 978-1-80018-184-7 Rights: World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris and Joel Morris would, between them, go on to write the best-selling Bollocks to Alton Towers books, contribute to potty-mouthed national treasure Viz, create TV idiot Philomena Cunk, co-write Charlie Brooker’s BAFTA-winning Wipe shows, work on the hit Paddington films and create the industrysmashing Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups. @framleyexaminer 89

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July

LITTLE DANCER MELANIE LESCHALLAS

Anarchist, ballerina, revolutionary, muse: a historical novel inspired by the iconic Degas sculpture Paris, 1878. Ballet dancer Marie van Goethem is chosen by the unknown artist Edgar Degas to model for his new sculpture: Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen Years. But Marie is much more than she seems. By day she’s a ‘little rat’ of the opera, contorting her starving body to entertain the bourgeoisie. By night she’s plotting to overthrow the government and reinstate the Paris Commune, to keep a promise she made to her father, a leading communard who died in the street massacres of 1871. When a devastating family secret is uncovered, everything changes for both Marie and Degas… ‘After you’ve read this book you’ll never look at Degas’ sculpture in the same way again’ David Shrigley

Title: Pub date: Format: Price: ISBN: Rights:

Little Dancer 21/07/2022 Paperback £10.99 978-1-80018-120-5 World/Audio/TV & Film

FICTION Melanie Leschallas holds MAs in Creative Writing from Sussex and in Drama and Movement Therapy from Central School in London. She trained as a dancer and worked at the Moulin Rouge in Paris during her twenties. She runs www.lunarlemonproductions.com.

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July

FROM CRIMEA WITH LOVE

Misadventures in the Making of Sharpe’s Rifles JASON SALKEY

The rollicking behind-the-scenes story of Sharpe’s Rifles, one of British TV’s best-loved shows, featuring a foreword by Sharpe author Bernard Cornwell In the summer of 1992, Jason Salkey was cast in Sharpe’s Rifles, a Napoleonic war drama to be shot in the Crimean Peninsula. Little did the producers know that they would be sending Jason and the crew to film in a rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union. From Crimea with Love documents the mishaps, incompetence and downright corruption that made Sharpe’s Rifles go down in British television folklore for its unique tales of hardship and depravation. Tapping into his diaries, photo journals and video log, Jason brings you an eye-opening, jaw-dropping insider’s account of one of the best-loved shows ever made. ‘A revealing account of the tricky reality behind TV’s glamorous image’ Daily Mail

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From Crimea with Love 21/07/2022 Paperback £12.99 978-1-80018-183-0 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Jason Salkey is an actor who has been a regular on our screens over the last three decades. In 1992 he played the role of Rifleman Harris in Sharpe’s Rifles, which became one of British television’s most cherished shows. He has also appeared in a number of films, including The Russia House, The Fifth Element and About a Boy. www.riflemanharris.co.uk 91

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July

THE MUSIC

An Album in Words MATTHEW HERBERT

This ‘modernist masterpiece’ (Max Porter) is a description of an imagined album that challenges how we hear the world around us In the last hundred years, music has undergone a profound revolution. No longer confined to specifically designed instruments, we can now make music out of anything. In The Music, award-winning composer Matthew Herbert evokes a shifting sonic landscape in precise detail: from tectonic plates beneath the Pacific Ocean to a spider spinning its web, from a cassette tape in the stereo of a crashing car to the silence of two strangers looking up at the night sky. This imagined album is a manifesto for sound, challenging how we hear the world itself, while listening to stories about humanity and our place in that world. ‘A dizzying display of imagination’ Paul Griffiths, TLS

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The Music 21/07/2022 Paperback £12.99 978-1-80018-154-0 World/Audio/TV & Film

FICTION Matthew Herbert is an award-winning composer, artist and producer whose range of innovative work extends from numerous albums to film scores and installations, as well as music for the theatre, TV, games and radio. He is director of the new BBC Radiophonic Workshop and an artistic researcher in the School of Music and Performing Arts, Canterbury Christ Church University. matthewherbert.com / @matthewherbert 92

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August

THE CARPET MERCHANT OF KONSTANTINIYYA, VOL. II REIMENA YEE

The second and final instalment of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Zeynel, a carpet merchant turned vampire, has accepted his fate and now searches for the stories of his past. With his ties to Istanbul threadbare after the passing of his wife, Ayşe, he travels across the West in search of a new home. The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Vol. II is the second and final instalment of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel. A modern Gothic story that takes apart the ‘vampire as other’ trope, it tells of the healing balm of compassion and the redemptive power of forgiveness.

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The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Vol. II 04/08/2022 Hardback £25.00 978-1-80018-169-4 World/Audio/TV & Film

FICTION Reimena Yee is an artist, writer and designer based in Kuala Lumpur. She has drawn for Adventure Time, Image Comics, Girls Make Games and a cornucopia of smaller businesses. You can find her comics at reimenayee.com. @reimenayee

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August

GLITTERING A TURD

How surviving the unsurvivable taught me to live KRIS HALLENGA

A Sunday Times bestseller: how a diagnosis of incurable cancer taught CoppaFeel! founder Kris Hallenga to live life to the fullest Kris Hallenga was living a totally normal life as a twenty-three-yearold. However, when she found a lump in her breast and was subsequently told that it was not only cancer but also incurable, life took on a completely new meaning. Little did Kris know it was cancer that would lead her to a life she hadn’t considered possible: a happy one. From setting up a charity promoting breast health to navigating romantic relationships like any other woman in her twenties and thirties, Kris shows us what it is to live a life well and to the fullest, no matter the particular ‘turd’ you’re dealing with. ‘Honest and beautiful’ Fearne Cotton ‘A manifesto for how to be alive’ Dawn O’Porter

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Glittering a Turd 04/08/2022 Paperback £10.99 978-1-80018-177-9 World English

NON-FICTION Kris Hallenga is the founder of breast cancer awareness charity CoppaFeel!. She has received a Pride of Britain Award, a Cosmopolitan Ultimate Campaigner Award and an honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University. @KrisPoB / Insta: @howtoglitteraturd

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August

COLD DAWN JAMES ELLSON

The second crime novel in the critically acclaimed DCI Castle series Against the rules, Manchester DCI Rick Castle removes a prisoner from Strangeways and returns to Nepal. His aim: to bring to justice his nemesis Hant Khetan, rumoured to be the next Osama Bin Laden. When the prisoner escapes, Rick and his small team must search for him along the paths of the Everest foothills. Trekking in the shadow of snowcapped mountains and through earthquake-flattened villages, Rick becomes increasingly desperate. If they can’t find him, Rick can’t even begin... ‘An exciting new addition to the world of crime fiction’ Stephen Booth

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Cold Dawn 18/08/2022 Paperback £12.99 978-1-80018-159-5 World/Audio/TV & Film

FICTION James Ellson was a police officer for fifteen years, starting in London and finishing as a Detective Inspector at Moss Side in Manchester. Cold Dawn is the sequel to his debut novel, The Trail, published in 2020. He is now working on the third book in the DCI Castle series. @jamesellson3

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August

PHILOSOPHY@WORK

Reflections from the world’s leading business thinkers ANDERS INDSET

Reflections on practical philosophy from some of the world’s leading business thinkers, curated by the bestselling author of Wild Knowledge Intended as a source of inspiration, Philosophy@Work explores the integration of philosophical tenets into the business landscape, and how they can be applied to personal development, the art of leadership and coping with the forces of change. Within its pages are reflections from twenty-seven of the world’s leading business thinkers, including Dorie Clark, Erica Dhawan, Mark Esposito and many more. Through articles, interviews and essays, they share their insights into the profound impact philosophy can have on business. This is a starting point to a world of practical applied philosophy, a first glimpse into the beginning of a new era.

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Philosophy@Work 18/08/2022 Paperback £16.99 978-1-80018-128-1 World/Audio/TV & Film

‘A breath of fresh and philosophical air’ Stuart Crainer

NON-FICTION Anders Indset is one of the world’s leading business philosophers and a trusted partner to international CEOs and political leaders. He is a guest lecturer at leading international business schools, a founding partner of the Global Institute of Leadership and Technology and an advisory board member of the Swiss-based deep tech pioneer Terra Quantum. His first bestseller, Wild Knowledge, was published in 2017. Insta: @andersindset 96

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August

SHAREWARE HEROES

The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet RICHARD MOSS

The origin story of indie video games: how the shareware model shook up and changed the industry forever Shareware Heroes takes readers on a journey through a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model. Building on deep archival research and featuring interviews with creators, developers and other heroes of the shareware age, Richard Moss – author of The Secret History of Mac Gaming – once again brings to light a forgotten but all too important era of game development. This is the story of the games and developers who relied on nascent networking technologies in a land of opportunity and promise, offering a glimpse of the digitalfirst future.

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Shareware Heroes 18/08/2022 Paperback £12.99 978-1-80018-174-8 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Richard Moss is an award-winning writer, journalist and historian who has written extensively about the history and culture of video games for Ars Technica, Game Developer, Mac/Life and Polygon among others. He produces the podcasts Ludiphilia and The Life & Times of Video Games, and is a co-producer/writer on CREATORVC’s documentary film First Person Shooter. @MossRC / mossrc.me 97

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September

BIRDS

Paintings of 100 British Birds JIM MOIR

A book of bird paintings by the artist also known as Vic Reeves, with a foreword by Chris Packham Jim Moir loves birds. As his popularity as a painter has soared in recent years, the simplicity and sincerity of his bird paintings have given them cult status among his fans. Now, for the first time, one hundred of these beautiful paintings are gathered together in this exquisite book. It is a book to remind us why we love birds: because of the shapes, movement, colours and sounds they bring into our lives. ‘Jim doesn’t just see birds, he looks at them so intensely that he understands them’ Chris Packham

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Birds 01/09/2022 Hardback £14.99 978-1-80018-202-8 World English

NON-FICTION Jim Moir, more commonly known as Vic Reeves, was born in Leeds. He is most famous for his work alongside Bob Mortimer on TV shows including Vic Reeves Big Night Out and the comedy quiz show Shooting Stars. Jim Moir is also a successful artist. His artworks have been featured in television shows and he exhibits regularly around the world. @JamesMoir10 / Insta: @JamesMoir12 98

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September

SHIRK, REST AND PLAY The Ultimate Slacker’s Bible

ANDREW GRUMBRIDGE AND VINCENT RAISON An illustrated handbook filled with all the tips, shortcuts and (de)motivation you need to get more out of life by doing less Shirk, Rest and Play is a comprehensive illustrated guide for wannabe drop-outs, dreamers, drifters and gadabouts. Authors Andrew Grumbridge and Vincent Raison – along with their panoply of wastrel acquaintances – offer ruminations about finding beauty in the ordinary, lessons in tactical slacking and detailed advice on how to duck out of the system and live life on your own terms. They cover all aspects of modern existence, moving smartly through Childhood, Work, Leisure, Home, Money, Health & Beauty and, of course, Death, where even amid the tears and sadness, you can still find plates of mini-burgers.

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Shirk, Rest and Play 01/09/2022 Paperback £10.99 978-1-80018-146-5 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Andrew Grumbridge and Vincent Raison founded the lifestyle blog Deserter in 2014, which led to the acclaimed alt-travel book Today South London, Tomorrow South London (Unbound, 2018), an Evening Standard Comedy Book of the Year. Their Deserter Pubcast has been lauded as an ‘essential’ listen by both the Sunday Times and Esquire. deserter.co.uk / @deserterblog 99

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September

UNFORTUNATE ENDS

On Murder and Misadventure in Medieval England SOREN LILY

An in-depth illustrated look at the most interesting cases from medieval coroners’ rolls, by the creator of Twitter’s hugely popular Medieval Death Bot From the bizarre to the mundane, each death in this illuminating collection tells a tale from a dangerous time to be alive, and even to die. Medieval coroners’ rolls list every inquest held for a death by misadventure – or accident – as well as grisly murders, some witnessed by others, some only coming to light when the hidden body was found. A handful of these deaths rise to the top, their tales too ridiculous or heartbreaking to not be spun again for the modern ear. Through death, Unfortunate Ends gives us a rare first-hand look into everyday life for the common people of medieval England.

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Unfortunate Ends 01/09/2022 Hardback £10.99 978-1-80018-136-6 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Soren Lily (aka The Medieval Death Bot) burst onto Twitter in 2013, succinctly relating various macabre and mundane deaths of people in the Middle Ages. When pushed, the Medieval Death Bot is willing to suggest a possible medieval death for all those who choose to engage with it, for which it has since been suspended. 100

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September

LOST & FOUND ELIZABETH GARNER

An illustrated treasure trove of folk tales told to enrich the present and be carried forward into the future Lost & Found is Elizabeth Garner’s own retelling of fifteen treasured folk tales that have nurtured, sustained, terrified and enthralled her in equal measure. Some of the stories are taken from the books of her childhood, some are remembered and others she has discovered in her reading over the years. Garner’s tapestry of words is adorned with engraver Phoebe Connolly’s beautiful woodcut illustrations, which bring the friends and foes of folklore to life. This illustrated collection is another link in the chain between storyteller, listener and our shared ancestors: tales from the past, told to enrich the present and to be carried forward into the future. ‘Garner writes of myth with lyricism and sensitivity; she is steeped in the gift for being able to control the surreal with startling force’ Amanda Craig, The Times

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Lost & Found 15/09/2022 Hardback £16.99 978-1-80018-123-6 World English

FICTION Elizabeth Garner is the author of two novels, Nightdancing and The Ingenious Edgar Jones, both of which were influenced by traditional folk tale narratives and motifs. She is also the arts trustee at The Blackden Trust educational charity. Lost & Found is her first collection of rewritten stories. www.elizabethgarnerauthor.co.uk / @Lostandfoundst2 101

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October

SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM Lessons from a Dissolute Life SIMON NAPIER-BELL

The legendary music impresario tells his life story in a series of mesmerisingly candid vignettes Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom is the book Simon Napier-Bell’s fans have always hoped he’d write. His previous bestsellers lifted the lid on the music industry, combining meticulous analysis with unforgettable stories of fame and wild excess, but now, at long last, he’s turned the spotlight on himself. From a brief spell playing trumpet in the clubs of 1950s Montreal, to co-writing a hit single for Dusty Springfield and managing artists such as the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan and Wham!, Simon’s memoir is a kaleidoscopic sequence of more than sixty episodes drawn from a truly extraordinary life. ‘Never has anybody had so much fun, remembered it so precisely and made so much sense of it all’ Mark Ellen

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Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom 13/10/2022 Hardback £20.00 978-1-80018-189-2 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Simon Napier-Bell has been a film composer, songwriter, record producer and author, but he is best known for having managed various artists, including Wham!, who under his management became the first Western pop group ever to play in communist China. He is the author of four acclaimed books about the music industry, most notably the bestselling Black Vinyl White Powder. 102

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October

THE BUSINESS

A History of Popular Music from Sheet Music to Streaming SIMON NAPIER-BELL

A highly acclaimed history of the popular music business, as told by its ultimate insider Let legendary manager Simon Napier-Bell take you inside the world of popular music, balancing seductive anecdotes with an insightful exploration of the relationship between creativity and money. This book traces the evolution of the music business from its birth in the eighteenth century to the huge global industry it is today. It uncovers a treasure trove of little-known facts, including how a formula for writing hits in the 1900s helped create 50,000 of the best-known songs of all time. After reading The Business, you’ll never listen to music in the same way again. ‘An essential text’ Mojo

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The Business 13/10/2022 Paperback £12.99 978-1-78352-937-7 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Simon Napier-Bell has been a film composer, songwriter, record producer and author, but he is best known for having managed various artists, including Wham!, who under his management became the first Western pop group ever to play in communist China. He is the author of three other books about the music industry, as well as the forthcoming memoir Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom. 103

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October

CASTING THE RUNES The Letters of M. R. James

JANE MAINLEY-PIDDOCK (ed.) The first-ever collection of letters by England’s greatest writer of ghost stories The much-loved author M. R. James is best known today for his ghost stories. Their popularity has kept them in print since the first collection was issued in 1931, and they’ve earned a cult following. But for all this literary success, his lifetime’s correspondence has remained inaccessible in a Cambridge University archive – until now. This first-ever collection of his personal letters has been meticulously curated, transcribed and annotated by Jamesian scholar Jane Mainley-Piddock to offer an unprecedented and overdue insight into a great and singular mind, covering everything from his fear of spiders to his musings on the work of other contemporary authors.

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Casting the Runes 27/10/2022 Hardback £30.00 978-1-80018-175-5 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Jane Mainley-Piddock is a British writer, blogger and book reviewer. She specialises in the ghost stories of M. R. James and the literature of the late Victorian period. @jmainpidd

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October

THE DECADE IN TORY

An Inventory of Idiocy from the Coalition to Covid RUSSELL JONES

A hilarious, furious and absolutely true black comedy about the most hapless and appalling British government since the last one The Decade in Tory is an inglorious – and entirely true – comedic take on the decade of Tory rule from 2010 to 2020: Cameron’s pledge to tackle inequality, which reduced UK life expectancy for the first time since 1841; the bewildering storm of lies and betrayals that led to Brexit; the ineffectual response to Covid-19; interminable failures in health and education reform; and much, much more. Written with all of Russell Jones’s signature scathing wit, this is the perfect gift for left-wingers who love to be confused about whether they should laugh, right-wingers who love to be angry at the truth, and millennials who just need something to burn so they can stay warm.

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The Decade in Tory 27/10/2022 Hardback £25.00 978-1-80018-171-7 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Russell Jones is a designer, project manager and programmer living in Cheshire. To relax, he paints portraits, plays drums, tweets about politics, and grinds his teeth to a fine powder while watching the news. He publishes a regular breakdown of the government’s regular breakdowns under the hashtag #TheWeekInTory, which is read by around half a million people per week. @RussInCheshire 105

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November

CLANGERS

The Complete Scripts 1969–1974

OLIVER POSTGATE with DANIEL POSTGATE The ultimate gift for Clangers fans: the entire scripts of the much-loved 1970s children’s TV show Clangers: The Complete Scripts 1969–1974 is the ultimate collection of scripts from the original two series of the show in one lavishly illustrated volume. These previously unseen scripts sit alongside original writing from Daniel Postgate – son of the original creator Oliver Postgate – exploring the inspiration for and lasting cultural impact of the show, new and historical photographs, Peter Firmin’s original illustrations, Oliver’s handwritten musical notations and more. The joyful revelation that the Clangers’ often colourful words were scripted in English brings an exciting new dimension to the Smallfilms legacy.

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Clangers 10/11/2022 Hardback £14.99 978-1-80018-198-4 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Oliver Postgate was one of the greatest children’s storytellers of his time. His work, which includes Clangers, Ivor the Engine, The Pogles, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss, is beloved by generations. Daniel Postgate is the award-winning author and illustrator of over fifty children’s books. He is also a BAFTA-winning scriptwriter and was involved in the production of the 2015 Clangers reboot. 106

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November

FOX and OTTER Accordion Books JACKIE MORRIS

The first pair in a series of illustrated concertina gift books by the Kate Greenaway Medal-winning author and artist An Accordion Book doesn’t open, it unfolds. One side is filled with beautiful watercolour images of an animal, sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest. The other is filled with text – poems, descriptions, invocations – inspired by the same animal. The books have been designed by Alison O’Toole, who collaborated with Jackie Morris on The Lost Words and The Unwinding. They make beautiful gifts and in time will form a library of nature, which anyone who loves Jackie’s work will want to collect and treasure. Title: Pub date: Format: Price: ISBN: Rights:

Fox and Otter 10/11/2022 Hardback £12.99 each 978-1-80018-204-2 978-1-80018-205-9 World English

NON-FICTION Jackie Morris is an author and illustrator. She studied illustration at Hereford College of Arts and Bath Academy and has written and illustrated more than fifteen books. The Lost Words, co-authored with Robert Macfarlane, won the Kate Greenaway Medal 2019 and Morris was nominated again for The Unwinding in 2021. She lives in Pembrokeshire. @JackieMorrisArt 107

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November

DICE MEN

The Origin Story of Games Workshop

IAN LIVINGSTONE with STEVE JACKSON A full-colour illustrated history of the store that changed gaming forever, as told by its founders Since 1975, Games Workshop has been a cornerstone of the UK gaming industry. An initial order of only six copies was enough for Games Workshop to secure exclusive rights to sell Dungeons & Dragons in the whole of Europe. Hobbyists themselves, co-founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s passion for the game soon spread and in 1977 they opened the first Games Workshop store. They went on to become bestselling authors and created an entirely new genre of interactive stories. Dice Men is not just the story of an iconic store, but tells of the birth of an industry, one that has changed gaming for ever.

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Dice Men 10/11/2022 Hardback £30.00 978-1-80018-052-9 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION After founding Games Workshop in 1975, Sir Ian Livingstone CBE and Steve Jackson co-wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first title in the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, which went on to sell 20 million copies worldwide. Livingstone is currently Non-Executive Chairman of Sumo Group plc and a co-founding partner of Hiro Capital. @ian_livingstone 108

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November

ITCHY, TASTY

An Unofficial History of Resident Evil ALEX ANIEL

The definitive history of Capcom’s groundbreaking Resident Evil video game series This is the definitive behind-thescenes account of Capcom’s horror video game series Resident Evil – one of the most popular, innovative and widely influential franchises of all time. Industry expert Alex Aniel spent two years interviewing key former members of Capcom staff, allowing him to tell the inside story of how the series was envisioned as early as the late 1980s, how its unprecedented success saved the company from financial trouble and, eventually, how a new generation of creators emerged after the release of Resident Evil 4. Featuring commentary from the game creators themselves, Itchy, Tasty offers a unique insight into how the series became the worldconquering force it is today.

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Itchy, Tasty 10/11/2022 Paperback £14.99 978-1-80018-212-7 World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Alex Aniel has over a decade of experience in the video game industry, and currently works for game music label Brave Wave Productions and physical game publisher Limited Run Games, specialising in the production of game music albums and business development for both companies. He lives in Tokyo. @cvkfreak 109

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November

BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW Or, The Devil’s Skin

ROBERT WYNNE-SIMMONS with illustrations by RICHARD WELLS An illustrated novelisation of the cult folk horror film, penned by its original screenwriter Blood on Satan’s Claw is widely regarded as part of the ‘unholy trinity’ of cult classics that gave birth to the film genre that would become known as folk horror. Along with The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, it found new ways to terrify audiences using elements of superstition and folklore. Now, fifty years after its release, readers can experience the unearthing of this terror in the film’s first official novelisation, penned by its original screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons and featuring haunting new illustrations from Richard Wells.

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Blood On Satan’s Claw 24/11/2022 Hardback £16.99 978-1-78965-158-4 World/Audio

FICTION Robert Wynne-Simmons is an award-winning British composer, film director and screenwriter whose credits include Blood on Satan’s Claw, Double Piquet, The Outcasts, The Book Tower, Scherzo, The Deluge and Kurtz.

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November

THE HUSH-KIT BOOK OF WARPLANES JOE COLES (ed.)

A stunning illustrated collection from the world’s leading alternative aviation magazine From the terror and exhilaration of First World War dogfighting to the dark arts of modern air combat, here is an enthralling ode to that most brutally exciting of machines: the warplane. The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes is a beautifully designed, highly illustrated collection of the very best articles from Hush-Kit – the world’s leading alternative aviation magazine – combined with a heavy punch of new and exclusive pieces. It contains a wealth of brilliant material, from Top 10 lists and historical deepdives to interviews with legendary fighter pilots and expert analysis of weapons, tactics and technology. ‘Stupendously brilliant . . . Completely addictive’ James Holland

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The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes 24/11/2022 Hardback £30.00 978-1-80018-094-9 World/Audio/TV & Film

‘The most explosive book about aircraft ever’ Jim Moir (Vic Reeves)

NON-FICTION Joe Coles maintains an obsession with aeroplanes utterly inappropriate for an adult. He has been writing about aviation for over twenty years; in this time he has been the editor of a best-selling aviation periodical published around the world and created Hush-Kit, a widely respected and deeply irreverent online magazine. hushkit.net / @Hush_Kit 111

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November

PAINT MY NAME IN BLACK AND GOLD The Rise of the Sisters of Mercy MARK ANDREWS

A raucous in-depth biography exploring the early years of the cult band who invented goth rock Leeds, 1980. Amid the violence and decay, the city was home to an extraordinarily vibrant post-punk scene. Out of that swamp crawled the Sisters of Mercy. Over the next five years, they would rise from local heroes to leading alternative band, before blowing apart on the verge of major rock stardom. Drawing on dozens of interviews with band members and key figures in the Sisters’ journey, Paint My Name in Black and Gold is the most complete account yet of how – against the odds and all reasonable expectation – these young men came to make transcendent and life-changing music. ‘Will entertain anyone with a bottle of black dye lurking in their past’ Victoria Segal, Mojo

Title: Paint My Name in Black and Gold Pub date: 24/11/2022 Format: Paperback Price: £12.99 ISBN: 978-1-80018-197-7 Rights: World/Audio/TV & Film

NON-FICTION Mark Andrews is from Warwickshire and has lived and worked in the UK, Egypt and now Belgium. He is the author of a series of long articles for The Quietus on the early years of the Sisters of Mercy. He has also written for the Middle East Times, Bangkok Metro, Flanders Today and Louder.

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Unbou Unbo

GIVING NEW LIFE TO OLD BOOKS

Backlisted.fm

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Featuring: Clangers A lavishly illustrated collection of never-before-seen scripts from the beloved children’s TV show. Birds Exquisite paintings of 100 British birds by Jim Moir, the artist also known as Vic Reeves. Dice Men A full-colour history of Games Workshop, the iconic store that changed gaming forever, as told by its founders. Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom Simon Napier-Bell, legendary manager of the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan and Wham!, tells his life story in a series of mesmerisingly candid vignettes. Lost & Found A treasure trove of folk tales retold by acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Garner and adorned with beautiful woodcut artworks. Glittering a Turd The paperback outing of the Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling memoir by CoppaFeel! founder Kris Hallenga.