First the bad news: A copyright issue has delayed the final work on volume 6.  This because some of the posters we wanted to use in the book have copyright ownership that is in dispute.  We are working closely with the Science Museum to resolve this.

A further complication arose at the end of 2012, when  the Scottish Company who has been binding and finishing our books went into receivership.  The search for a new production partner has taken some time as the book is larger than most UK companies can handle.   Our printers have worked hard to find a firm with equipment of sufficient size to handle a 2 kg book to our standards.   The only issue therefore is copyright which we should resolve within the next few weeks.

We have 70% of the hi-res images and these are being cleaned.  The remainder should be with us shortly and again time will be needed to bring these to the standard JDF quality.  Our best guess therefore is the book should be ready in late May, a delay of over two months on the proposed timetable.  We can only apologize to the many supporters who are eager for this to be published, but you can appreciate events this year have been out of our hands.

And now the good news: The  writing is all but complete and the volume of 256 pages will contain more than 380 posters that span the whole of the 20th century.  It will soon go away for proof-reading and really will be a beautiful volume, doing  the North-West of the UK proud.   We are particularly pleased that North Wales and Northern Ireland have come out extremely well.   We will keep everybody updated as soon as we can on the new timetable.

After many weeks of anticipating that Volume 2 (Yorkshire and the North-East) would soon go out of print, the recent spate of orders for Christmas presents means volume 2 regular copies are no longer available.  We have a few hand numbered copies for the first 100 that came from the press and a handful signed by Paul Atterbury of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, who kindly wrote the foreword.    The book wholesale trade has asked for more to be made available, but we will only reprint Volume 2 when the final three books in the series have been published.   It has been a very successful and sought after book, so those of you who would like copies please get in touch, or watch for inflated price copies appearing on Ebay.  

After several weeks working on engineering projects,  I am back writing and preparing Volume 6.  It is now over half completed, and I am currently in Cheshire (chapter 5), but with North Wales and Northern Ireland (the next two chapters) already planned and laid out.   Three of the recent additions to the work are shown below.  The sixth chapter is entitled The Beauty of North Wales, so it is beauty in every sense!   There are over forty posters included for this part of the UK,  so I hope we have done the area proud.   It is beginning to look like the entire book will have around 350 images in a work of at least 250 pages, so another large volume is in prospect, with a really diverse set of posters. 

The past two weeks have seen us undertake book signings, after dinner speeches, involvement with a local railway progress and progress on the writing of Volume 4. On April 16th we were guests of the National Railway Museum at York for an Author day signing copies of Volume 3 of the poster series. The left hand picture below shows us preparing for the day. The cover poster – Oxford by Alan Carr Linford – was taken out of its drawer in the NRM Collection to display, along with our own poster of Weobley, Herefordshire.
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A  trip down memory lane for Poster boy and girl Richard & Judi

It has been 2 months since our last news posting, so this blog is well overdue. The two months have seen a great deal of activity, both on shipments of Volume 3 and progress on Volume 4. We have received a few reviews already on the third book (See Reviews Page) and also some letters giving us additional information on the exact locations of four of the posters, including two from The Gower, as requested in the volume text.
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The Third book Covers Midlands & Wales.

Volume 3 is now published and available after several weeks of frantic efforts to get everything ready. Even towards the end the inclement winter we are having caused some delays and the books did not arrive for the formal launch at the GCRA Auction Stoneleigh on 15/01/2011 until 9am that morning, so that was tight, very tight! We have had two weeks of packing and posting to fulfil all the orders we have received.
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Firstly, we wish all our readers and project supporters a Happy New Year.   We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of finished Volume 3 books, after receiving sample pages from Amadeus Press in mid-December.  As with the first two volumes in the series, the pages we have are really colourful and show many Midlands and mid-Wales posters in all their glory for the first time.  Read More

Vol. 3 goes on the presses next week after the proofs were checked and passed. This is going to be a colourful book.

Whilst some of the modern images required little attention, some of the older GWR and early BR posters had suffered damage so the cleaning of these took some time. Read More