The new and the old

I have been meaning for some time to write a post detailing how you tell one of the new Poysers from the original editions, but I fluffed, faffed and prevaricated, until an email from a collector today shook me into action. So here goes - there are three key differences to look for:


1) The back cover has a list of the entire Poyser series, in order. Most Poysers had an instantly obsolete list of titles, along with an out-of-date address, an old price, an incorrect barcode etc. So I decided to standardise this in a way that would show people exactly what's available in the series.

2) The copyright page (usually page 4) states that 'this is a print on demand copy, produced from an original edition'. The rest of the copyright page has also been updated.

3) There is no spine blocking on the book. This is the gold lettering that you get on the cloth of the spine, below the dust jacket, which you of course will continue to see on standard Poyser editions. 

There's another thing too - all PODs have endpapers that are coloured light blue; the actual colour is called Puffin Blue, which I found rather pleasing. This isn't distinctive in  itself - I learned from Trevor Poyser that there was a conscious decision from the very first book in the series to always have coloured endpapers, and some of the originals no doubt had light blue ones - but if you find a book with endpapers like this it probably derives from the recent revival.

Jim

Crazy for cuckoos

And so the end of another week, and another raft of Poysers have been approved and released back into the wild. We're just going through the last of the titles that we're bringing back to life; these are larger-format titles, which are a bit trickier to produce, so I decided to leave these till last.

Included among these is perhaps my favourite book on the list, Cuckoos, Cowbirds and other Cheats by Nick Davies of the University of Cambridge. Its an amazing read and a great gateway into the world of behavioural ecology.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in avian breeding biology, as brood parasitism is rather more commonplace than you might realise. Wood Ducks, for example, are notorious. However, unlike cuckoos and cowbirds, which attack other species, some female Wood Ducks simply dump their eggs on other unsuspecting mothers, and let them go through the hard labour of chick-rearing.

A female Wood Duck with young - but did she lay the eggs from which they hatched?

I was struck by a passage in Nick's book about how the male Great Spotted Cuckoo lures magpies from their nest by flying past slowly and lazily. The magpies set off in furious pursuit, but while they are distracted the female cuckoo sneaks in to lay her eggs in the nest. I recently had the opportunity to commission artist Jan Wilczur to produce cover art for our forthcoming title, Cuckoos of the World, and was inspired by the tale of the crafty Clamator. So here's a sneak preview of the almost-finished product, which will be gracing the cover of the book when it comes out next summer.

JIM

Producing Poysers

A few people have been asking how we brought all these Poysers back from the publishing backwater of out-of-print and into the light once more. So, in a peanutshell, here's a run through of the process.

These days, books are laid out using programmes such as Quark or Indesign, from which PDF files are produced that are sent for printing, but this has only been going on for 10 years or so. Before then things were a bit more primitive, and you don't have to go too much further back and designers would actually cut out illustrations, paste them onto a board with the text on it in blocks, then photograph the result and use that for printing. The upshot of this is that there are no PDFs or anything else besides the actual books for pretty much all of the Poysers. So in order to print brand new copies, the first stage was to get each title into a digital format.

Even we didn't have some of the books, due to their scarcity, so first I had to buy copies that were missing from a variety of second-hand sources. I then sent them off to our scanners. They scanned each page to the highest quality possible, and the digital files produced were then cleaned and sent off to the printers, Martins, who are based in Berwick Upon Tweed.

A trio of Poyser scarcities.

Each copy requires rather a lot of craftsmanship. Martins use the files to print the text, with the colour and any black and white sections printed seperately on gloss art paper. These are then inserted into the book at the right place, and the book is then glued and lined to form an unbound copy, known as a bookblock.

Next the endpapers are glued to the bookblock to give it strength, and the cloth of the jacket is cut to size. This is glued firmly to the boards that will make up the case. The bookblock is attached to the case, and the near-complete book is left in a clamp to dry.

The book is finished with the jacket, which has been printed separately, again from a digital file that matches a pristine copy of the original – the only difference is on the back cover, where I decided to include a standard list of the series. The originals had all sorts of things on the back, usually incomplete lists of the series up to the point of publication.

With this the book is ready to be sent out to the reader! I am secretly quite happy that we are using some quite old-fashioned book production techniques, allied with some that are rather more cutting edge in producing the e-book versions of each title. The Poyser list - a real blend of the old and the new.

Website wonderment

And now, the end is near ...

At last, we've 'gone live', which is IT geek-speak for 'the website is now visible to all and sundry'. Exciting.

So please have a look. Slightly embarrassingly, I got the website address wrong before. It is now http://poyserbooks.com. The perfect portal to all things Poyser.

Trevor Poyser himself was kind enough to write a piece on the history of T&AD Poyser, with me adding a little on how things have progressed in recent years. Have a look here.

Now. to celebrate, I think a trip to see the juvenile White-winged Tern that's hanging around the Serpentine in Hyde Park might be in order ... what a bird for inner London.

Terntastic. Thanks to James Lowen for this pic.

JIM

Cover critique

Another busy day on planet Poyser. Besides the usual hurricane of frantic activity, I approved two more titles for the launch of the mighty Poyser backlist - Malcolm Ogilvie's Ducks of Britain and Europe, and Mike Brooke's The Manx Shearwater. Great books both, and Ducks has a particularly pleasing retro cover.

You can't beat a nice Eider.

Poyser has never been afraid to push the boundaries when it comes to cover art. Check out this funky number from 1981's Estuary Birds of Britain and Ireland:

My fave is actually quite a bit more recent. Its one I commisioned in 2005 by Norfolk artist James MacCallum, and it still has the power to divide – loved and loathed in equal measure. But I think when its taken in tandem with the back, which matches it quite brilliantly, its one of the best all-round jackets in the series. What do you think?

Hailing the Hen Harrier

Welcome to the World of Poyser!

The first of what I hope will be a fairly regular blog output from me. First, an introduction. My name is Jim, and I am Commissioning Editor for T & AD Poyser, a part of A&C Black Publishers. I thought I'd set up a blog to keep our readership from around the globe up to speed with all things Poyser.

And there's a lot to talk about.

Most of our backlist is long out of print, and we felt its about time this was rectifed. So from the end of September we'll be republishing the entire Poyser series, from 1973's Breeding Birds of Britain and Ireland onwards. Not only is the series highly collectible, with some titles changing hands nowadays for many hundreds of pounds; the books are extremely readable too, as I have been finding out as I've worked on them over the last year or so. My favourite so far is The Hen Harrier by Donald Watson - a classic in every respect, and a model of old-school natural history writing.
 

 

Anyway, we're almost ready to go live. I've set up a new website, poyserbooks.co.uk, which will be released into the wild at the end of September. The site will act as a portal for people to buy the revived books, plus our standard editions and the forthcoming raft of ebooks. Today I took a few photos of the complete set here, which we're hoping to use to jolly up the website.

A selection of titles, old and new

Its all go.

Jim