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