We’ve been (quietly) celebrating our 15th anniversary this year, via some £15 deals combining recent titles with items from our backlist. Meanwhile, a sudden spate of organisational enthusiasm uncovered some items from right back at the start of the Sidekick journey. Here, for instance, is the first invoice we ever received from a printer, for our micro-anthology Coin Opera, at £517 for 200 copies – a little steeper than we’d hoped, but typical of a short print run with thick gloss paper:
Note ‘Side Kick’ books – we’re not sure if this is their mistake, or an indication that we hadn’t quite settled on the name yet. (Also: we’ve long moved on from the Whitechapel address, but by all means raise the topic of a blue plaque with the council.)
Good News Press sadly went out of business not long after printing Coin Opera and Obakarama, as have other printers we’ve used since. With so many international printers offering lower prices, it can be hard for UK businesses to compete, but so far we’ve stuck with them out of principle. Buy local where you can!
And talking of which, here’s the first (so far, one of only two) adverts we took out in a paper, this one in the London Review of Books in late 2010:
It was very successful as ads go; Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland remains our bestselling title, quickly selling out of its initial 500-copy run. But even though we felt we’d caught the attention of the wider reading pubic, and even though, by the time the fourth Birdbook title rolled around, people were telling us we’d exhausted the concept, there are still readers discovering the series anew at every book fair we attend. Lois Cordelia’s striking papercut cover artwork still draws the eye, and we even get the odd repeat customer coming back to complete the series after starting it years ago.
It’s also our most ambitious project in terms of the number of poets and artists involved, but we’re aiming to top that over the next couple of years with a continuation of the 10 Poets series. Stay tuned for more on that soon!
The four new books are:
This incredible collaboration has been a real labour of love, and goes far beyond the average poetry collection. Harry Man has travelled around the UK to shadow conservation teams and geocache poems for nature lovers to discover.
