Authors Electric

Heading from Yachting Monthly 'RNVR Journal' 1940-45 Since the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers of WW2 I’ve become more and more aware how little I know. I worked hard to research the book and can confidently say that I left out much more than I put in. That’s not hard when you’re researching from memoirs, lists, websites and histories. The source material fills several shelves; the book itself is a single volume. Even my bibliography had to be rigorously selective – only including the books I’d used directly in the finished product, not everything else I’d read along the way.  As it was, I got into trouble with the publishers for going over the contracted word count. I hadn’t fully realised how tightly managed their budgets must be and the extent to which rapidly rising paper costs could threaten the viability of a project. I felt rather sorry and amateur when I delivered 15k excess words – but I still fought like a pitbull for my Right to an Index....

Arthur Ransome’s eighth novel,  Secret Water, is eighty this year. It’s his only Essex novel and this anniversary has prompted a 'hub' weekend of events in Harwich during the county's book festival in March. It also prompts the question what does it mean for a book to be eighty? An eightieth birthday, celebrated in 2019, means that the book was published in 1939 -- and in Secret Water ’s case it's likely that most of it was written during that peculiarly unsettling year.  Publication date for Secret Water was 28th November 1939,  when Britain had already been at war for almost three months. In those days the period between a book’s delivery and its publication could be very short. In a letter to his mother, dated Sept 18 th  1939, Ransome reports: ‘The new book, as I told you, has gone to the printers and I am now full blast with pictures and maps trying to get them done before the proofs arrive. I’ve done some big maps and a little one. Four full pag...