Happily Ever After
Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running
Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.
Doom, Gloom and Despondency
by admin - 15:49 on 18 February 2011
And the day began so well... No Northern Lights, but a good (if brief) view of a sparrowhawk on Master Marten's gate, just feet from the window, where he (or she – I don't know) looked around like a lord and eyed the suddenly-empty bird feeders.
His place was taken a while later by a woodpecker, and not long after that I saw two previously unseen mystery visitors who turned out to be bramblings. A great start to the day.
Half an hour after that, Marten James, Andrew and I picked up two hundred shiny new copies of The Bumper Book of Black Isle Snappery, handed over three substantial cheques to a beaming Norman and retired to a handy cafe to admire our completed work.
That's when everything began to go wrong. Within minutes of leafing through three brand new copies, pages became loose, then fell out altogether.
We were soon back at Norman's workshop, where we learned he was out, banking our cheques. However, there was no quibbling when he returned and, after some polite discussion, wrote out three new cheques for us.
Perfect binding on books of heavy art paper can be tricky, he told us – something we'd never even considered as our well-handled Blurb copies are all still in one piece.
He then disappeared for a while to inform the Edinburgh-based binder of his firm's miserable performance, leaving a rather sheepish Brian to apologise again and take further instruction from Andrew about shortcomings in the colour reproduction.
Discussions will continue between Norman and the binder to find out whether the books can be rescued or need a total reprint. Other binders will be consulted. The binder won't be paid (by Norman) for his work so far and Norman will have to write off wasted ink, paper and time (which seems unfair as all this is the binder's fault). We've had to scrap our launch event and push back publication to an unknown date.
So no-one's happy.
Our media blitz has been put on hold and tomorrow I'll have the dispiriting job of collecting launch posters. It could be worse, though – all this could have happened next Friday, just days before the planned launch.
I hope my consolation will be a fantastic display of Northern Lights tonight, but the currently murky sky suggests that won't happen. I'll settle for the return of the sparrowhawk when the Pentax is pointed in the right direction, or even the bramblings. I think I've earned it.
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