WHAT'S NEW AT THE KING'S ENGLAND PRESS & THE POTTY POETS
 

 

 

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Autumn 2007

Dear Customer,

It hardly seems like two minutes since I wrote to you in the Spring, yet in the interim England has experienced the second wettest Summer since records began and all the while, in between watching the rain fall, we have been working on a veritable cornucopia of new titles for you this Autumn.

Firstly, it is of course the Potty Poets 10th Anniversary this year and to mark that auspicious milestone we have two new Potty Poets titles, bringing the total for the series to 24 and counting.

Great Aunt Fanny’s Moustache (ISBN 978 187238 71 9) A5 paperback, £4.50, is the latest collection of ribald rhymes from the frolicking funster himself, the one and only Gez Walsh.  If you haven’t yet experienced one of Gez’s high-octane performance poetry gigs, this can only mean one thing: you’re too old to go to school and you’re not a teacher!  Gez has been delighting kids up and down the country and promoting reading and literacy since the publication of his previous book, Mum The Dog’s Drunk Again in 2004.  His legions of fans are going to be battering down your door and besieging the tills for Great Aunt Fanny so make sure you order early for Christmas.

Hot off the press we also have Don’t Put Dave in the Microwave (ISBN 978 1872438 72 6) A5 paperback, £4.50 by Chris White.  Chris’s daft drawings of crazy creatures have earned him the soubriquet “Derby’s Doctor Doolittle”.  His skill at conveying the voices and personas of animals is reminiscent of the late lamented Johnny Morris.  We’ve lined up a full programme of media appearances for Chris, so Don’t Put Dave in the Microwave is going to be very much in demand.   And with a series, don't forget you’re bound to have requests from kids who are making a collection of the Potty Poets, so please see our website www.pottypoets.com to check you’ve got the whole backlist.

So that’s the kids’ Christmas presents organised.  What about us grown-ups?  I’m very excited to be able to tell you that Traces of the Templars (ISBN 978 1 872438 16 0) paperback 234 x 153mm, £14.95 by George F Tull is back in print to satisfy all those Templar-freaks who became intrigued by The Da Vinci Code.  Tull’s ground-breaking book was published to wide acclaim at the turn of the millennium and is an intriguing and scholarly account of all the Templar remains in England.  Tull’s commentary gives the reader a real sense of what life must have been like for this austere band of warrior-monks.  At £14.95, this unique book is good value as it can be read for pleasure and turned to again and again as a source of reference.

At his death, George F. Tull left incomplete his new biography of Jethro Tull, inventor of the first agricultural machine.  His research has been augmented and revised by biographer Maisie Robson and the fruit of their joint endeavours is entitled The life and achievement of Jethro Tull: Two Ears of Corn  ISBN 978 1 872438 40 5 (Forthcoming) 234 x 153mm  pbk., £14.95. Agriculture is very much a "hot topic" at the moment and with things such as Foot and Mouth disease rampaging  through the fields, it's not surprising that people are beginning to take notice of things such as mechanised farming. Of course, Jethro Tull, as well as lending his name to a pop group, was the daddy of all mechanised farmers, with his theories of crop rotation and his seed drill being responsible for the genesis of much of how the English rural landscape looks today.

Maisie Robson also takes a bow as the editor of the awe-inspiring Railwaymen: The Organisation and Staffing of an Edwardian Railway ISBN 978 1872438 93 1 (Forthcoming) 6in x 9in pbk, abt. £7.99.  The railways of Britain a hundred years ago were the last word in transport; no other rail network offered the level of speed, comfort and convenience that the top twenty five British railway companies set before first class passengers. On such comfortable thoughts (and equally comfortable dividends) did the managers and directors, on the whole, recline. That the railway companies were complacent in the utter absence of substantive competition is well illustrated here. ‘Railwaymen’ is written from the company perspective rather than the employee, whose duties are described from the carriage rather than the coaling stage.  Taken from contemporary descriptions, this book does exactly what it says on the tin, providing a comprehensive description of how an Edwardian Railway was organised and staffed.

There are millions of family and social historians out there, so could we remind you at this juncture that we also publish the popular Arthur Mee’s Dream of England for those who wonder what it was like when England had an empire; 1906: Every Man For Himself! about Edwardian times; and Family Fables: how to write and publish your family’s history.  Every family has its enthusiast and Jordan’s Guide to British Steam Locomotives and Jordan’s Guide to English Churches could be just the right Christmas present for that difficult-to-buy-for person.

And now for something completely different – Arran Diaries,  ISBN 978 1872438 58 0 (2007) 6in x 9in pbk £7.99: the story of three separate trips to the Isle of Arran, 2005-07, a bit like Bill Bryson, only not as funny, and with more midges.  The Arran Voice described it as “often amusing and occasionally lyrical”.  If you are a bookseller north of the border, don’t forget we also have, for kids of all ages, the exploits of Mac the Rabbit by Dumfries author Hugh McMillan, illustrated by Chris White, sales of which benefit Mossburn Animal Sanctuary near Lockerbie.  So if you want to do “a good deed in a naughty world”, why not order a stack of Mac to place beside the till?

It seems a little early to be wishing you Merry Christmas (though I bet I’m not the first!) but if I don’t do it now, before you know it’ll be National Poetry Day and the clocks will have gone back, and the snow may be falling, though with the crazy weather we've had this year, there'll probably be a November heatwave and a hosepipe ban.  So as the nights draw in and you close the curtains on the garden, settling down to your winter reading in your favourite armchair, may I wish you compliments of the season – and happy reading!

Yours sincerely

Steve Rudd

STEVE RUDD

The King’s England Press

POTTY POETS
REFLECT ON A DECADE OF DAFTNESS
1997 - 2007
 
 
If you were to have asked small independent publishers The King's England Press, back in the closing years of the 20th century, whether they could ever have foreseen that their sole children's poet, virgin author Gez Walsh, would stride so boldly into the new millennium and stamp his mark so firmly on the poetry world that a new genre, Potty Poetry, would be created, the suggestion would probably have been met with a bemused silence, if not outright disbelief.
 
None of us possesses the ability to tell the future, but that of Gez Walsh and the rest of the Potty Poets, for whom he led the way, now seems more certain than ever in the face of alarming statistics showing that one in six young people currently leaves the UK education system unable to read or write. The desire to be one small cog in reversing this trend and combatting what has been described by some educationalists as "a national disaster" lies at the heart of the Potty Poets' core values, which were first embodied in 1997 with The Spot on My Bum.
 
It is sometimes difficult to think back to the world as it was 10 years ago, to bring to mind the values and attitudes of the time. 1997 was, of course, the year Princess Diana died. It was also the year that saw the world of politics hail the first labour government in eighteen years, scientists announce the birth of the first successfully cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, and the literary world hail the first book of the Potty Poets series, The Spot on My Bum, as ground-breaking. Back in those days, Gez was only just embarking on his new vocation, having traded social work for a writing career, and the book which was originally penned to help his young dyslexic son was about to take the bookshops by storm.
 
Today, some ten years on, and 200,000+ copies later (surely some sort of a record for a poetry book?), the genre which Gez made his own has a number of imitators but none to outshine the original. Bums, farts, bogies and burps are now subjects authors no longer fear to explore, a triumph of Gez's no-nonsense approach in his pursuit to provide learning through fun, proving without doubt that spots are good for kids!
 
The ethos behind the series is a simple one: to get young people reading books. Especially those who wouldn't normally look at a book, let alone open and enjoy one. Since teachers find that the subject matter can be used to stimulate youngsters who wouldn't touch a poetry book with the proverbial barge-pole, the series has fulfilled the function of providing a gateway (albeit a rather wacky one!) into the world of books for many thousands of reluctant readers UK wide, as well as creating a barrel of laughs into the bargain. Alongside the poems, Gez's writing career has branched out into fiction with his sword and sorcery trilogy, the Celtic Chronicles, plus a factual guide aimed at helping promote drugs awareness, Fax 4 U: Drugs.
 
In the last 10 years the Potty Poets series has grown to 22 titles in all and has spawned its own web site www.pottypoets.com to meet public demand for updates and information. Fans log on to keep track of new developments, communicate with their favourite author, and send in their own poems inspired by the books. Teachers, librarians and event organisers also make use of the site as a tool for arranging author visits, book week events and public appearances. Gez Walsh and Chris White, the two main purveyors of Potty Poetry, travel many thousands of miles each year to provide performance and workshop input for schools, libraries, at festivals and teaching conferences and venues as diverse as shopping centres, muddy playing fields, hospitals and prisons!
 
Chris White became a Potty Poet in 2000 with the publication of Bitey The Veggie Vampire, subsequently followed up by three more collections, the latest being Shark in the Toilet!. With art school training, Chris brings another dimension to the world of Potty Poetry. His crazy cartoon style provides an additional visual stimulus to engage difficult-to-interest pupils, whilst his technique of inciting the audience not only to chant along with such gems as "The Big, Big, Guinea Pig" but also to draw the said rodent as well rounds off the experience and ensures that everybody participates. A riot of fun, Chris's live act has become legendary, his wacky world of animal based cartoon creations earning him the title "Derby's Dr. Doolittle"!
 
Whilst Potty Poetry regularly reverberates amid the classrooms and corridors of the education system, it sometimes escapes into the world at large and is beamed across the airwaves into the great British public's living rooms for everyone to enjoy. Both Chris and Gez's material has recently been given a 21st century makeover by popular young CBBC presenters who've introduced Potty Poetry to the nation. The work of the authors also features on various BBC web sites as writing resources, including BBC jam.
 
'If just one kid who previously never read a word picks up a book and starts reading as a result of something I've performed or written' says Gez Walsh, 'then that alone will have been worth ten years of being pointed out in the street as "Mr Spot on the Bum". ' 
 
Fans of the series will be keen to know that both Gez Walsh and Chris White have new books planned for the autumn in a double-whammy to mark the official Potty Poets 10th anniversary in 2007. Gez's collection, Great Aunt Fanny's Moustache, and Chris's offering, Don't Put Dave in the Microwave, each promises another huge steaming dollop of the winning formula of poetic lunacy which has been tried and tested over the last decade and which has repeatedly proved to have put the "fun" into "fundamental literacy".
 
Plans for the future are biased firmly towards channeling the vast support and interest generated by the Potty Poets into a project aiming to benefit any individual or group of young people marginalised or disaffected by the education system and, utilizing the new "F"  word - FUN - encouraging these youngsters back into the scope of learning and literacy. Unlimit-Ed is a not-for-profit joint venture between publishers The King's England Press (owner of the Potty Poets imprint) and the Godfather of Potty Poetry, Gez Walsh. In collaboration with various other professionals, Gez will head up a team whose aim is to use the Potty Poets approach to provide beyond-the-classroom learning experiences so that those students for whom mainstream education has proved unsuccessful will still be offered the chance to participate. 
 
While it is only early days yet to claim that Potty Poetry has the same impact and importance as, say, Romantic poetry, the Metaphysicals or the Mersey Sound did, nevertheless the growing legions of its adherents testify not only to a decade of daftness but also a decade of deftness in bringing poetry to a whole new audience.