Retired at last!

Well, it looks like I'm properly retired at last. The other day I turned down an illustration job and yesterday found out that the publisher of the book I've been working on for the past year 10 principles of graphic design has just gone into administration!Vivays was founded by a couple of ex-employees of my main publisher Laurence King, including commissioning editor Lee Ripley. Ah well.

It's happened before. In 1991, my second book CAD for product design was commissioned, written, edited, picture researched and ready to go to press when its publisher (whose name escapes me) was taken over by Phaidon. What I didn't know was that Phaidon had also been recently taken over and was relying on its back catalogue to generate income. They weren't publishing anything new, so sat on my book until I asked for it back. After sending it to another couple of publishers (Wiley was one, the Design Council another) and waiting for them to read it (this was before the internet and email), I decided it was getting too out of date to continue, so it never saw the light of day. Soon after, Laurence King approached me about Production for graphic designers, and I've worked for them ever since. When they proposed a second edition of Drawing for designers, which would have been virtually a different book to the first edition, I declined, saying that I'd retired.

So Lee emailed me last year about her new venture and I couldn't say no - only 17,000 words required. Incidentally, another of their authors is Ruth Slavid, who I worked with at IPC Science and Technology Press in Guildford all those years ago. Her book 10 principles of architecture did get published, though it's unlikely she'll see any royalties!

That makes three unpublished books on my hard drive. CAD for product design, which is only openable as a text file, seeing as it was probably written in Claris Works; my NaNoWriMo novel from November 2011, which I'll self-publish just as soon as I can decide on a title; and the graphic design one. Maybe the administrator will find a buyer, maybe not.

History Hunters

History Hunters was a spin-off from the successful Channel 4 series Time Team. Channel 4 deleted the original site some years ago - all that's left is this summary page - but luckily I found the archive on an old CD-rom (that hadn't rotted) and decided to preserve it for posterity.

It was a sort of local history/geneaology programme in which two teams competed with each other to solve a mystery! The pilot episode was at Marshfield and at that time the proposed series was called Hands on History, later changed to Time Team Roadshow. It was my first experience of telly and it was very daunting, as presenter Tony Robinson would often cut to me pretending to type on my computer! (I sussed pretty soon that as it wasn't going out live, I didn't actually need to do any work on site, apart from scan images that wouldn't be available to me later - all the coding was done later at home.) The scanner and other stuff was usually transported by writer Nancy Duin in her car. Digital photographer was Simon Williams. For Marshfield, I hired a Mac laptop for the weekend at great expense - for later episodes I bought a G3 Wallstreet for just over £3,000. It was all great fun and should have gone to a second series, but it went out at a bad time on Saturday afternoon instead of the better Time Team Sunday slot.

I also worked on all the annual episodes of Time Team Live except the very first one, from August 1998 at King's Lynne until 2001, but that's another story. I also visited sundry regular Time Team digs (when it was still trendy to have a webmaster tapping away in the background) and worked on Tim Taylor's own Teamsite, which has also disappeared from the internet.

So, dive in - and enjoy! It's exactly as it was - tho it was designed to fit into a Channel 4 template - and some things may not work!