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Saturday 7th December 2013 How time flies Crikey, where did the summer go? It only seems five minutes since Reg hung up his ticket punch and Colin put the OB back in the garage and here we are just a few weeks away from Christmas. All excitement here in Larkhall as we have had our local "Co-op" completely re fitted, it now has a ceiling, chiller cabinets that don't keep dumping gallons of water on the floor and a much bigger range of stuff to buy. As if that weren't exciting enough the checkout staff have been taken out of the draughty doorway, there are also self service checkouts (for those that like that sort of thing), they still seem to stock all the red wines I liked in the old store and they still have the odd bargain if you go in there at ther right time. I went to the most excellent Warley show at the NEC, a fantastic array of model railway-ery, including the "Gresley Beat" (wow), "Porthcullin" (completely convincing Kyle line in the 1970s) and an amazing Dutch perspective modelling masterpiece with flattish railcars in 4 scales - deeply clever. I looked in on various trade stands and suppliers, Wild Swan seemed to be doing a roaring trade, Lightmoor were busy and Ian Allan were selling everything at reduced prices, including all the newly published books. I know I'm being a bit cheeky and don't run a business anywhere near a fraction of what they are worth, but I do worry about those Ian and Allan boys sometimes.... Talking about Wild Swan, at Warley they launched their new LMS Review, which is the "replacement" for LMS Journal. I must say I'm very impressed, a good selection of subjects and articles, mixing pure model with prototype in an effective and interesting way and just what the modelling readership (who seem to me to be the most active audience for railway books at the moment) are after I would have thought. At 80 pages long and priced at £18.95 I have heard a few people say that it is overpriced, but I think absolutely not. It is produced to a very high standard, written in the same (correct) English of MRJ and designed by Paul Karau - in other words it is a real quality piece of publishing. Having just been Christmas shopping in Bath last week, and experienced the prices of everything (and the lousy quality of quite a lot of it) I came away feeling that very nearly everything in my shop is ludicrously underpriced - we enthusiasts don't half whinge and worry about nothing you know, and yes I include this new publication in the "bloody good value for what it is" category. On that note, I have heard that the just published and very last issue of LMS Journal has now gone out of print. Now it may be that the print run was scaled down a bit too much, but at £10.95 for 80 pages it was just too cheap wasn't it? I hope people don't complain about this, I mean the last trains on branch lines were always vastly over patronised weren't they, and the old guard would always wryly observe that if a quarter of those who came to see of the old line and complained about its loss had bothered to use it when it was running then it could have all turned out so differently....
As a sort of postscript to this year I would also like to say that I know it is very easy to criticise, and I appreciate that I do just that in these pages on a pretty regular basis. Well, I also appreciate how difficult it is for any of us to achieve perfection and the huge amount of effort that goes into the publication of all the books and magazines that I talk about.
So in a spirit of seasonal goodwill and in all humility I would like to say thank you to all of the writers, illustrators, designers and publishers who create all of the books and publications that we enthusiasts are presented with every year - we are very lucky! |
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Simon Castens |