THE XANADU MANUSCRIPT

I really enjoyed reading John Rowe Townsend's The Xanadu Manuscript both for its Cambridge setting and also for it's clever time travel story. It  was first published in 1977 and has been re issued by Oleander Press, a small publisher of books with a Cambridge interest. The Xanadu Manuscript, however, will interest young readers far beyond Cambridge as it has such a popular and universal theme.

    John is a very good friend, living close by and I'm delighted to see his book back in print again with its new, eye-catching cover.

4 DECEMBER DIARY ENTRY

For most of my life I kept a diary. I used to like to compare my own day, especially if it had been a bad one, with the days of other diarists in The Faber Book of Diaries edited by Simon Brett.  Now the blog has replaced the diary with posts that are not quite as personal as diary entries. Here are the entries of  The Reverend John Skinner, Jane Welsh Carlyle , George Gissing and Joan Wyndham for 4 December in 1823, 1855, 1893 and 1940 respectively:

And here's my own for 2011:

Woke at 10.30 after a bad night relieved it was Sunday and not Monday.  The last few days have been manic; trying to get Zoë’s Boat off to China for printing with the worry the huge files are still stuck somewhere out in cyberspace - hopefully nearer to Hong Kong than Cambridge.

     It was all so old fashioned and easy last year when Lavenham Press printed The Little White Sprite and the printer drove over to collect everything from my house; staying for tea and cake. But all that costs money and, now we’re in 'a time of economic crisis', costs have to be kept down. Though yesterday, 'the economic crisis story' didn’t ring very true at Hitchin Waterstones – or for that matter the ‘death of the book story.’ I’ve never seen so many people in a bookshop before and I’ve never had such a good signing session before – 47 copies sold.