And Still They Come #12

The old adage has it that the pen is mightier than the sword. The new adage [courtesy The Threadbone Press] updates as follows: the press is mightier than the pen. Anyone who fails to grasp the import of this increasingly self-evident truth need only scan the bookshelves of Threadstones [though not for some time yet] or the pages of the world-wide interweb retail portals to realise that a massive monetising juggernaut is in full advance, bringing with it title after title in the race to occupy jaded minds and empty eager pockets. That the Threadbone Press is at the head of that juggernaut is unquestionable: the literary plates are in motion, tectonic shifts are afoot, warp-speed approaches: watch out National Bookday: Threadbone Book Day dawns.

Hard on the heels of more than a dozen titles recently announced in the Threadbone Press's Threadbone "How We Used To Live" Classics Series comes a single but significant publication in a similar but distinctive format: The Threadbone Post-War Classics Series. Using the same enticing railway poster artwork - much of it from the studios of distinguished and prolific artist Frank Henry McNightly (1889-1974) - the series is aimed at a public tired of crime, tired of CONTRIK-69-inspired nostalgia and eager to consume quality literature from a bygone golden age of deftly-plotted psychodrama. Or should we say old and long-forgotten royalty-free works in new and deceptively beguiling wrapping? [The publishers claim that the series will be ideal virtual garden or beach reading, attractively priced and even more attractively presented.]

First to appear, Cambridge Summer by Arthur Maddingley is a coming-of-age novel which tells the story of a single summer experienced by a young boy displaced from his Dorset home and separated from his parents and siblings when he is sent to stay with widowed Aunt Iphigenia. Why he is thus displaced and what tragedies and intrigues lie behind his singularly haunting and beguiling tale is the focus of the book's finely-wrought plot. Original reviewers opined that only a man steeped in science and tempered by a life in academia [its author was a pupil of renowned Cambridge don Dr Kenwood Chefe] could have attempted such a tale.*. Graced by an Introduction by none other than Press supremo Mrs Amanda J Threadbone, Cambridge Summer is, according to Dorset Summer Reads Magazine set to be "the read of the summer". [Dorset Summer Reads Magazine is a publication of Threadbone Leisure and Special Interest Magazines Ltd a division of The Threadbone Press]

*OK but is it any good? [Ed]

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CAMBRIDGE SUMMER

Sample chapter from Cambridge Summer HERE

Flipped version HERE