First book update, and JBW

Well, two things to report today...

One is that we delivered our first UBG 'new edition' last night. It's an updated version of our first guide (for 8-12s, published way back in 2004). It's got well over a hundred new entries (we had to lose some of the old ones to make room, but not too many!) new read-ons, etc. Turned out to be much more work than we'd anticipated, but I think more interesting too. It's been nearly five years since we delivered the first edition and it's startling quite how much has changed. Hope we've done justice to all the new exciting things... The manuscript is now with Susila, our editor, who has the unenviable jigsaw-like task of working out how to fit our 168,000 words (you're crazy if you think we didn't count) into a book... Publication early 2009.

And Susan and I did a fun event at Jewish Book Week this morning - 90 year six kids from a few different schools, and a good lively group. Lots of questions and lots of comments on what we had to say, and particularly a large number who wanted to discuss the relative greatness of books vs films. Books won. People said nice things about the event so seemed to have gone well. Best compliment was probably the organiser, Mekella, saying she assumed we'd done this sort of school event loads of times... Actually this was our first, but do hope to do more...

D.