Old Pond publishing days

Massive earthmoving miners in Britain (2)

(Continued from 17 June.) Full details of the DVDs are in the blog of 9 September

Our next call was at the Selar OCCS pit belonging to Celtic Energy. Here a Hitachi EX1900-5 was hard at work (left).

The following morning saw us at another Celtic Energy mine - the East Pit site, near Ammanford. This gave Steve the opportunity to point out the advances made by the EX1900-6 (right) on the dash five above. These included the new cab, wrist-control electronic levers, new terminals, new engine, electro-hydraulic folding stairs, new engine radiator design and a bigger fuel tank.

Working nearby was a 300-tonne Komatsu PC3000-1(left).

For our next day's filming Steve got us up to Scotland, to the Broken Cross open-cast coal mine at Douglas Water, Lanarkshire. The operator is Scottish Coal.

The company prides itself on its safety systems with different roads for haul trucks and support vehicles. Everywhere we went we were shown whole-hearted dust-suppression and noise-reduction systems.

Here (right) an O&K RH120-F face shovel was loading Terex TR100 trucks.

Not far away, one of Liebherr's 350-tonners, the 9350 face shovel (left) was also loading the Terex trucks - in just 55 seconds.

That night we drove down to Northumberland for two more days' filming ... continued in the blog of 12 July

Farmed animal welfare - new book

In On the Menu: Animal Welfare Sue Cross has collated a vast range of information about how the animate food we eat is farmed or obtained. Her chapters deal with:

Shellfish, squid and octopus
Fish
Beef
Lamb
Poultry (ducks and geese, guinea fowl, quail and chickens)
Pork
Dairy
Game
Eggs.

The details are given unemotionally and with full references. However, in her Conclusion Sue Cross writes with passion: "We are kept in the dark about the true origin of the food we eat ... the overwhelming majority of the animals used for our food are living out their brief lives frightened, diseased, crippled, shut up in sheds in their thousands. Their entire lives are spent in abject misery, as far removed from a natural existence as can possibly be imagined."

On the Menu: Animal Welfare by Sue Cross is published by Pen Press at £8.95. Contacts: www.penpress.co.uk phone 0845 108 0530.

New Massive Earthmoving Machines DVD in stock

All the power of the machines moving mountains in Spain and the French Pyrenees is on view in the DVD Massive Earthmoving Machines Part 4 (Mountain Movers) by Steven Vale. Now in stock at £15.95 at Old Pond. Details: blog 4th May.  

Baggermodelle - new construction model magazine

The first issue of Baggermodelle magazine is due at the end of October: 44 pages, full colour, 'for collectors of construction machine models, cranes and heavy haulage'.

This is being published in German with an English text to download online. The price per issue is Euro 8.90 for European customers. The website is www.baggermodelle.net

General enquiries can be emailed to editor Daniel Wietlisbach at [email protected].

New Land Girls book in stock

Old Pond now has stock of the new paperback book Land Girls Gang Up by Pat Peters. For more details see the blog of 26 April. 

The end of Corocharm?

The following email was sent by James Bunby of Corocharm to Old Pond Publishing on 16th April:

"It is with deep regret that I have to inform you that, following a strategic review, Corocharm Ltd is no longer trading. Unfortunately falling sales, unsold stock, monies owing to us etc has left the situation as untenable. We have tried to resolve as many issues as possible and any further ones will be resolved by the administrators. These will be advised in writing shortly. Naturally I am personally very saddened by this and regret being the latest victim of this recession and for any problems that this may cause you."

We are saddened too. But we are also curious to know the trading position of the company. We still have not been contacted by any administrator. Does anyone know what is happening?

Some background: In the very early 1980s when I published books at Farming Press one of our most succesful outlets was through Farmers Weekly magazine Readers Offers, even though FW was a competitor to the magazines in the Farming Press group. At first I dealt with John Ascoli.

In those days, well before the internet, magazines were keen to add value for their readers with their offers pages. Typically they were run by the subscription department, but used 'spare' advertising space. There could be conflict between the priorities of the two departments. The aims of the Offers could also be unclear: were they to promote the magazines, or were they to make profit? It usually ended up as an uneasy combination of the two.

John Ascoli was succeeded by John Bunby at Farmers Weekly. Then the magazine decided that it would hive off the Offers operation and John was given the opportunity of taking it on as his own business. With his wife Mary and, later, son James, John developed a thriving operation. It continued to be closely linked to Farmers Weekly but extended to other magazines too. Whereas agricultural books and DVDs were the mainstay in the mid-1990s, a decade later profits were coming from items such as tapestry kits.

Corocharm worked this way: the host magazine allocated Corocharm so many pages space in specific months. The host was to be paid a commission on sales generated from the pages. Corocharm approached suppliers to obtain information and images for suitable books, videos and other items for the pages. When the offer appeared, Corocharm received the orders from readers and forwarded the orders to relevant suppliers for fulfilment to the individual customers. The suppliers then invoiced Corocharm for the price of the items (including postage). This invoice was at a quite a high discount in view of the fact that the suppliers were sending their goods direct to readers in ones and twos.

So Corocharm made its living from the difference between the discounted price charged by suppliers and the commission it was paying to the magazines. In good times this must have been very profitable. The advantage to the suppliers was that they had an outlet through Farmers Weekly without having to pay the high advertising charges of a business-to-business magazine. So the suppliers accepted a lower possible final return in exchange for a reduction in risk.

If profits were high for Corocharm in good times, there were also always problems for them because they had no control over the goods they were advertising. In a competitive market they would want to be first among those advertising a good new book or video. But they were working several months ahead, a lead time that seemed to grow over the years rather than reduce. This meant they had to trust the ability of the publisher to publish on time, something that was not always achievable.

A couple of years ago Corocharm extended its operation to take on the CMP magazines such as Farmers Guardian. We also understand that in some instances they began holding stocks and supplying from these; something that was significantly different from their simple early operation.

The Corocharm business fulfilled a real need for magazine readers and countless people involved in farming must have used the service. Our own experience as a supplier is that over the last two or three years the volume of Corocharm orders has been reducing.

Massive earthmoving miners in Britain (1)

After showing us the largest earthmovers in continental Europe, Steven Vale has turned to the British Isles. We have been recording with him film of the largest machines working in our open-cast coal mines. Expect a DVD (or two) from Old Pond in the autumn.

First Wales, and a site above Merthyr Tydfil that is actually a reclamation scheme for an area of noxious waste built up over the past hundred years, at Ffos-y-fran. Beneath the waste cleared by Miller Argent is the coal destined for the power station.

The first thing we saw (left) was the loading of the coal trucks by Cat 966H.

A Demag 185S backhoe (right) was loading a Cat 775E with loose material.

Another backhoe at work (left): Komatsu PC3000 dwarfing a 100-tonne Cat 777F.

The steam coal was being loaded into trucks by Cat 325D (right) to be taken to the central store seen in the first photograph.

In an area dotted with shafts from earlier deep mining a Komatsu PC1250 SP (left) was loading a Cat 77F with overburden.

In the late afternoon we hurried off to another mine. At least, we hurried until the sat nav led us a mile up this blind alley.

Never mind, the dog pointed the way.

(Continued in the blog of 28 June.) Full details of the DVDs are in the blog of 9 September

Know Your Pigs - breeds book advance information

Know Your Pigs, Jack Byard, postcard-sized paperback book, 64 pages including 29 photographs. IN STOCK at Old Pond, £4.99.

The Know Your ... series of books is ideal for novice enthusiasts of all ages. For his fifth book, Jack Byard has selected 29 breeds of pigs. These include all those you are likely to see in the UK on farms or at rare breeds centres.

Some are old favourites such as the Berkshire, one of which. the fictional Empress of Blandings, was the subject of Lord Emsworth's devotion in books by  PG Wodehouse. Others are new commercial breeds, the types you will see in pig arks on farm land, such as the Meidam and the Hybrid AC1.

Among a third group of breeds are some which you might see on holidays abroad or which have an intrinsic interest, such as the American Choctaw.

Every breed has two pages devoted to it: a full page photograph opposite which are a clear description of the animals and some notes about the breed history and current status. The author makes an impassioned plea for the preservation of those breeds which are currently endangered.

Breeds included in the book

American Guinea Hog
Bentheim Black Pied
Berkshire
Black Iberian
British Landrace
British Lop
British Saddleback
Choctaw
Duroc
Gloucestershire Old Spots
Hampshire (top picture) 
Hybrid AC1
Iron Age
Kune Kune (centre picture)
Large Black
Large White
Mangalitza
Meidam
Meishan
Middle White
Ossabaw Island Hog
Oxford and Sandy Black
Pietrain
Poland China
Tamworth (bottom picture)
Vietnamese Pot Bellied
Welsh
Wild Boar
Glamrock

Hadleigh, Suffolk, new Kindred book advance information

Hadleigh: the Portrait of a Suffolk Town. The photographs of Peter Boulton

Selected by David Kindred

Commercial photographer and film-maker Peter Boulton recorded Hadleigh and its people in the 1940s and ’50s. This thriving country town, ten miles west of Ipswich, gave him scope to photograph the activities that were typical of so many towns at that time.

During the Second World War Peter Boulton photographed the wartime sandbagging of major buildings, the work of the Royal Observer Corps and the celebrations of VE Day. His later photographs show the craftsmen of the town, including work at Brett Weavers where coconut matting was woven.

There are many evocative photographs of groups of people – at carnivals, fetes, school sports, dances, the Coronation celebrations and the Hadleigh Show. The Hunt winds its way through the town and there are accidents and incidents such as the disastrous fire at Toppesfield Mill in 1954, the cover picture.

David Kindred has also selected photographs from a dozen of the surrounding villages such as Kersey, Boxford and Monks Eleigh. He has based his captions on the log left by the photographer and has consulted the Hadleigh Town Archives and the Hadleigh Society for supporting information.

David Kindred worked for forty years as photographer and picture editor on Ipswich and East Anglian newspapers. He writes two popular weekly articles featuring local nostalgic photographs and is the author or co-author of ten books, three of which have been published by Old Pond.

Paperback book, 242 x 168mm, 128 pages with 250 photographs. ISBN: 978-1-906853-12-9. IN STOCK at Old Pond, £12.95.

Among those at a tractor sale and demonstration at the White Hart, Hadleigh, in 1947 were Jack Gray, Mr H Wright, Mr Widdicombe, Jack Green, Johnny Green, Bill Bateman, Leslie Widdicombe and Jack Wells.

Horseman Mr Fleet lived at Long Pond Cottages, Lower Layham and worked a short walk away at Overbury Hall Farm. This photograph was taken in 1948.

Farmer Victor Fairfax (left) with a line-up of Guernsey cattle at Brook Farm, Great Waldingfield in 1949. Soon after the Second World War Mr Fairfax and his wife Christine bought three farms totalling about 350 acres.

Part of the production line at Brett Weavers in October 1947. Brett Weavers made a wide range of goods including rope, coconut matting and sacks. During the First World War they also made army uniforms.

Good friends at the Hadleigh Secondary Modern school sports day, June 1954.

Asda to boost classic tractor prices?

A quote from the Independent newspaper, Business section 2 June: 'Asda's shares scheme delivers £43m bonus.... Staff plan to spend their cash on treats, such as second-hand tractors and attending Elvis conventions in Las Vegas.'