Our first short-run book!

At the end of February, Cicerone took delivery of our first short-run print job. The title we chose to trial first was Walking the French Gorges by Alan Castle, which had been out of stock for many months with many outstanding requests from retailers. This is the first step in a process designed to stop our oldest titles going out of stock, or out of print, in the future and to give customers speedier access to our full list of over 250 titles.

For our oldest books we don’t have any digital artwork so our short-run printers Cpod in Trowbridge have to scan the printed books to produce the artwork file. They can then print the books and deliver them straight to our distributor within a month, so no one should have wait long. And we’re so pleased with the trial that another five black and white titles are back in production as I type – The Lake District Anglers’ Guide, A Walker’s Guide to the Lancaster Canal, Walking in the Wolds, Roads & Tracks of the Lake District and The Relative Hills of Britain.

Walking in the French Gorges was first published back in 1993, but still provides all the information walkers need to tackle any section of this 320-mile route from the Côte d’Azur to the Massif Central, through Provence and Ardèche. The short-run printing version of the book is the same as the previous version, except that the 8 pages of colour photographs are now black and white.