CATALOGUE
Works
The Mint, 1928 text
Military Report on the Sinai Peninsula
Translation
The Forest Giant
Letters
T. E. Lawrence Letters series
Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw
Correspondence with E. M. Forster and F.L. Lucas
Correspondence with Henry Williamson
28 December 2011
Castle Hill Press News
by Jeremy Wilson
Updated 28 December 2011Most links from this page open in a new window
CONTENT
New
One-Page Shop!
New
Letters series bindings
Lawrence of Arabia, The Authorised Biography
Email
Newsletter
More Correspondence with Writers
IMPORTANT
- subscription emails
Rethinking
the Lawrence Letters series
Boats for the
R.A.F.
New Letters series bindings
New quarter-cloth binding for T. E. Lawrence Letters volumes. The spines will be uniform, but the colour of the sides, top edges, leather title labels and endpapers will vary. All volumes in the series published so far should become available in this binding-style during 2012.
There will be no dust jackets: we want people to see these elegant bindings, which echo deluxe bindings of Lawrence's day.
Three Letters volumes still to be issued - VI, VII, VIII - will be available to advance subscribers in full-cloth, to make a matching set with the Shaw, Forster and Williamson volumes. After publication, however, unsubscribed copies of these volumes will be bound in the new style.
Lawrence of Arabia, The Authorised Biography
Work starts on a new edition >>
Email Newsletter
Update 28 December 2011
Our second newsletter goes out this week.
- - - - - - -
Some subscribers forget to check this page - and as a result miss important notices.
That has been troubling us for a while. We have now decided to send Castle Hill Press customers an informal email newsletter. It will contain progress notes about our current projects as well as brief articles related to T.E. Lawrence and/or Castle Hill Press. We recently circulated a trial issue with an invitation to subscribe. Future issues will follow at 6-8 week intervals.
This newsletter is for customers, not for the general public. If you are interested in T.E. Lawrence and wish to receive notes and comment by email, you might like to subscribe to the T.E. Lawrence Studies list, which I have moderated since 1997.
More Correspondence with Writers
This volume will be the seventh to be issued in our 9-volume series containing Lawrence's known post-war correspondence with writers. It will also also be one of the largest, with some 350 letters and over 400 pages..
Note that the subscribers' full-cloth binding can only be ordered before publication. Post-publication, the available binding will be the new quarter-cloth style.
Four subscription FAQs:
Q. Why do you not send subscription announcements by post?
A. We would have to add the cost of a large mailing to the price of our books. In the past, the additional subscriptions gained from a postal mailing have never justified the expense.
Q. Why do you not have standing-order subscriptions?
A. No payment option will allow irregular charges not initiated by the customer. Also, we need to check that your postal address is still the same.
Q. What happens if I miss a subscription?
A. After the subscription closes, we can only supply a book - if copies are still available - at the prevailing price. That may be considerably higher than the subscription price.
Q. My ISP's spam-trap seems to have blocked your emails. What can I do to prevent this happening in future?
A. If you think this may happen, we recommend opening an additional free webmail account. For example, up until now we have had no communications problems with subscribers who use gmail.
T. E. Lawrence Letters series - subscribers' cloth bindings now out of print
We have reached the end of our stock of backlist volumes in the T.E. Lawrence Letters series in full-cloth subscribers' bindings. It will be some time before all these volumes are available in the new quarter-cloth style.
We still have a few full-cloth copies of most volumes with very small faults - usually a thin scratch on the gilt top-edge.
Orders for new copies will be held until the quarter-cloth binding is available.
Quarter-goatskin and full-goatskin bindings are unaffected by this change.
Question: I have subscribed to the series. Will I be able to get future volumes in a matching binding?
Answer: Yes, provided we have you order before publication (so that we can include your copy in the order for subscribers' bindings). Note, however, that the formal Letters series will now stop at Volume IX (see below). Other volumes we publish - especially those with a very short print-run - may not be available in a cloth binding.
Rethinking the T. E. Lawrence Letters series
We spent some time this spring thinking about the content of future volumes in the T. E. Lawrence Letters series, and indeed about the nature of the series itself. This has been prompted by several factors:
- The length of the Letters volumes has been creeping up. If we accept this (it means more editorial cost per volume), then we can reduce the number of volumes. That makes sense, first, because the cost of craft binding is large and rising compared to the cost of printing. So the physical production-cost per page of a short volume is getting much higher than the cost per page of a longer volume. Secondly, we know from experience that the queue at the bindery can cause long delays to our editions (and to the availability of our backlist). Fewer volumes = fewer bindings.
- As Lawrence's letters vary greatly in length, the page-count of proposed volumes is difficult to predict until we assemble their content. Over the past few months I have assembled the main content of several future volumes. That has led to some rearrangement.
- The type of content in each correspondence varies. Some combinations of correspondences seem to work better than others.
- We can save editorial time by doing the groundwork for similar volumes at the same time. For example, to prepare the collection of 'Later Writings About Service Life' that appeared in edition of the 1928 text of The Mint, we read through all the letters in our chronological files between 1927 and 1935. While doing that we also noted material we could use in Boats for the RAF. The remaining volumes of correspondence with writers will benefit from a similar approach.
- In Boats for the RAF it made sense to combine some of Lawrence's minor works with related correspondence. That blurs the distinction between our editions of Lawrence's works and letters. Having done it once, we decided we would do it again, for example by adding his Oxford thesis to the pre-1910 letters. Should we be calling the result part of the Letters series? Maybe not.
- We are also conscious of the looming 1914-18 centenary. In one way or another that will mean a lot of work on the war period. Our three most recent volumes have focused on the service years. It would be sensible to finish more work on that period before the war years take over.
The upshot is this. We will reduce to three the future volumes containing 'literary' letters:
Volume VI: More Correspondence with Writers, including John Brophy, John Buchan, Noel Coward, C. Day Lewis, C. M. Doughty, David Garnett, James Hanley, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, Frederic Manning, Siegfried Sassoon.
Volume VII: Correspondence with Bookmen, including Jonathan Cape, Sydney Cockerell, C. J. Cumberlege, Peter Davies, F. N. Doubleday, Edward Garnett, St. John Hornby, Ralph Isham, Manning Pike, Bruce Rogers, Raymond Savage, Whittingham & Griggs, G. Wren Howard.
Volume VIII: Correspondence with Robert Graves.
That will close the present gap between Vol. V (Letters to E. M. Forster and F. L. Lucas) and Vol. IX (Letters to Henry Williamson). The remaining volumes will be described as 'Works and Letters', and not numbered. There is a provisional list of the series, as now proposed, here.
How does this rethink affect our immediate plans?
We are completing in parallel the groundwork for Volumes VI and VII - and also continuing to prepare Letters from Carchemish. Volume VI is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2012.
It is possible that in Vol. VIII we will combine the Liddell Hart and Graves correspondence as in T.E. Lawrence to His Biographers. Before deciding, we need to know the length of the additional material we will include.
T. E. Lawrence, Boats for the R.A.F. 1931-1935
T. E. Lawrence, Works and Letters
Scheduled issue: Winter 2011-12
Update 25 November
Because of commitments at the bindery, this has been waiting in a long queue.
The latest news is that things will start moving again in December. Binding
should be completed in the early weeks of 2012.
We are very conscious that subscribers are having to wait for this publication - but we also think you will be pleasantly surprised. We have added so much to the specification since the advance subscription that we are accepting no more orders until the binding is finished and we know its final cost. Not for the first time, there will be a big difference between the subscription price and the post-publication price.
We have never hesitated to improve the content of our books when the opportunity arose, even though doing so usually increases the cost. That is why we limit subscription orders to a proportion of the edition.
Description
Boats for the R.A.F. includes Lawrence's notes on the 200 Class Seaplane Tender,
as well as other reports that most people would classify as a 'work'. These
include the log he kept during the winter of 1934-5 describing the overhaul of
RAF boats at Bridlington. It was the last substantial writing task he completed
before his death in May 1935. The writings are set chronologically in the context of Lawrence's letters to key RAF personnel involved in work on marine craft.
The collection illustrates - more clearly than any of other we have edited so far - the strength of Lawrence's practical gifts. What you read here tells you something important about the kind of man Lawrence was.
For me, this is one of the most significant volumes in the series. It tells a story that is important in Lawrence's biography, but unavailable elsewhere in anything like so much detail. The letters also fill many blanks in the biographical chronology of these last service years, by telling us where Lawrence was, on specific dates, and what he was doing.
Not for the first time, the process of assembling in sequence a set of letters and documents about a particular topic has produced a far richer and more vivid picture than before. That in turn can be thought-provoking.
One thing that struck me is that the four-year time-span of Lawrence's involvement with RAF boats (1931-5) is comparable in his biography with the time-span of two other periods of committed activity: the Carchemish excavations and the war. Moreover, there are ways in which these periods are similar. In each, Lawrence was working with other people on tasks that involved a large practical element, as well as intellectual judgement. In each, he found himself alongside people who were not from his own educational or social background. In each, he was in a kind of liaison role, motivated by objectives that meant far more to him than to many of those around him.
This edition contains more than 180 letters and reports, many hitherto unpublished.
Prospectus and provisional specification >>
NEWS
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Customer feedback
Some comments from the customer feedback page on our old website:
. . . I couldn't be more pleased. The attention to detail, and conception of this edition, are wonderful . . .
I cannot praise too highly the quality of the production, with exceptional clarity and beauty of print, the erudition of editing, and the excellent on-line service. Important correspondence in beautiful books - the perfect combination.
. . .Excellence in research and editing, and magnificently produced books in superb bindings. Last but not least, efficient and friendly service, with books posted in rock solid packaging.
. . . These books are a pleasure to own and read . . .
. . . a quite invaluable job in publishing (very beautifully . . .) many of the writings of TEL which hitherto have been available only in manuscript form in museums, libraries or private collections, or in out-of-print books which are very hard to obtain.An excellent set of publications that are beautifully edited and produced. A wonderful addition to my library and to any library.