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New Catalogue, new thinking

 25. March 2008  paul.bentham@robinsons-uk.com  Behind the Scenes  (0)
One of the pitfalls of being involved in any sort of publishing is that you often forget what the time of year is. The relentless need for monthly magazines to produce next month’s issue (often with the following month shown on the cover) by the end of this month means that to writers and publishers, summer starts in March, Christmas occurs around early October and Easter can be as early as the New Year! When speaking to our friends at magazines like Your Horse, I often feel like I’m entering a strange world where the next six weeks have ceased to exist, kind of like amnesia but in the other direction. When you think about it, the same must be true of anyone working in the soaps. Every so often, you’ll see a giveaway, like evidence of snow in an episode aired in May – look out for that this year! One of the more interesting 'work' days out I am fortunate to have is to a venue which just happens to be an occasional location for Emmerdale. I’m told that the continuity people who are there during the shoots are permanently worried about making everything look like it’s a month and a half in the future. In the case of the humble catalogue production department, our timing can be even longer into the future. With Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter campaigns, the deadlines may be less frequent, but the thinking is even further ahead. With that in mind, I was almost going to tell you how we’re very happy with the way our Autumn/Winter ’08 catalogue is shaping up and then I remember that you’ll only recently have received our Spring/Summer catalogue. Do you see what I mean? Time and again, time plays this trick on me.
Spring/Summer 2008 Cover Maybe I can put it this way: I hope you like our new selection and indeed our new catalogue. We’re very proud of it and we hope it’ll be very popular, but I expect it to be the last of its kind, a throwback to a simpler age. In the evolution of mailorderus catalogi, we’re at the point in time where the species has to adapt to a changing environment. If we don’t develop the equivalent of warm blood or opposable thumbs, we risk becoming a dinosaur and nobody wants to look forward to being a rather famous skeleton.
So what are we going to do next time to make this new catalogue seem like a quaint, old-fashioned relic? Well, I’m sure you can agree that I can’t possibly discuss that here (yet), but I’m also sure you can probably guess the direction we’ll be heading. And here comes the other curse of the publisher: the fact that you hardly ever get the chance to be proud of the thing you worked so hard to create - because you already know that in the pipeline is something that promises to be much, much better. I can’t wait until we can share it with you… Merry Christmas! Paul.
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