Now that Shady Characters has been published, I can reveal what I’ve been working on for the past few months. The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time will be published in late 2015 by W. W. Norton, and I’m delighted to say that the esteemed Brendan Curry will assume editing duties once again.
As I mentioned recently, I handed out copies of the Shady Characters quiz at the book launch party here in Edinburgh. I promised the attendees that one winner would receive a copy of the US edition of the book, and I’ve finally got round to tallying up the scores. Tom Pilcher and Chris Mackinnon both scored top marks, but random.org, my go-to source for numerical chaos, has selected Tom as the winner. Congratulations to Tom, commiserations to Chris, and thanks again to all who came to the launch and took part in the competition!
Shady Characters
has been on sale for over a week, and now that the furore has died down a little I thought I’d collect links to all the articles I wrote in support of the book. Some of these have already been featured here; others were posted on Twitter, Facebook and so on, and a few more are new. Without further ado, then, and in no particular order, here you are:
The launch party for Shady Characters went swimmingly! The bar was packed with family and friends, both old and new; many books were signed, and much wine was drunk. My mum brought along a fountain pen that had once belonged to my grandfather, and it was an honour to be able to sign books with it at my first-ever book launch.
…Paul Carvill (@paulcarvill) and John Stuart (@biostuart)! Congratulations to them both. Paul and John’s names were picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest. Their copies of the UK edition of Shady Characters will be on their way very soon.