Having spent the last couple of posts telling you about Mum and her Welsh roots, I think it’s time I got back to telling you more about her writing, starting with the phone call from an editor at Grisewood and Dempsey – the publishers Mum had contacted earlier about wanting to write a children’s book about the Vikings.
If you remember, this editor had promised to keep Mum’s details on file and said she’d contact her if anything suitable turned up. At the time Mum had thought that this was just a polite way of saying they weren’t interested, but she was wrong. The editor had meant what she said – and something suitable had turned up!
Under their Kingfisher imprint, the company had started publishing a series of children’s information books, called History As Evidence. Designed to tie in with the new National Curriculum for teaching history in schools in the UK, they’d already produced The Greeks
and The Romans
while The Egyptians was just about ready to go to the printers.
The next in the series was going to be The Vikings – and they’d already asked another author to produce an outline for it with the same format as the earlier books. He’d not done it the way they wanted, however, and so they were calling Mum to ask her if she’d like to see if she could come up with something better.
They promised her that, if she could produce an outline they liked, she would be given the job of writing the book – and, even if they didn’t like her outline, they would pay her for doing it. They also promised to send her copies of the books that had already been published, so she could see what they were looking for. The only problem was that they wanted the outline by Friday morning – and it was already late on Monday afternoon.
Luckily the promised books arrived the following morning and, as she quickly read through them and studied their format, Mum could feel her confidence growing.
Although the books were described as being 40 pages long, 4 pages at the beginning and 3 at the end were actually blank. Then there was a title page and a contents page, plus a 1-page glossary and a 1-page index. This meant that Mum’s outline would actually only have to cover the contents of 29 pages, one of which would be the introduction.
The other 28 pages had to be divided into 14 “double-page spreads”, each covering a different aspect of Viking life, which meant that Mum had to think of 14 different topics to go on them. As the previous books were illustrated with lots of artwork and photographs, she also had to think about that as she was putting the outline together.
Luckily she got the outline finished and posted on time and a few days later she got to know that it was just what the editor wanted. She was also invited to the company’s offices in Great Titchfield Street, not far from Oxford Street in London.
There she met the editor and, over a working lunch of wine and sandwiches, they put together the rough design of the book.
With no computers to help them in those days, they used large sheets of paper – one for each double-page spread – and worked out how much space would be given to text, artwork, photographs and captions on each one.
That then went to a professional book designer and what Mum got next was a formal lay-out with spaces for the illustrations and an exact numbers of lines for the text.
She then had to advise the two artists on what she wanted them to produce – and at the same time she had to go through other books on the Vikings, photocopying a selection of suitable photos and where they’d come from to make a list for the picture searcher who would also be working on the book.
Once all this was done, Mum finally got to write the text and the captions, then finally the glossary and the index – where she found her old librarian’s skills were very useful.
It would be another 18 months before the book appeared in print in the UK and the USA, and in that time Mum’s life went through another series of ups and downs, which I’ll tell you more about soon.
Meanwhile, look out for a special post from me early next week to celebrate St David’s Day – and, as always, take care, stay safe and keep warm!
Follow my next blog:131. SAINT DAVIDS DAY BONUS
25/02/2021
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 