OLD ORDNANCE SURVEY MAPS: THE GODFREY EDITION

August Newsletter

I'm afraid these Newsletters seem to come out ever later in the month - but at least I haven't missed one yet!

After all the excitements of June and July it's been back to the grindstone this month, quite difficult at times with everyone trying to take some holidays. Hopefully at some stage in September I will have a full complement of staff again.

But I've been snatching the occasional day away to research the odd map or two - and some are even seeing the light of day - such as this Yorkshire one to the left.

And here's another that is out today. I normally give my authors guidelines - length of course, but also subjects to be treated in small doses or with caution, such as pre-history, John Wesley (he went almost everywhere), geology (a gap in my brain), and ghost stories; but I really couldn't resist this particularly elegant ghost, especially as I stayed in the hotel where she roams. But if you want to read more about her, you will have to buy the Rishton map!

Meanwhile I've almost finished the notes for this German one -

....and will spend part of the weekend writing the notes for this Irish one!

But the real achievement in August has been upgrading our webshop. We use Actinic software and for many years have been using version 6. I tried to upgrade this to version 7 about five years ago but failed and so decided to carry on with what we knew. However, we recently decided to have another go at upgrading, this time to version 9, and Suzanne volunteered to take the project on. In the event, it needed an almost entire rebuild, quite a task with some 2,400 titles to input. When this was complete we had the nervewracking task of uploading it to the server, which was our undoing last time round. Amazingly we succeeded first time round, with only the most minor of gremlins - pound signs took a little while to sort out. Some links are still being added, to give the shop items links to information pages within the general website (all maps do now have these) but with luck that will be complete within a few weeks. I hope that you like the new, smarter appearance of the webshop. As ever, we try to keep the other pages of the website as simple and informative as possible, as general feedback tells us that that is what the customers want.