Welcome to our February Newsletter. And I'm pleased to say that - as I write - the snow has almost gone but the roads have been treacherous and icy until well into last week. It is now many weeks since we heard the reassuring sound of a gritting lorry go through the village where I live!
The main thing to mention this month is the Who Do You Think You Are Family History Show at Olympia, which runs from Friday 26th Feb to Sunday 28th Feb. I shall have a stand there - well, a table anyway - in the Society of Genealogists part of the show. Several other stands will, hopefully, be selling some of our maps so I will only have a few recent titles there, but I hope that many of you will take the opportunity to come and say 'Hello', ask me any questions that you might have about the series, place orders, even say how much you like the maps! Flattery always welcome.
I don't often have a stand or table at such shows and, to tell the truth, prefer to be out researching new maps. But perhaps this year it will be good to be doing something under cover. My nephew Joel Godfrey will come and help me on the Saturday and Sunday, and Jackie Depelle will also be giving me some help, but I myself will be at the stand most of the time, so I do hope you will come along and help keep me amused. It is a very good show, with lots of interesting stands, so well worth visiting anyway.
It is always a pleasure to tell you a little about our authors in these Newsletters. Richard Oliver will be a well known and much respected name to many of you, and especially to those of you who are collectors or enthusiasts of Ordnance Survey maps. He is author of the Concise Guide, an invaluable book which we do sell, and he has written about 40 historical introductions for us, most recently for the Inch to the Mile maps we have been publishing for SW England.
Richard has sent me some biographical details, noting that he was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, in 1954, and after working for some years in a bank, he read history at Sussex, and then went on to research and write his doctoral thesis, The Ordnance Survey in Great Britain 1835-1870 (1986). Since then he has written extensively on the Ordnance Survey, most notably Ordnance Survey maps: a concise guide for historians, published by the Charles Close Society in 1993, with a second edition in 2005. His most recent work is the Introductory Essay in Roger Hellyer and Richard Oliver, One-inch engraved maps of the Ordnance Survey, which was published last year. Between 1989 and 2009 Richard was Research Fellow in the History of Cartography at the University of Exeter - thought to be the only such full-time post in the UK - working with Professor Roger Kain on tithe maps, enclosure maps and pre-1900 urban maps of Britain. He has recently taken very early retirement, which ought to give him a little more time not only to write about OS maps, but also to pursue his other interests, which include railways, milestones, local history, walking, cycling, architecture, music, reading and Quakerism, as well as providing a sort of Battersea Dogs Home for various leftovers from institutional map collections.'
Return to Index The Godfrey Edition / godfreyedition@btinternet.com revised 14 February 2010