Clarification on the status of Classic/Chevron Publications

[Dave Wadman]

Fellow discussion board members, in order to clarify the current status of Classic/Chevron Publishing, Robert Forsyth has asked me to post the following:

If I may risk boring you with a little bit of history. Eddie Creek, Arthur Bentley and I set up Classic Publications in 1995 and in 2003 (by which time Arthur had retired), for various reasons, we sold the rights to the name 'Classic Publications' to Ian Allan Publishing (IAP) who had approached us. This resulted in a perfect arrangement of convenience: IAP wished to make a return to aviation publishing in a major way, adding the Classic imprint to Midland operation which they had already acquired. However, they were committed to maintaining the content and style of the books we had produced when we were functioning as an independent publisher. As such they wished to retain and contract the Classic team (ie myself, Eddie, Colin Woodman and Martin Pegg) to work on all Classic titles. Since 2003, Eddie and I have therefore functioned as Chevron Publishing - a fully independent book production company, producing aviation books for the likes of IAP and Hikoki Publications.

The team now comprises myself, Eddie, Mark Nelson (who has joined us on the design and production side) and my wife, Sally, together with an associate illustration specialist, Tim Brown.

In the last couple of months, IAP have taken the decision to cease operating the Classic Publications imprint with a view, as far as we understand, for Midland Publishing to be the main aviation publishing imprint. We had little knowledge of this internal decision and no involvement in it. We - that is to say the original 'Classic team' here at Chevron ­ will still be working on books for IAP but they will bear the Midland imprint.

You may rest assured that within the parameters we are given to work by our client publishers, we will always strive to continue to offer the levels of content and quality which we have produced in the past.

As I say, our website, may offer an insight into what we do.

Thanks for your kind interest.

Best regards

Robert Forsyth

Chevron Publishing Limited

www.chevronpublishing.co.uk

[Huib Ottens]

Dear Gruppe,

Perhaps we can express our amazement or even discontent to Ian Allan Publishing (IAP) regarding their decision to cease operating the Classic Publications imprint.

A simple (and polite) email to their email account by, hopefully a lot of, members from this board might perhaps persuade IAP to reconsider their decision? This was already suggested by Nick Beale in an earlier thread on TOCH and with this message I second his proposal.
Perhaps we should best address the emails to the sales director Mr Jonathan King.

In my opinion IAP loses more than it gains from this decision: trading in a specialized brand for a “wholesale” brand will probably cause a loss of focus, fewer specialized books and therefore a loss of clients.

According to the IAP website they have problems with their email account. They can be contacted at info@midlandcounties.com and the subjectline is supposed to start with “Email from Ian Allan Website [temp]”, probably to redirect the messages to IAP.

I am interested to hear what you think of this proposal and I hope it generates a lot of emails to IAP.

(I have posted a simular email at LEMB)

[O.Menu]

Classic Publication life was short but very appreciated! Thanks!