LP Trade & Reference Titles
Worked on LP's Tuvalu Time & Tide book, with LP co-founder Tony Wheeler, photographer Peter Bennett, and the Tuvaluan government. This was a ghost-writing gig in some respects, plus involving listening to hours of recorded interviews to flesh out the background - a sobering task.
Better Than Fiction was a travel anthology of 32 non-fictional travel tales written by famous novelists. I was proud to ask Keri Hulme to contribute one, and unsurprisingly it turned out to be my personal favourite, about Keri's journey to the near-mythical Hawaiki, the Maori homeland. The anthology also included DBC Pierre, Isabel Allende, Joyce Carol Oates (my 2nd favourite story, about a visit to San Quentin), Bryce Courtenay (one of his last pieces of writing before his death), Pico Iyer and Alexander McCall Smith. I got to work with Don George on this title, a lovely man to work with!
Cooks, Clowns & Cowboys is a compilation of 101 "life skills" you can learn in amazing places around the world. I commissioned about 110 of these in the end, as some didn't end up matching our needs (and I was learning on the hop which ones did and which didn't!). 30 different authors contributed to this, and sourcing images to some of these weird activities in weirder destinations took almost as long as sourcing the text. I think my favourite remains the cosmonaut one.
One Planet A full-colour, glossy, beautiful book that was a lot of fun to work on, but I can't get past one of my worst proofing errors ever. On. The. Front. Cover. (Ask me about it. Over a whisky perhaps. Or zoom into the image and see if you can see it.)
Book of Everything A brilliant infographics compilation, with "how to"s for everything from fighting a crocodile to preventing a hangover. I mostly project managed this one, tho it was also a rare chance to do a little bit of science writing.