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" The world is mud-luscious

and puddle-wonderful "

e.e.cummings

The Book of English Magic & Endangered Species

November 8th, 2007

I’m off to London today to meet up with fellow author Richard Heygate and his son Fredddie. He and I are writing ‘The Book of English Magic’ together and we’re planning to interview all the interesting characters I’ve met over the years who are involved in magic in one way or another. Freddie, who’s graduated from the New York Film School, is going to film us interviewing Christina Oakley-Harrington who owns Treadwell’s book shop in Covent Garden. It’s a delightful, magical shop in the heart of London, and our idea is to build a website over the coming year with film clips of all the interviews we do.

Richard’s first book, co-authored with his cousin Michael Daunt, has just come out to a fanfare of publicity – an amazing feat since it’s so hard to get your book publicised at all. It’s called ‘Endangered Species’. Richard is the Bart, because he’s a ‘Sir’ and his cousin is the bounder, because he’s well – a bounder! You can read all about the book and see video clips on it at the B&B site.

Here’s what The Telgraph says about the book:

“Like a pair of disreputable Victorian villains, the Bart and the Bounder have confessed their sins in a wonderful book, titled “Endangered Species”. What makes the tales in their book such a treat is that the pair not only ransacked their long memories and old game books for anecdotes but actually went out on the road together for 3 months last year, travelling Britain, ferreting out old acquaintances – gamekeepers, gypsies, coal miners – and quizzing them about their secrets of the countryside.”

After sushi in Picadilly and filming in Treadwell’s I might go on to hear Georges Monbiot talk about whether we’re all going to survive global warming.

I suspect tomorrow’s post will be gloomy….