dorling kindersley books

This has been a hell of a year. But the end is mercifully in sight. My department at Dorling Kindersley had 3260 complex pages of integrated text, illustrations, diagrams, maps, captions and all the rest to complete in 2001. We did it by the skin of our teeth - actually by sheer determination - and so we'll all be avoiding iced drinks and overheated mulled wine in the next few days. In addition, we moved offices in the summer; we've had to completely overhaul our business plans and working practices. Slimming down, "less is more" (which means, as we all know, "more for less") etc. etc. Basically it's been a long, long slog, but the future now looks better than ever. Onwards and upwards. And what's more, it is Christmas in a few days time. For ten days or so we can party and begin to recharge our batteries for 2002.

I take the day off, one of nine holiday days still owed to me this year, eight of which I will now be unable to enjoy. The last viable shopping day before Christmas overcrowding sets in. My wife and I get home at 6.30, the wheezing Volvo's boot stuffed like Santa's sleigh - CDs, socks, books, the last of HMV's special offer PS2s, games, videos, cases of booze. The plastic melting in our pockets.

Duty calls, I check the messaging service.

"Andrew, please ring JR - it's urgent"

Beep beep

"Hi, Agatha, is John still there?"

She puts me through.

"Andrew, look something's come up…"

Heart sinks, P45s, visions of un-meetable overdrafts in January…

"…We need you to take on a major project."

"Sure, what's the deal?"

"You're having lunch with Bill Wyman tomorrow. See me first thing."

After cracking what turned out to be the first of many seasonal bottles, the pieces fell into place.

Backtrack to June 1999. A similarly oblique phone call, this time from CJD, our Publisher-in-Chief and Deputy Chairman.

"Andrew," he growled, "what do you know about the Blues?" I am modestly positive and self-promotional (this is what publishers tend to do after all). "Good, join me for lunch with a Rolling Stone tomorrow" - hardly an offer I would want to refuse.

That meeting, over a gloriously elongated lunch on the King's Road, brought us the contract to create Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey, a great book, a TV series, a remarkable CD - in all a dream-ticket publishing event. As we hunkered down over antipasto in the shaded gloom at the back of the restaurant, Bill's team on one side of the table (backs to the wall), DK's on the other - a line of rapidly emptying bottles of Verdicchio and Chianti marking the penalty area - we smoked our way through a conversation which ranged from Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt to Alexis Korner and Son Seals, through the geography of the Devil's music, to how great the book could, and would, be.

But the outstanding thing was Wyman's astonishing skill as a raconteur, stories bubbling up from casual asides, memories from the horse's mouth which put the record straight; as often as not he popped popular myths ("That never happened."), swiftly replacing them with even better truths ("What really happened was..."). Here was Bill Wyman, the silent Stone, so often standing statuesque in the shadows, generating booming powerhouse bass rhythms apparently effortlessly, while Mick and Keith cavorted in the spotlight - here he was talking like a normal guy about the most extraordinary situations. We were fascinated.

Wyman's team included his alter ego, Richard H. - an alchemist who could turn Bill's stream of recollective consciousness into words and pictures of gold. It was clear, as the DK team crammed into a taxi while the rush hour started, that here was a team here who could deliver. The rest, as they say, is history. The book published in October 2000, and sold phenomenally well, reaching high in the bestseller charts.