Castle Hill Press
Scholarly editions of T. E. Lawrence's works and letters

Printed prospectuses and correspondence
We do not issue printed prospectuses for our books, because we try to keep non-publishing costs to a minimum. In general, the only prospectus we issue is on this website.

For the same reason, we communicate with customers whenever possible by e-mail. 

Why don't we sell our fine bindings and the Subscribers' Library Edition of Seven Pillars through bookshops?
Any bookseller who feels irritated about this should complain to the major British high-street bookselling chains and supermarkets. In recent years these have used their huge buying power to extort ever-larger terms and profit margins from publishers. 

For a publisher who has to sell through these outlets, there are only two possible consequences. The recommended retail price (RRP) of books has to increase, and production costs must be cut. The latter includes, notably, putting books in cheaper bindings. 

If we offered fine bindings or the Subscribers Library Edition of Seven Pillars to the general retail trade, we would be expected to meet the terms demanded by the big chains. The result would be an absurdly high RRP. We prefer to keep prices lower and sell the books to customers direct. 

If other publishers follow suit, the physical difference between copies that publishers sell direct and copies sold through chain booksellers might soon mirror the traditional difference between trade editions and cheaper book-club editions. Indeed, some publishers might choose not to sell hardbacks through high-street chains at all. 

Maybe that's what will happen. Customers wishing to buy cheap books online or in high-street convenience-stores will do so, while those wishing to buy hardbacks in good-quality bindings will get them at a reasonable price from publishers' websites. Some online retailers may even join in, buying well-bound trade hardbacks from publishers on terms that don't send the price into the sky.

Print-runs, prices and production-values
Back in March 2004, I remarked that our subscription price is sometimes a bargain. For example, when we set the subscription price of our 1997 edition of the 'Oxford' Seven Pillars, we had no idea that we would be able to include the colour portraits. With the portraits added, the cost of producing the illustrations volume multiplied by four. Had we known sooner, the subscription price would have been higher! However, we honoured the original price for those who had subscribed. 

This week comes news that subscribers to our parallel text of Le Gigantesque / The Forest Giant will get something better than expected. We have reduced the size of the edition to 352 copies - a little over half the number originally announced. That will certainly affect its re-sale value in years to come, and the post-publication price is now higher. However, if you subscribed at £58, that is what you will pay. 

There is an important message here: our print-run reflects the number of orders we receive in advance. When we seek subscriptions, we set the limitation at what seems to us a reasonable number of copies. If advance orders say something different, we adjust the run. When subscriptions are low, as with The Forest Giant, why sacrifice trees producing books people don't want? When there is an unexpected demand, as there was for special bindings (not originally planned) of our 2003 Seven Pillars, we try to respond by providing what subscribers wish. Subscriptions to The Forest Giant are probably low because few of our customers read French. Also, few people seem to have read the book, even in Lawrence's translation. That may be their loss. When the Sunday Times asked Alan Sillitoe (author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) to name a book that had changed his life, he replied: "The Forest Giant by Adrien le Corbeau, translated by T E Lawrence. I re-read it recently and see why."

Please never call us, after the subscription period has ended, to say that you meant to subscribe, and would buy a copy if we could let you have it at the subscription price. Ditto after publication, having missed a copy with the additional subscribers' leaf. The reason we offer extras to people who order in advance (and pay when payment is due) is that we need a realistic idea of demand. I've been called countless times by people saying they had "intended" to subscribe to our 1997 Seven Pillars: "Surely, you must have a set somewhere that you could let me have!"

What of the future?
Thus far, we have never made our initial printing deliberately small in order to give it artificial rarity-value. If one of our editions sold out on publication, we would blame ourselves for misjudging the market. If we think we will sell 700 copies, over a period of ten years, that's how many we print. This in turn enables us to set the price of the book much lower than we would if we only expected to sell 350 copies. (Why change the price? Because for short-run editions most of the costs involved in editing and production are fixed. If you publish fewer copies, you have to charge more.) 

At present, we are debating the print-run and price of the Lawrence-Forster letters. I would like the edition to be 702 copies, as for the Shaw set. On the other hand, the present market is sluggish and it might be more sensible to produce 502, or 352, or.... For each publication, we need to assess demand at different prices and find a viable solution that makes the standard edition as cheap as possible. Of course, if the books could be even cheaper, a few more people who would buy them. But 'a few more people' do not equate to the thousands of sales needed to drive unit costs really low. Someone told me they would like to buy a copy of our 1,100-page Seven Pillars parallel text, but only if it could be produced as a paperback costing around £15. They didn't understand that it couldn't be done. How many people would want to buy such an esoteric publication, even at £15? An optimistic guess might be 700, worldwide. To price it in paperback at £15, you would need to sell several thousand. 

From the outset, friends in the fine-press business have advised us to publish fewer copies at a higher price. We could do that; we know the market is there. We could raise the same revenue with much less effort - and who enjoys packing books? Fleece Press and the Whittington Press have both produced Lawrence-related editions of shorter texts at significantly higher prices. Our books are not printed letter-press, but their content is longer and generally more important - and we, too, publish to high standards. To judge by current prices for our 1997 Seven Pillars (as yet, the only one of our books that is out of print) the market recognises the quality of our work. 

In truth, decisions about edition size and price lie with our customers. I myself hope that the decision imposed for The Forest Giant will not soon apply to titles in the Letters series. If that happens, all our books will be collectors' rarities and the initial price of the cloth copies will be well above what most people can afford.  

Some people ask: "What about production-values? Wouldn't your books be cheaper if you produced them to lower standards?" That might be true if the only costs involved were for printing, binding and materials. However, the editorial research for volumes in the Letters series usually costs far more than physical production. If we added those editorial costs to the price of, say, a paperback printed on cheap paper, the result would seem scandalously expensive. 

That's not all. Because we design and produce our editions as fine-press books, we have a market for some goatskin 'specials'. These subsidise the cloth copies. Without them, the price of the cloth copies would have to be far higher. But we couldn't put beautiful goatskin bindings on shoddy book-blocks. 

Publishing, like politics, is the art of the possible - and some of the most important parameters are set by the market. To find out what these are, you need to understand the market segments that our books appeal to. 

• The largest is made up of people seriously interested in T.E. Lawrence who could not afford the time or the cost (or both) involved in travelling to libraries to read original Lawrence letters. In any case, to have a printed edition on their bookshelf is far more convenient

• An overlapping segment consists of people who find the added-value of the editorial research and indexing in our editions worthwhile. We do that time-consuming work once, for everyone. Each copy of the book bears only a small fraction of the cost

• A third segment consists of people who appreciate fine-press books and enjoy collecting them. Their interest in Lawrence may have been triggered by the many fine-press editions of his writing

• Another segment, which probably overlaps with all of the above, consists of collectors who calculate that our editions are a reasonable investment. They project the likely values, once the books go out of print, by looking at today's prices for earlier editions of comparable quality, scarcity and importance. On that basis, it was easy to predict the outcome for the 1997 Seven Pillars. You can do a similar calculation for volumes in the Letters series

If you are only interested in the content, the fine-press format doubtless seems unnecessary. If you are only interested in fine-press production, the quality of the text may seem far less important (though it surely adds to future appreciation of the book). We aim to meet the requirements of all the market segments because, when you add them together, they make our editions viable.