Happy Birthday RAF!

1 April 2018 marks the centenary of the formation of the Royal Air Force as the first independent air force in the world.  At the time of foundation, it was the largest air force in existance.

For our books on the history of military aviation, see here.

AbeBooks Outage Over

The problems affecting AbeBooks hardware appears to have been resolved.

Enjoy your shopping!

AbeBooks Outage

We have received the following notice from AbeBooks

Dear Seller,

We are currently experiencing a hardware issue which is causing all AbeBooks sites and services to be unavailable. Buyer and seller information remains secure and is not at risk. 

We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We do not yet have an estimated time when this is going to be resolved 

No orders placed before the outage will be lost. Your seller rating will not be affected by any processing delays caused by this outage. 

Customer Support tools are also affected and they are unable to respond to inquiries at this time so please check our Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates. Customer Support will resume responding to all inquiries as soon as they are able. 

We apologize for the inconvenience and interruption of services. 

Sincerely,
The AbeBooks Team

You can still contact Diplomatist Book's directly here.  As far as I know there are no issues regarding AbeBook's parent company, Amazon.

Competition Winner!

We now have a winner for our New Year competition.

You will remember that the prize was a Diplomatist Books' 2018 Membership, giving 10% off the cost of orders. 

The questions we asked were:-

• Our spreadsheet tells us we have sold 1004 books in the UK.  What is the total number including overseas sales (to the nearest 20)?  Answer - 1247.
• To which non-English-speaking country have we sent most books?  Answer - Italy.

Unsurprisingly, nobody got the answers to these questions, so we went to Plan B and had a draw of the public followers of this blog.

And the Winner is...  Paul Smith!

Paul, the e-mail I have for you is out-of-date.  Please drop me a note so I can explain how the membership deal works.

Oversees Sales

Why have we sent more books to Italy than to Spain or Germany (which are next on the list), or even Ireland?  I don't know!  Perhaps the subject for a future competition...

Back to Normal and Competition Reminder

This is what our backlog looks like after a few days' illness meant I had to miss a couple of post-runs.  It's all now sorted.

A lot of small businesses can get into difficulties with orders during cold/flu seasons (especially if they have to make the stuff!).  I've known some to get into really serious difficulties because they didn't know when to stop taking new orders, take a cash-flow hit, and concentrate on fulfilling the orders they already have.

It's great to support a specialist supplier.  A lot of them are (like us) one-person-shops who just bob along more-or-less solvent.  Please have some patience with them.

Midnight tonight (GMT) is the closing date for our competition.  It looks as if it will come down to a straight draw between public followers of this blog.  So you have just under 11 hours to sign up!  News of the winners tomorrow...

Disruption to Normal Service...

A photo taken chez Diplomatist this morning
(obviously...)

I'm poorly, so I'm afraid that there's been a little delay in dispatching order this week.  Hopefully things will be back to normal by Monday.

Competition Reminder

As it's a week since I announced the New Year Competition and a week until the close for entries, it's time for a reminder and a clue.

The Reminder

Details of the competition are here.

The Clue

Since setting the questions last Monday, we have sent books to the Netherlands, Norway and Spain.  None of these countries is the answer to Question 2, and sending these books out wouldn't have affected the answer.

And Finally...

Remember, that if no-one answers the questions correctly the prize will be awarded to a random follower of the blog.  It's time to become a follower now!