Delivery Scams

There is currently a scam doing the rounds where one gets a text out of the blue saying "your Royal Mail parcel is awaiting delivery. Please confirm the settlement of 1.99 (GBP) on the following link".  The link then takes you to a fraudulent site which takes payment and other details.

Royal Mail has confirmed that it never asks for excess payment by text or e-mail.

Everyone should be alert to this and similar scams.  I myself got one of these texts this morning, and I'd hate to think that anyone would fall for it because they were expecting a delivery from us.

The Royal Mail's tweet.

Some more details on the BBC new pages.

Focus On... History of Exploration

By a large margin our bestseller this month has been William Battersby's biography of James Fitzjames, a senior member of Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage.  You can see it here (if we have any left in stock when you read this!).  

I'm pretty sure that the recent upsurge in interest is due to the BBC screening the drama 'The Terror' this month.  But it's not a great surprise either: the Franklin Expedition has an on-going fascination, and books on it and the many expeditions that set out in its wake always sell well.

So I thought I would use this post to point to our other books on the Arctic, which can be found in our History of Exploration section (which currently has over 90 titles) alongside books on the rest of the world.  

There should be something there for everyone, so happy browsing!

An Update - Feb 2021

I'm aware that this blog is very rarely updated, so I've decided to make an effort to improve that.  First up is an update on what was happening with Diplomatist Books in February.

Due to the pandemic, most of our* usual sources for secondhand books have dried-up, but we've still been able to source new and remaindered books.  

In February we added 115 new titles to our stock.  We have at least as many waiting to be added in March.  Unlike secondhand books, these tend to come in multiples, so that figure represents some 500-600 actual books.  They cover all subjects: however, a significant number of them come from a German publisher, Kerber Verlag, and has increased our selection of art books - with many more to come over the next few weeks.

As ever, all new titles have featured on our Facebook page when they were listed.

In addition, we had an order with our wholesaler of military books that allowed us to restock a number of titles that had sold out in the last few months.

And it'll soon be time to get a new batch of postcards.  At the moment the bookwhippet is the fore-runner.

* I'm not sure why I use the nosism, Diplomatist Books is actually 'me', but the editorial we always seems more appropriate.