Credit Where Credit's Due

Thanks everyone for the flood of kind comments on the latest Slingshot, which have included words and phrases like "astonished", "astounded" and "kicking and screaming into the modern age". As the maxim goes - "under-promise and over-deliver".

Anyhow, some thanks and distribution of credit:

• Some people have commented on the "intelligent ordering of history and game content" - that is actually Nick Harbud. I send him stuff in a random order, and he tries to make sense of it and get the articles to finish in the vicinity of the page breaks, and in an order that clusters like content together. He also processes the pictures to try and make sure they'll work in a black and white PDF, and is entirely responsible for the internal look of the magazine. We decided for the previous issue to revert to a 2-column layout, and a number of people have commented on that also, I think at the font size and for the type of content we're running, it makes sense.
• On the wider issue of the new covers and the external format - the issue has been floating around the committee, with a strong direction to improve the external formatting of the magazine, for some time (thanks in particular to Phil Steele, for eventually stopping reminding me that a book is judged by its cover), and one of the issues has been the ability of our printers to support any such change. So we had to change printers as well. The new printer is Joshua Horgan, who are coincidentally also the new printer for the Pike and Shot Society's Arquebusier magazine (OK, it's no coincidence - several of the committee members are also in the P&SS, and Phil took a reference from them at a recent show).
• David Edwards, the society's secretary, painstakingly proof-reads each issue of Slingshot before its going to publication.
• Richard Jeffrey-Cook had the unenviable task of trying to disentangle our mailing account from our old printer Printall (who were by the way fine about all of this) and move it to Horgans. Richard, as society's treasurer, has also ensured that sufficient budget has been set aside to maintain the new format, and page count, through the rest of 2008
• And of course, many thanks to the various contributors who've set aside time and thought to provide such excellent content for the issue. But - please send more!

Anyway, hopefully this shows, firstly it's a team effort; and secondly I owe a lot of people a beer.