Alun Ceri Jones of Dalen Books has been in touch and given a lot of info on the company’s background,what they are publishing and plan to publish:
“Dalen has been publishing GNs in Welsh since 2005; all of them are adaptations of European titles, including material for kids as well as adults – plus your Tintin and Lucky Luke which (arguably) are so clever they’re more than just childrens books!
Arthur the Legend is the first title we’ve published in English, and hopefully will be the first of many. We’re going to be concentrating mainly on Celtic themes – there are some excellent titles currently released in France – although we’re also discussing reintroducing Corto Maltese in English next year.
Our next English title will be Druids: 1. The Ogham Sacrifice, for release in October. Written by Jean-Paul Istin and Thierry Jigourel, and illustrated by Canadian Jacques Lamontagne, the ongoing series is published in French by Soleil. As with Arthur the Legend, our series will 2-volume omnibuses in our reduced size format. This is another excellently written and researched series, beautifully illustrated, set in the 5th century Age of Saints, and boils down to a conflict between the last of the druids and the early Celtic saints. We’ll shortly be uploading preview pages to our website, but in the meantime if you’d like an idea of how the series looks, then log on to dalenbooks.com, and naviagte to the Derwyddon series – which is the Welsh equivalent of Druids – and click on the ‘inside’ bubble.
As regards distribution of our books, we’re distributed in the UK by Turnaround and the Welsh Books Council, and in Australia by Book & Volume. We’re currently in discussion with a NZ distributor. Currently however our rights agreements for Arthur the Legend and Druids doesn’t include North America. So for availability, Waterstones should be able to supply readers (Arthur has been scaled out to some, but not all, Waterstones). Other stores should be able to order from Gardeners etc.
However, if they have any problems or are outside our distribution territories, then readers can order directly from us on dalenbooks.com, or via the Welsh Books Council on gwales.com.
In Welsh, we’ll be releasing Druids 3 this autumn (the next in the series following the first 2 we’ll include in the English omnibus), as a large format paperback. We’ve just also published Tintin the Black Island in Welsh, with Land of Black Gold to follow in Welsh in September We’ll be doing the 2 Tintin moonshot stories next year (plus also a possible Irish edition TBC).
I’ll send you our current Tintin titles for evaluation; I imagine they could be of interest to aficianados of the genre. It’s surprising how many orders we’ve received for these from collectors on the continent. ALSO, fans can also get free A2 Tintin posters from our website (they just pay for p&p), the kind they’d get charged £15 for an unframed French version – and we’re currently hosting an online Tintin competition with a rare and collectable running sheet of 8/8 pages as a prize. The only thing is, the question is based on the Welsh Black Island which entrants will have to get before they’re able to answer!”
Which tells me more than I knew yesterday and I hope you CBOers out there!
Check out the site and see what’s on offer!
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