It was the best of times...

Or to mix media: And now, the end is near. Where has this year gone, etc. etc. 2006 has whipped by (as every year is wont to do) and is shuffling out the back door, and 2007 is panting eagerly through the letterbox. Excitement!

2006 has been a wonderful year for the old Bird. Penguin took a barrel-load of prizes (the Booker, the Orange x2, the Whitbread - now Costa, of course), revived the Victorian serial, hit 1million worldwide with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, beamed Jamie across the globe for a live cookcast, opened a one-day-only Pop Up Shop for the Gorillaz, and invited inky-fingered readers everywhere to design their own jackets for the classics.

Elsewhere, I gobbled up the Black Swan Green proof swiped from Colin the Copywriter, lording it over everyone who had to wait for the hardback for (sadly) only a few days; loathed the Classics Protectionists' snobbish snubbing of up-to-date classics jackets; and admitted defeat by Anna Karenina. For yet another year. (I just put it down in the wrong place, and by the time I found it again I was on to something else. Humble apologies, Tolstoy.)

2007 may be a pretty good year too. Penguin goes to the movies for The Missing, as well as more conventional silver-screen appearances for Perfume and Notes on a Scandal. The beautiful acetate-jacketed-and-cloth-bound Glass Books of the Dream Eaters finally sees the light of day, The Malice Box gets us office drones sucked in a Dan Brown world of adventure and puzzles, and Lesley Pearse launches the Women of Courage Award.

I have a personal looking forward-ness to (cough) the new Harry Potter, Philip Pullman's frankly mind-boggling Golden Compass movie, our lovely lovely office move (roll on Summer Fridays), a few new McSweeney's, Nick Tosches' shocking and brilliant look at Jerry Lee Lewis in the re-released Hellfire, and Meg Rosoff's new book The Dark Ages.

However, after all that, it's this piece of writing that has really made my 2006.

Here's wishing you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Sam the Junior Copywriter

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Comments

[Jennifer Jeffrey]

Lovely wrap-up, Sam. Sounds like Penguin had a jolly good year. Here's hoping 2007 will be even better!