Greenhill leapt properly on to the new book publishing stage with a significant and substantial book in May 1990: Brave Men's Blood: The Epic of the Zulu War, 1879 by Ian Knight At right, Ian Knight with a copy of his BRAVE MEN'S BLOOD at a memorial at the battlefield of Isandlwana. This is a large format book, with a strong text and 270 illustrations, and continues to be in print today as a trade paperback. It has certainly been one of Greenhill's best-selling titles. The publishing programme became of wider appeal, and as the five year anniversary of the sale of Arms & Armour Press passed and I was freed from the non-competition clause which restricted the print-runs that I could undertake, Greenhill had developed the infrastructure to publish books which needed a marketing machine – such as Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel and The Illustrated Napoleon by David Chandler. Then in April 1991 came a blockbuster – Soviet Wings: Modern Soviet Military Aircraft by Alexander Dhuz. Soviet Wings was a large format book with brilliant photographs. It had grown out of a conversation held on a Russian publisher's stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1989. The publisher was showing me a maquette of a book about the history of Soviet aviation, which had photographs over the last century and through World War II, and there was one very grainy photograph of a modern plane. I had already put the book to one side, saying that I did not see an audience for it, when something made me ask if the grainy photograph was in colour. 'Da' was the answer. I was astonished; the photograph was of a Tu-160 Blackjack in flight above the clouds. Those were the days of Gorbachov, when there was a new atmosphere even though the Soviet Union was still a major world power and a major military threat, and after a little hesitation I asked 'Do you have other such photographs?'. Again the answer was 'Da'. I put forward the idea of not undertaking their book about the history of Soviet aviation, but undertaking a wholly new book, in full colour, on modern Soviet aircraft. I was not ejected from the stand, and was not given the standard answer that had been used so many times over the years in negotiating with the Soviets that something was 'not expedient'. Instead they asked how many such pictures I would like to have. I asked for one hundred and fifty. Nobody fell over at this suggestion, and indeed they started asking as to what sort of contract we would give them. Over the next months I received a series of slide boxes with transparencies, and I showed these to one or two knowledgeable friends. They were excited. They were in fact, electrified. Things were being sent to us that had never been seen in the West before. Technical details that were not known about at all were now being revealed. A little team of people from Whitehall came up to our Golders Green offices a number of times in order to inspect the pictures. When I was in Washington, word via one of my contacts reached the CIA, and a team came into my hotel on a Sunday afternoon to inspect the photographs (and pose some pretty pointed questions as to why these pictures were coming to me). One friend in Washington said that they had never seen a photograph of a Su-27 Flanker taking off from an aircraft carrier, and I passed this and a shopping list of other suggested requirements through to Moscow. More materials came to us during the course of the year (including a whole sequence of photographs showing the Flanker taking off and landing from the aircraft carrier Tiblisi) and when I returned to Washington my contacts were bug-eyed, and stunned that I was producing such images. A contract was signed, and for the 1990/1 Frankfurt Book Fair we had a dummy, sample pages, and so forth. We signed up a whole team of foreign language publishers who wanted to join the print-run for what was then sensational material. Those were the days when it looked as though the hard-liners would take over again in the Soviet Union, and none of us knew when the tap which had brought such material to us might be turned off. But we did get sufficient material to make a stunning book, and then ran like bats out of hell to fulfil the contractual arrangements that saw the book appear in several English language editions (including Canadian), and translations into Japanese, German, Italian, French and Slovak, all in one 50,000 copy print-run. As, however, Soviet Wings was published the Soviet Union went into collapse, and there was no longer the frisson of excitement in seeing their aircraft. Yes, the book was stunning and beautiful, revealing sensational new things, but interest in Cold War military equipment collapsed as the Cold War came to an end. We sold the first copies of the book extremely quickly, and then the sales stopped almost overnight, but by that time we had completed all of our supply contracts, and Soviet Wings was probably the most profitable project ever undertaken by Greenhill Books in the shortest possible time. 1991 was good for Greenhill Books due in particular to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. We were working at that time with Colonel Trevor Dupuy of Washington, who produced a little booklet entitled If War Comes. We ended up bringing over air-freighted quantities of the book, and sold several thousand. Immediately after the war a large format book, Desert Storm: The Gulf War in Colour, was produced on a co-edition basis with an Italian publisher, and sold a large number in a very short period. In August 1991 we produced a fine study of the Gulf War entitled Military Lessons of the Gulf War, edited by the late Bruce Watson. This book has been translated into several languages. By now Greenhill had taken significant steps in creating the infrastructure to enable the publishing house to undertake a publishing programme of wholly new books. Rather like the progression of an amoeba to mankind, Greenhill had progressed from: a reprint with simple cover to a reprint with simple cover and new Introduction to a reprint with designed cover to a reprint with designed cover and new material to a reissue of hitherto inaccessible source works to a reissue of hitherto inaccessible source works, with new Introduction to a reissue of hitherto inaccessible source works with new Introduction and illustrations to reprints and reissues with fully designed covers of a trade nature to printing first British editions of new books from America for trade publication to wholly new books of a specialist nature to wholly new books of a general specialist nature A significant step in the growth and development of the new Greenhill publishing house was when there were sufficient books and continuity for Presidio of California to undertake distribution of the Greenhill list in the United States, and Greenhill to distribute Presidio internationally. This commenced in 1989, and Greenhill distribute Presidio to this day. However, when Presidio changed their warehousing and sales representation in 1993, Greenhill transferred distribution to Stackpole Books, with whom I have had a relationship for forty years. It is difficult to believe that today's vigorous publishing programme of new books is effectively only ten years old (or, rather, young). In a future Greenhill Military Book News we can review the publishing of new books in the 1990s, and authors that Greenhill has had the privilege of working with include: Lionel Leventhal Coming Next: Forty Years of Military Publishing Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 95 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com