Jonathan Nash

Page two of AP54's Subs Letter - the purple one with the L'Amour du Mort photo-story - crashed lino four times.

Not just error-messagingly, you understand, but in a whole system smashing down like a redundant chimney and having to be rebooted way.

A series of increasingly put-out phone calls advised me to make substantial changes to the page, because I was, in effect, single-handedly holding up the running of the entirety of Future Publishing with some scans of old books and a photograph of John Junkin dressed as a cowboy.

This I did, removing what the lino chaps thought each time could be the problem, but which turned out not to be it at all.

(This is why the AP54 Subs Letter, page two, is a tad disjointed. Originally there were three or four more pictures, including a very small one of the whole of the previous page as The Story So Far. Incidentally, in a time when the average mag page proper came in at, at the most, 1.5mb, my Subs Letters would average 7mb. A side. They were not processed with glee.)

In the end, the enormously expensive fault was traced to a letter from Reader Millington - one of the few remaining subscribers - which I had presented in the form of a record. It seems that the thirty thousand pound Linotype Hell machines could not handle text printed along a circular path. I swiftly took a snapshot of the text (which, of course, drew happily on everything else) and shoe-horned it into the page. The logjam was cleared, and order was restored.

Sportingly, the lino chaps didn't make anything of the incident, instead keeping it quiet, for were any publishers to know the whole company had ground to a halt over a few hundred words about the Ideal Home home shopping catalogue, I'd have been in dramatically serious...

Oh dear.