About Classic Expressions
If you are reading this then you have either clicked through via our e-mail marketing, or you're curious and have happened upon us (don't go yet!) or you have been searching the web and finally found the Holy Grail not only of rare, collectable whisky literature, but also other classics from mountain literature. This is CLASSIC EXPRESSIONS and our aim is to bring books that are out of print (and therefore usually either totally impossible to find or exorbitantly expensive) back to life!
Who are we? Well, this can be either a short or a long story depending on how desperate you are to get your hands on the first two books that we are resurrecting. If you want the longer story (best read with dram in hand) then just click the sidebar where the names Neil Wilson and Ian Buxton appear. If you want the short version, read on.
Still here? OK, here goes. Neil Wilson is a publisher, whisky writer and motorcycle enthusiast who also likes the odd brisk scramble in the mountains of Skye, a walk over the Moffat hills or a sail along Scotland's West Coast. He is 51, married with two children and has been a whisky enthusiast since an engineer friend asked him to smuggle a litre of Glenfiddich into Kuwait when Neil was visiting with Bahrain Rugby Football Club (more of this in the long story).
Ian Buxton (or Mr Buxton as he prefers to be called) is a bit older than Neil but has managed to divest himself of two expensive (but quite charming) offspring and now resides in rural Perthshire working as a management consultant and whisky writer while pondering vastly expensive architect's plans to convert his old distillery into a place of pilgrimage (aka self-catering holiday cottage).
So why this coming together? Simple. Neil's publishing abilities (or lack of them perhaps) and Ian's marketing and copywriting skills needed a new home and their shared love of rare and collectable whisky books for their respective libraries sealed it.
So Classic Expressions was born, and we started lookig for our favourite whisky classics (the mountain literature comaes a bit later!).
Its mission is simple. To create affordable, facsimile reprints of out-of-print classic books ... to the likes of you.
So how are we going to do this? Again, simple. By employing state-of-the-art scanning and digital printing, you no longer have to stare at the the staggering prices of first and second editions on the web and despair at the hopelessness of the situation. We are fixing all that. From now on, Classic Expressions is going to produce highly-affordable, limited edition, collectable facsimiles of these books.
And this is where it gets very interactive because if you are one of the people who's been seeking these volumes you can have a critical part to play in their actual resurrection by becoming a Founding Subscriber. If you do you can benefit in a number of ways and receive an attractive pre-publication offer as well.
The scanning technology we have used is really clever because it actually cleans the text and compensates for page curvature as it goes along. The result means that the original editions we scan are never damaged or broken in the process. There's no foxing, marginal marks, notations or any of the damage often seen in old books. These facsimiles are as good as the technology will allow them to be.
And there's something else. We are even going to give you FREE, to add to your appreciation of your 'new' whisky classic, a CD* with a PDF file of the original text!
Let's face it, few if any of these titles are indexed and finding that nugget of information you desperately seek can be difficult. This will allow you to conduct searches of the content in a fraction of the time it takes to read the entire volume. Or you can even choose to read the whole thing on screen without opening the book itself.
Hallelujah! No more frustrating hours of wasted time in a dank library, just use Adobe Reader (freely downloadable on the Internet) to search to your heart's content and you can have hours of fun with words like 'illicit', 'mutchkin', 'excise officer', 'altercation', 'apprehended', 'Sheriff Court' and 'fined'.
Right, that's enough of this. Go look at the books and thanks for dropping in. We'd like to keep you posted on forthcoming titles (and listen to your suggestions) so make sure you register your details here even if you can’t be tempted to buy (yet!)
* (read-only, fully searchable)