A Note From the Editor

(Excerpt from the Introduction)

The opening that comes to mind is along the lines of, ‘And thus I take up my quill, on the 9th day of February Anno Domini MMVIII, being Anno LVI of Our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth ...’ The pleasure of being asked to contribute introductions to this book, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of Osprey in 1968 and the 450th title in the Men-at-Arms series, compensates for the uneasy thought that – as the Oldest Living Inhabitant, with a cumulative 28 years’ worth of ‘hash stripes’ – I am the only member of the team able to recall what we might term the company’s Jurassic Period.

I was the commissioning editor and art editor of the Men-at-Arms series from 1972 to 1989; after a nine-year hiatus (when Lee Johnson heroically kept the candle burning, during a stormy and mostly unrewarding period for the company), I returned, happily, in 1998.

I have known the company under four owners, in six premises, in three cities; I don’t believe I have ever known it in better heart than it is today, but this is a proper occasion for a glance back, and a quick verse of the anthem ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’.

The Genesis of Osprey lay in aviation publishing, and the Abraham figure in the company’s history was Richard Ward, a Canterbury-based freelance illustrator. In the late 1960s a number of us who had worked with Frank Mason in the pioneering aviation partwork venture, Profile Publications, kept in touch while we looked for new opportunities. Dick Ward, a tireless producer of aircraft profile sideviews, also did regular work for a major tea company, painting the promotional picture-cards that used to be enclosed in tea packets. These were printed in Reading by the Berkshire Printing Co Ltd; so Dick Ward suggested to them that they start their own publishing company, to feed the aircraft enthusiast market revealed by the success of the Aircraft Profiles. Printers always want things to keep their machines running; and so it was that 1968 was remarkable not only for the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Prague Spring and the Beatles’ White Album, but also for the birth of what was originally called Osprey Publications Ltd. The first-ever product was Ward’s Aircam series No.1, on the North American P-51D Mustang – a card-bound 48-page book, of a trim size that will be familiar to Osprey’s present-day readers, with an eight-page centre section of colour artwork.

The first Men-at-Arms

In 1969 Osprey decided to expand into a general list of non-fiction including some military titles, and the managing director (another Profile survivor, David Provan) had the good sense to hire Roger Cleeve as commissioning editor and Roger Bonnett as production manager. Cleeve’s list would include some fine bits of publishing: I remember particularly a facsimile of the 17th-century Ogilby’s Road Maps of England and Wales (which now changes hands for large sums) and a huge Companion to Charles Dickens, which leapt out of the bookshops after a rave review by Bernard Levin in the Times. A humbler work, H. L. Wickes’ Regiments of Foot (1974), remains one of my most well-thumbed deskside references more than 30 years later.

Martin Windrow