It seems that the best course of action right now is to just wait for Fraser, the artist, to get back from his vacation on Monday. Once he's back, we'll be able to patch up this last snafu without too much muss and everything can continue onward.

Two Windhaven-related notes: After speaking with Nancy Hanger, I realized that the schedule we had them on for the second books was theoretically doable, but inordinately tight. As such, I'm going to revise our earlier timeline and push everything back one month so that the second set of 17 books gets all the attention it deserves. I feel this is an acceptable delay which will greatly benefit the final set.

On another note: In my last post, I had no intention of indicating that Windhaven was dedicating anything less than its full attention to the Virginia Edition. They've been putting in an extraordinary amount of time and effort on these books and we couldn't manage this at all without them.

I don't have time to do it today, but I have pictures of a subscriber's replica office from Destination: Moon that I have permission to post on here. It's pretty cool for the Heinlein fans out there--I'm assuming that's most of you.

Updated

Okay, after talking to Transcontinental, it seems that the original approval we received on the stamps was somewhat erroneously given. Luckily! Luckily, all the other work is done and the actual stamping process is only a day or two in length. We're raising the artist posthaste and, with any luck, this will resolve itself rather quickly.

First, I would like to proffer an apology for not posting on Friday. My birthday was Thursday and my family surprised me by flying in from England to see me and I needed to properly show them about.

On to business:
I still haven't gotten a response from Transcontinental so far as the hold-up with the first set of volumes. I have a number of outstanding queries with them at the moment that haven't been answered. Transcontinental has been fantastic throughout the process so far, so I can only presume that they're being swamped and that explains why they haven't been able to respond as promptly as normal. They have a national holiday today and tomorrow we're supposed to have a conference call and, rather than make any guarantees, I'll report back on what comes of that.

On positive business news, we were speaking to Windhaven and it seems that the proofing and typesetting department have gotten through the set-up and teething of the process, have ramped production up to about full-speed, and we now have dates for when each set of books will be ready for printing.
The second set of books--volumes 8-23, 16 volumes--will be ready as of the start of September.
The third set of books--volumes 24-35, 12 volumes--will be ready as of the start of December.
The fourth and final set of books--volumes 36-47--will be ready as of the start of March, 2009.

http://heinleinprize.com/rah/thisibelieve.htm
We found a disc with a copy of Heinlein reading "This I Believe" for Edward R. Murrow. It's now hosted on the Heinlein Prize website, just click on the link to hear the master read the piece.

I'm going to try to include one tangential piece at the end of each of these, some interesting aspect of Heinleinia or something interesting that people have done with Heinlein's works. I think it'd be a simple, yet pleasant, addition.

I'm going to do a largish post on Friday--when I believe I'll have a plethora of news-worthy offerings and a few neat pictures to share.

One note I was told about today: The original TC print run got started with the wrong paper used for the tip-in/serialization page and so that may cause a slight delay, however we may be able to circumvent that by shipping the first sets to customers as soon as they're ready rather than waiting for the full run to complete. I'll know one way or another n the next couple days, in any event.