Waterstones in Lion and Lamb Yard was full of fun facts and curiosity as a Farnham Man released his new book.
The new book “MISC” is the brainchild of the trio Christian Tate, Marcus Webb and The Bourne local Rob Orchard.
To celebrate the launch they hosted family, friends and guests for an evening of book signing, quizzing and photo opportunities.
As family, friends and guests walked through the door there were quiz sheets challenging visitors to name the only flag with a Kalashnikov on it and what explorer Victor Vescovo found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench plus many more challenging questions.
Whilst some may have been using the internet and the new book to find the answers others gave it their best shot. “MISC” branded chocolate bars were awarded to the top quizzers.
Rob’s speech featured the answers to the questions whilst thanking and congratulating the team behind him. The speech humoured the guests as he tried to fit in the story behind the book and the answers. Comparing parts of the story to Farrow & Ball paint colours and the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.
The book is a compendium of fun facts and information they have sourced from their work in the “Delayed Gratification” magazine. The magazine takes the best news stories from the past three months and provides people with a detailed and informative look into what happened.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Good evening everyone. I'm going to do a little speech, a very little speech. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Rob Orchard, and alongside Marcus who is here, and Christian who isn't, I am one of the creators of MISC.
00:18Thank you so much for coming, thank you so much for buying copies of the book. We'll stick around afterwards, we'll do lots of signing, but honestly it's such a nice thing because you sort of do a book and then you don't know if anybody's going to turn up and you all turn up and it's so lovely.
00:31The keen-eared among you will quickly realise that I crowbarbed the answers to the quiz in your hands into this speech. So if you've done it, mark them off as you go along, and I've got some lovely chocolatey treats for those of you who get the most right.
00:48For anyone who hasn't looked at their quiz sheets, the following is going to sound really very random indeed, which is Nike on Brown Lovers. Thank you all very much for coming. Thanks to Rob from Waterstones who set up the event.
01:03Thank you very much to Tim, our agent, who got us the book deal. To Vicky, our fabulous head of marketing. To Steve over there who gave us a brilliant quote.
01:23Thanks. To Becky, where are you Becky, for going into Waterstones in Covent Garden and tipsily insisting that they move misc to a higher shelf by the till. To Jess and my lovely boys and to all our friends from Farnham for turning out to support, it means a lot to us.
01:48Publishing a book is, in many senses, a fool's game. When Misk hit the shops last week, it was one of 1,900 titles released in the UK that day alone. By definition, the vast majority of them will sink without a trace, which is very upsetting for their authors who have spent years toiling away in hope of that breakout moment, only to be left dispirited.
02:09It's a bit like the experience of super explorer Victor Vescovo, who in 2019 took his submarine right to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 10,934 metres deep, deeper than any human has ever been before, only to discover that the only thing at the bottom of the world was a plastic bag.
02:39So when you publish a book, unless you're Boris Johnson or Sally Rooney, you are buying a ticket in a lottery. Will it take off and travel around the world, burned onto the public consciousness, like the worlds of Neil Armstrong when he stood on the moon? Or will it be received more like the worlds of Charles Charlie Duke, the 10th man to reach Earth's satellite, who simply said, underwhelmingly, that first foot on the lunar surface is super.
03:09Let me take you back to where it all began. My co-authors, Christian and Marcus and I, along with our associate editors, Matthew, Jeremy and James, decided to launch a news magazine back in 2010. The world was still reeling from the financial crash of 2008, and the atmosphere for small journalism start-ups was about as warm and inviting as the flag of Mozambique, as we all know with a Kalashnikov.
03:36We were determined not to approach things like everyone else. We were happy to take some risks and to stand out, like a grockle in Devon.
03:47Everyone else was producing news faster and faster, driven by Twitter and live blogging, and commissioning shorter and shorter stories. We wanted to make something slower and more considered, a magazine that looked back on big events after the dust had settled and asked the question, what happened next?
04:06Everyone else was convinced that digital was the future, but we were still in love with print. The new paradigm was to give away journalism for free online and monetise it with invasive pop-up adverts. In contrast, our magazine, The Late Graphification, has always been advertising free, with proper journalism uniquely supported by our readers.
04:25We called our new approach Slow Journalism, to distinguish it from the knee-jerk news production we saw elsewhere. We were given a tiny office on the first floor of the old Time Out building on Tottenham Court Road by Tony Elliott, the late great founder of Time Out.
04:39It was so small that you could almost reach out and touch both walls at the same time, and if anybody wanted to get out to go to the toilet, everybody had to stand up to let them pass. We set about painting the place and making it our own, not with some lovely Farrow and Ball paint, like Elephant's Breath, or even Clunch, but some off-brand lumber, like Salmon Surprise.
05:01In January 2011, we launched The Late Graphification, the slow journalism magazine. The early years were economically challenging. It felt like playing keepy-uppy with a medicine ball. And keepy-uppy is not a good sport. Unlike tug-of-war and town planning, it's never even been an Olympic event.
05:19We did have some brilliant events. We did have some brilliant breaks. So in February 2011, it looked like the magazine was going to go under. We had sold only four subscriptions in the previous week, and I thought the game was up.
05:30And then my co-editor, Marcus, went on the Today programme on Radio 4. He was supposed to go on First Thing, but kept getting bumped back and bumped back. And in the end, he appeared at 10 to 9, the perfect moment. I was listening to him on internet radio and watching the subscriptions feed.
05:44In the 10 minutes that he was on the radio, we sold 10 subscriptions. And that day, we sold 400 subscriptions, and it saved the magazine and kept us in money for the next year. It was a beautiful moment. We felt like Rachel Blackmore in 2021, when she became the first ever sportswoman to win the Grand National.
06:03We grew the magazine, and we became more ambitious with our journalism. We sent journalists out to scary and interesting places to come back with important stories. And then the pandemic hit. And like everyone else, we were buffeted about the place like the Mona Lisa, which over the course of its life has been attacked with acid, paint and cake, stolen and hidden in a false bottle trunk, and hung on Napoleon's boudoir walls.
06:28All our sales in shops stopped overnight. And to replace the income, we pitched and sold our first book, An Answer for Everything. Making it left us as exhausted as John Steinbeck, forced a rewrite of Mice and Men from Scratch after his first draft was eaten by his dog, Toby.
06:50The world can be a depressing and disconcerting place. As depressing and disconcerting as the show titles of Jerry Springer, including My Fiance Won't Marry Me Until I Stop Stripping, and A Ghost Threw Me Down The Stairs.
07:15We wanted Misk to be a jolly read, a collection of amazing facts and trivia that would make people happy. We had so much fun pulling it together. We did a lot of walking around the beaches of Margate, where Christian lives, talking about ideas.
07:28We ran around London last week with bars of special bribery chocolate, the same treat that I'm waggling at you tonight, trying to persuade booksellers to move the book to the front of their stores.
07:38Misk is not an outwardly important book. It is, realistically, mainly to be consumed on the toilet.
07:46Unlike some very high-profile recent launches, it contains very little in the way of political indiscretion or score-settling with Michael Gove.
07:53Unless this turns out very different than inspected, we will not use Misk to position ourselves to become future UK Prime Ministers.
08:00Which is just as well as it can be a very dangerous position. Just ask Spencer Percival, the first and so far only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated.
08:10But despite all that, we think that Misk is funny and interesting, and maybe that is also a bit important in this overwhelming and disconcerting age in which we find ourselves.
08:34We hugely appreciate your support. Please, when you leave here, tell stories about Misk across the whole land of Farnham. Yay! Even unto Guildford.
08:44If you have any influential friends, or even uninfluential friends, please tell them about the book and ask them to share it on their socials.
08:52That includes any professional wrestlers you may know, like the Doctor of Thuganomics and the Bionic Redneck.
08:59But not the Big Scary Beast, because I made him up.
09:03Do some tweets. Do some Instagrams. Stand on street corners with your copy of the book, alternately laughing and stroking your chin with fascination.
09:12Help us make a success of Misk. Thank you very much.