No news yet on the Lodge at Exeter Castle, which we hoped might be a candidate for the new Syntagma Towers. It’s looking unlikely as I write, for a variety of reasons.

However, since my short, mocking piece on photographs of desks, I’ve been inundated with … pictures of desks.

I’m just going to publish one of them to show you what splendid readers we have here.

This is the “office” — or library — at Humdrumming Mansions, a stately pile in Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, occupied by Steve Newman, a Syntagma author of peerless works of literary magnificence, including a novel, The Crime of the Crimea; a fictionalized biography of Ernest Hemingway; and his “blog”, Our Man in Stratford.

Note the volume on Elgar on the table (2007 is Elgar’s 150th anniversary year), and the picture of John Wayne on the wall-to-wall bookcases. A man of many talents clearly.

Apart from being Senior Director and Editor of the Humdrumming Publishing House, Steve is Director and driving force behind the Stratford International Festival of Literature, the first of which is to be held in September this year. The event will feature such mega-luminaries as Colin Wilson and Guy Adams (another Syntagma author), and is being jointly sponsored by Syntagma Media.

What more could you possible desire?