They are coming, truly they are.

I know you don't believe us about the new books. You're well within your rights. I'd be all doubting and dubious and hurrumphing too if I didn't know what an essentially honest and decent and hardworking collection of bods we are at heart. Not only at heart but also on the surface. By which I do not mean superficially. We are decent bods through and through. We don't wittingly tell fibs about new books.

This is the current state of affairs. The new books very genuinely are at the printers. We know for a fact that the printer chappie started spitting them out of his machine last Friday, because he telephoned us on the telephone to ask if we were quite sure we didn't want them laminated, and we said 'ah, go on then', so that's what's happening. In the time it takes for the printer chappie's machine to disgorge ten bulging boxes of the dinkiest, shiniest, most eloquently written little books you could ever hope to meet, the new books will be here. They will come in a silver van (with wings... and driven by a PIXIE). It will be more than very exciting.

I know the wait is vexatious. But it's so character building and you'll be glad of it in years to come.

Otherwise we are pimping our new poetry competition left right and centre. So why not here? It's new and it's great. It's the Leaf Books Open Poetry Competition 2006 and it kindly invites you to submit poems of up to 25 lines in length on any subject whatsoever, such as hats or donkeys or oblate spheroids or free will or cabbage soup or Norfolk. It cost £4 to enter, and that £4 entitles you to choose one of our existing 19 titles and have us pop it in the post to you with a sweet little compliment slip and a newsletter. So off to the website with you now. To the submit work page, to be precise, where you can download and print off an entry form or enter online or all manner of jolly things.

And you might want to have a stab at entering the Summer Short Story Competition as well while you're at it. It's not that we're in any way DISTRESSINGLY SHORT OF ENTRIES or anything. It's just, you know, a good and worthwhile and SOMEWHAT UNDER-APPRECIATED competition. That's all.

No other news of great import. The sun is coming in at an unkind angle through the window, because we've been on the blinds waiting list for about seventy-two years now. The office is a little untidy. Possibly we may have to commit a spot of arson on it later in the week. The weather is not unseasonable. Our lunches were digested with little in the way of complaint.

Oui.

C'est more or less ca.

Sam.