Inconvenient Revival

Looking at the last four editorials of Inconvenient History, I shudder. It contains so much bad news that any normal person would throw in the towel and be done with it. And believe me, I was getting close to this point during the turn of 2023 to 2024. But if I were a quitter, I wouldn’t be here.

Frank Sinatra’s song comes to mind with the famous lines:

“Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race!
That’s life!
I tell you, I can’t deny it,
I thought of quitting, baby, but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it!”

What we at CODOH have been going through over the past half year or so is a déjà vu experience of what happened with the IHR and the Cartos back in the mid-1990s. Back then, I stayed out of this infighting, trying to get along with both parties. This time, I am in it without a choice, and there isn’t any resolution in sight. Many people have urged us to sue. Very funny. CODOH is almost broke and has lost almost all its revenue stream – which was not abundant to begin with – due to donors and supporters getting scared away by what is going on. And who would blame them?

Furthermore, let’s say we get the financing to retain a lawyer and sue: would you really that CODOH spent such funds on litigating, that is, on infighting and mudslinging? We could also just shake off the dust from our sandals and walk away to productive new projects. That’s my preferred solution.

It’s not for me to decide what will happen. CODOH’s Board of Trustees has made a decision, and we will see whether that leads to anything conducive to the trust’s operations.

As for Inconvenient History, the Board decided to put all editions back into print, meaning the ones that used to be available as print copies (Vols. 1 through 6), and all the new ones that had never been printed before (Vols. 7 through 15).

I started working on that project on April 11, and wrapped it up on June 22. That’s roughly ten weeks for 15 volumes, which have altogether almost 7,600 pages. Plus, I finished and put into print Armreg’s second Spanish-language books in the middle of it, Kollerstrom’s Breaking the Spell (Rompiendo el hechizo, see Book Announcements). Of course, I did not have to reinvent these 15 inconvenient wheels. Most of the text was already there. It merely had to be fetched, reformatted, illustrated, and prepared for print production.

However, the further I progressed, the more work it became per volume, slowing me down a little more with each subsequent volume. The reason is that Inconvenient History had been neglected increasingly as time passed, so contributions were at times in need of revision; some were not even in English but had been posted in Italian or French; others had been forgotten and sat on my hard drive in the proper issue’s folder, but never made it online. Editorials had been abandoned altogether. It’s all my fault, so I have only myself to blame.

But now, after ten weeks of incessant work, the deed is finally done. All 15 volumes have been finished and submitted to our printers. If you don’t have a copy yet, please consider getting one from Armreg.co.uk.

While working on resurrecting the CODOH library earlier this year, I moreover realized what a dumping ground of all sorts of inappropriate contents CODOH had become over the past five years or so. Separating the wheat from the chaff and weeding out the nonsense will take some time.

Going forward, we have decided to make Inconvenient History the core of CODOH’s online and publishing operations. If a submitted contribution isn’t good enough for Inconvenient History, it’s not good enough for CODOH. News reports and interesting correspondence exempted, of course.

CODOH’s cooperation with the new publishing outlet Armreg LTD in the UK is as amicable and mutually supportive as the old relationship with Castle Hill was, when it was still in the UK – albeit without the financial entanglement of both entities, a mistake we will not repeat. There are a few new players in the game, but the rules of engagement are similar.

We are off to new horizons. Thank you for being part of that journey!

P.S.: As I write this, Volumes 14 and 15 of Inconvenient History are still stuck with our printers, who are a little slow getting them through their preflight and into production. So bear with us a few days.