baby goes west

Those of you with long memories may remember that at the start of this year we proudly announced that we’d signed an agreement with a US publisher for a North American edition of City Baby. It was going to be amazing, we told you. It would have a new cover, extra photos, and it would translate some of the hard-to-understand UK slang into something a little more digestible for folk who live on the other side of the pond. Get ready, America! we said. This is going to blow your little socks off. Oh, and it’ll be with you by mid-May.
Now, given that we’d prefaced that announcement by confessing that we’re regularly surprised that things take longer to get done than we imagine, you might think we should have guessed that by setting the publication date so definitely in stone we were setting ourselves up to fall flat on our face. Our rueful chuckle at our own exuberance – and the link to that blog is here if you want to see exactly what we had to say – should have come with a healthy dose of small print and a truckload of loopholes. In triplicate. And then we should have thrown in a handful more, for luck.
Things take longer than we think, we said. Little did we know how right we were.
2015 is almost over. May came and went. Summer drizzled by. The days got shorter and the nights got longer. The Rugby World Cup and Halloween are both history, Donald Trump’s wig is still weird, and Xmas is lumbering over the horizon. Our facebook posts and tweets about the book are so old they’re currently being studied by archaeologists. Where, you might wonder, is this fabled US edition? Is it ever going to arrive??
Well…. we’ve finally got news. Good news.
We’re very very very happy to announce that the US edition of City Baby is now on sale. Yep, right now. At this very minute. In what we are, optimistically, calling ‘very late May’. Our thanks go to Bazillion Points for all the work they’ve put into creating a new twist on our best-selling publication. It looks amazing. And we know the story’s an absolute cracker. The wait may have been a long one, but we can guarantee it’s worth it.
If you’re one of the thousands of GBH fans in North America, you can now order a copy of the US edition of City Baby here. That’s good news. The even better news is that if you get your skates on and order it now, you can take advantage of their special discounted price and get a free “I bet that never happened to the Clash!” button badge too. What better reason do you need?
Just in time for Xmas, too. You’d almost think we’d planned it.
(Those of you elsewhere in the world can still get signed copies of the original edition from our website here. Perfect gifts for your favourite punk rock afficionado.)