This is the eighth book in the series about Muddy Waters and his friends, and this one introduces the dredger Cedric and the finding of a bomb during one of his dredging jobs.
Cedric and the Bomb. Price £3.99p.
New Muddy Waters Title
Canal Walks (Julia Bradbury)
- Canal Walks (Julia Bradbury)
Published to accompany a four part BBC television series with Julia Bradbury walking four different canals. They are the Llangollen Canal, Caledonian Canal, Worcester & Birmingham Canal and the Kennet & Avon Canal.
The book is priced at £9.99p, and can be found here.
Model Boats
Another few items that are returning to the catalogue after a long absence are the three 20cm (8″) model boats, Lapwing (pictured left), Sandpiper and Water Rail,
- 10cm model narrowboats
and the 10cm (4″) model narrowboats, available in three different colour schemes.
Kingfisher Tiller Pin
After a longer than expected wait, the kingfisher tiller pin is now back in stock, there has been a slight increase in cost due to the higher VAT rate.
This tiller pin is the best seller by a long way, sales of this pin are more than the total of all the others.
Spring Fair, NEC
Spent a leg aching day yesterday walking around the majority of the exhibition halls at the NEC, Birmingham, looking for anything new in the canal and campervan ranges, and as far as the general gift manufacturers are concerned, campervans are more popular than canals.
The only items new for the canals that I spotted were a few jigsaws, so they should be appearing in the catalogue in the near future. Plenty of stands had campervan stuff, keyrings, fridge magnets, clocks, cushions etc.
The main problem for both canal & campervan stuff is that it represents a very small part of the range offered by the company, and quite a few of them have minimum order quantities and costs that are £250-£300 or higher, and just spending that amount on the few items that you want means that you would have to buy more than you really want or could sell in a couple of years. So unless you can find a wholesaler that stocks these items then you don’t stock them.
The downside of the wholesaler stocking them is that every other shop on the waterways etc., is also stocking the item, so you don’t have something different to everybody else.
The 2011 catalogues haven’t appeared from the waterways’ wholesalers yet, so I don’t know what new stuff they may have come up with.