I'm indebted to Peter Collingridge for pointing me to a cost-free solution to analysis of visitors to this blog. I'm also grateful to Google and the Macmillan IT department for making it possible. Here are a couple of the charts available.

The surprise here is that I'd assumed a significant proportion of visitors were coming from India but the pattern is very similar to the standard geographical distribution of sales of an academic monograph.

What can I say about this one? Thank you Susan Hill and thank you Grumpy.

On a very sad note I have just heard of the death of William Armstrong, formerly Managing Director of Sidgwick and Jackson and a great publisher and mentor to many. There will be in-depth obituaries in the trade press by people who knew him intimately. All I can say is that he never once lost his enthusiasm for publishing good books well and commercially. As a result of William's retiring style, there are no pictures of him on Google Images so I'll have to wait for the Bookseller archives to dig something up.

And finally, Publishers Weekly has reported on the AMS Chapter 11 which I wrote about last week. What I hadn't realised was the quantum of potential damage. Random House is owed $43m and the next four (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins) around $80m between them. I'm not sure what the total profitability of these top five businesses in the USA is but I'd be surprised if it exceeded the sum of these liabilities. Let's hope that AMS keep their word and allow the non-US parts of the business to trade without depriving them of cash to pay suppliers.