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Original Busy Bee Basics Books
"Black & White Books"
When we first started designing patterns for machine knitting in 1988, the only technology we had was a, then revolutionary, Amstrad PCW9512.
The screen had just two colours, black and white, but it was a brilliant word processor, came with a daisy wheel printer that produced consistently sharp print and soon an excellent desktop publishing program was written for it. A succession of dot matrix printers for printing graphics followed as their quality of printing evolved and improved.
Then the new generation of better, more affordable personal computers arrived and colour became affordable at last. Sadly our old friends, the Amstrads, retired. As Hilary says: "if it hadn't been for Amstrad's PCW 9512 machines, I doubt if we could have produced the number of books and at such quality as we did."
These days a very average computer, a couple of good printers and a broadband internet connection have completely changed the way that books are produced. The biggest changes, of course, are colour and access to modern graphics programs. The internet has changed the way in which we market our books and it has changed how customers find the products that they want.
Whenever we have time, we rewrite some of the earlier books and republish them in colour. The patterns themselves never change. The patterns only change in minor details, sometimes to include references to newer knitting machines which had not been introduced when the patterns were written.
The covers sport new colour photographs, the illustrations inside the books are replaced with monochrome photographs and - arguably the best advance of all - the stitch patterns are now sharper, clearer laser prints.
The book number never changes! We needed to rename the garter carriage books; what started as a simple system of garter carriage classics and garter carriage design collections became classics volume 2, or design collection volume 5. The books numbers - 49,50,51,52, etc. - were tried and tested and would stay, but a book needs a title!
So the Welsh Castles were introduced. The names reflect our heritage and Hilary tries to find the castle to match the book........
But don't worry if you can't pronounce the names of those Welsh Castles - just order by book number as usual!