Pen and Sword have asked me to spread the word that the discount code they advertised in the most recent issue of Ancient Warfare doesn't actually work. Instead, they have discounted the books in the ad (Ross Cowan's The Roman conquests: Italy and Jeff Champion's Pyrrhus biography) for everyone. So now you know!

We're planning some changes in our production procedure. In preparation I'm moving editorial deadlines up. From now on the deadline for proposals always is always the 20th of every even month for the issue-after-the-next-issue. That's probably confusing, so I'll give an example. February 20th is the proposal deadline for issue IV.3 (IV.1+2), April 20th is the deadline for IV.4, June 20th for IV.5...

Ancient Warfare is now on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million and Chapters throughout America. Hurray! It's just that we can only know anything about the success (or let's hope not: failure!) of this new venture through our distributor. Every time an issue goes to print, we get a print-order from the distributor, print that many copies and ship them off. Once a month we get a nicely printed statement with numbers and percentages. But we'd just love to get a feel for it. This represents a huge increase in our circulation, after all, and it's very exciting for us to imagine our 'baby' suddenly sit next to long established military history mags!

The British charity I CAN helps kids with communication difficulties cope and improve their skills. They run adopt-a-word, which allows you to 'adopt' an English-language word (GBP 20 each) of your choice for a year. You get a nice pdf certificate to certify you did so, and the money goes to the charity. I thought this a quite fun idea, so I went and adopted 'legionary'. I'm sure various Ancient Warfare themed words are still available.

In his latest episode of 'Incoming' (bad for your wallet if you like ancients miniatures..., so of course I watch it every week :-)), Neil Shuck commented on Gorgon Miniatures' latest release of a Celtic chieftain with an impressively tall helmet. And though not very common, it's certainly not unheard of, witness this example on display in the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz. Or at least, it used to be on display there, the museum is overhauling its exhibition at the moment...

It's been all over the media in recent days, the news that Cambyses' Lost Army has supposedly been found. Besides the fact that no tombstone has been found saying "Here lies Cambyses' army. It got lost", there are other reasons to be more than a little suspicious of this news item, and those suspicions probably need more attention than they're getting.

I follow the Meeples and Miniatures podcast, part of which is a regular discussion between the host, Neil Shuck, and Henry Hyde, editor of Battlegames magazine. In their latest discussion, (View from the Veranda 3), they were discussing sources of inspiration for (prospective) wargamers. Consider my surprise when their talk suddenly came upon Ancient Warfare as a font of wonderfulness!

Murray Dahm’s series in Ancient Warfare is running out of interesting didactic literature to discuss. There’s only so much that survives!There’s only so much that survives! So, we'll need to replace that feature with a new one starting with issue IV.1. For a while now he and I have been brainstorming about other possible options with the help of regulars Duncan B. Campbell and Jona Lendering. The current idea revolves around a feature that would be called ‘the debate’, which could be either short articles relating the status of current academic debate that deals with warfare in the Ancient World, or short articles that discuss  detailed, concise ‘Frequently asked questions’, or common assumptions. Topics might be, and these are completely random examples, ‘Was there a leader of a Roman contubernium’, or ‘What evidence is there for women in Greek and Roman armies’. I’d like to hear the thoughts of the readership on this.

I've received some great suggesti0ns in my previous posting, from which I've selected a few after due consideration of experiences, other ideas and random thoughts. Three issues are more or less 'fixed', while the theme for three others is open to the vote of the readership.

Author P. Lindsay Powell kindly sent me a review of the Varian Disaster Special which was recently published in Military Illustrated. With this review and Jona Lendering calling it "easily the best publication on this subject of this anniversary year", what are you waiting for? Get it here.