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800 Park Avenue Suite 111A.,  Keene NH 03431 (603) 499-6500 

Surry Cottage Books was formed in 2006 by Craig Brandon, a national-award-wining author and award-winning former journalist to commemorate the centennial of the Gillette murder case with the publication of Grace Brown's Love Letters. These letters were written by the victim to the murderer before the crime and had not been published in nearly a century. The idea was to sell them during Craig's public appearances.

The phenomenal success of that book allowed Craig to consider self-publishing his next book, Monadnock: More than a Mountain, a book with many color photos that was a major investment for the new business. The 2000 initial copies quickly sold out and allowed Craig to publish 5000 more.

That success allowed Craig to resign from his position at Keene State College, where teaching students who didn't want to learn anything had become increasingly tedious, and set up an office at the Hannah Grimes Business Incubator in Keene. Since then, Surry Cottage Books has published Elizabeth Weston Timlow's The Heart of Monadnock and a collection of columns by outdoors writer Dick Jenkins called Monadnock Region Odysseys.

In 2008 Surry Cottage Books published the first murder mystery set on Mount Monadnock -- Murder on Mount Monadnock by first-time author J.S. Winter. Set in 1910, the book includes an all-star cast including Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Franklin Roosevelt, prizefighter Jim Johnson, Boston Red Sox pitcher Smoky Joe Wood, mystery writer Mary Rinehart and a host of others, seeking to find who killed the 20-year-old daughter of vaudeville singer Lillie Langtree.

In 2009, Surry Cottage Books left Hannah Grimes and moved to new offices at 800 Park Avenue in Keene where there is plenty of free parking and a conference room for meetings with authors, photographers, illustrators and designers. By now SCB had a stable of freelance book designers and editors that knew how to work quickly to bring an author's book into production.

Late in 2009 we published The Weight of the Ice: The Northeast Ice Storm of 2008 by Dave Eisenstadter, which sold more than 3000 copies in two months. We consider this kind of instant book, written and produced quickly while the story is still fresh, as a new kind of journalism, halfway between the day-to-day journalism provided by newspapers, television and web sites and the "final word" books that come out years later. Journalists, who are used to writing quickly on deadline are able to tell the "big story" by combining all the story elements that were reported piece of piece. It's the best of both worlds and this book proved that the public was ready to buy it.

We continued our long-term goal of republishing all the exisiting books about Mount Monadnock in 2010 with Henry Baldwin's classic Monadnock Guide in conjunction with the Monadnock Advisory Commission.

Besides publishing books under our own name, Surry Cottage Books publishes books for speakers and organizations in the Monadnock Region. These include books for the Historical Society of Cheshire County, motivational speaker John Curran and historian Jack Coey. In 2011 we formed a new division called Pumpelly Press to serve authors who want to self publish their own books. You can read more about Pumpelly Press. This resulted in Blood Club, a novel by Dublin author Walt Schnabel and When Cuba Was Lost a novel by by Hancock author Phil Jones as well as many other books by local authors.

For 2012, Surry Cottage Books is planning another or our instant journalism offerings with Good Night Irene, a book about the devastation caused by the tropical storm of August, 2011. Working with freelance writers from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York, it is our most ambitious project yet and will be coordinated by Craig Brandon, who serves as project editor. Experienced journalists are collecting photos and interviews, but also blogs, poems and artwork to create a comprehensive overview of the last week in August, 2011. It's due out on April 1, just eight months after the storm struck.

Among our future projects is a book about unusual New England Christmas traditions called Welcome Yule! and The Bucket List: 101 Things You Should Do Before You Kick It.

We're always looking for good manuscripts, freelance journalists, photographers, copyeditors and book designers. Contact us if you would like to be a part of the ever-expanding scope of our team! editor (at) surrycottagebooks (dot) com.

last revised Dec. 6, 2011