Halcyon: The Football Book Publishers
Halcyon is a publisher that explores authentic football stories, uncovering inspirational and untold stories that celebrate the beautiful game. As Admiral approached its 50th anniversary since creating the first replica kit, Halcyon emerged as the ideal partner to produce a book chronicling this journey and five decades of football shirt designs and memories. Now that the book is on sale, we thought we’d take a moment to discuss what it takes to become a football publisher and what was involved in the development of the ‘50 Years Of Replica’ book.
Where does your interest in football literature come from?
“When you’re interested in football and literature like we are, it couldn’t be a better fit, really. Being literature students, books have been a huge part of our lives and when we met, we found that we shared a love not only for football but for the seminal football books: The Football Man, All Played Out, Fever Pitch, Brilliant Orange, The Far Corner etc. The problem we always found was that there wasn’t enough of it around. Good football writing, really good football writing, is just really good writing per se. Football is as good a lens as any to view the world through and we were really fortunate to be part of an explosion of blogging and content creation by great writers who mostly cared enough about the game to write about it for the love of it.”
How did you get into book publishing?
“We both remember the moment fairly vividly. It was 2019 and little did we know but Covid was a few months off. We’d previously published a football anthology back in 2014 with Ockley Books called Falling for Football, which was a pretty ambitious project – 44 writers revisiting the teams that made them fall in love with the beautiful game in the first place. We loved the experience and felt we could set up a publishing house to facilitate the publication of another anthology, From the Jaws of Victory. It’s a long-running joke at Halcyon HQ that the company was a lockdown project that spiralled out of control and there’s certainly some truth in that.
That said, we’re in the lovely position that Halcyon isn’t a going concern – we both have day jobs – so we can pick and choose the projects we really want to dedicate time to. We’re proud of the fact that authors choose to work with us over bigger publishers so they can feel integral to the creative process from the publishing point of view, rather than it all feeling impersonal and passing them by. We know how special the feeling of having a book published is because we’ve been there ourselves and essentially, we want to curate the process that we’d like to have if we were being published elsewhere. That informs pretty much everything we do.
We’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best and most well-known football writers in the business, from Harry Pearson to David Winner, Paddy Barclay to James Montague, we’ve a stable of books we’re very proud of, and our (currently on sabbatical) Halcyon Podcast has seen us talk to the likes of Barry Davies, Martin O’Neill and Pat Nevin. It’s not a job if you love it, right? It’s also not a job if you don’t get paid!”
Where did the initial idea come from to work on the 50 years of Admiral football shirts?
“Lee Nash at Glory magazine approached us last year saying that Admiral had been in touch wanting to do something special to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the launch of the world’s first-ever replica shirt. We loved the idea and didn’t need our arms twisting to be involved. A meeting with Theo Hamburger at Admiral at their offices in Altrincham confirmed that this was a project we absolutely had to be a part of.
It could have been a smaller project, maybe examining the 10 or dozen most iconic Admiral shirts, but we felt that in order to do Admiral’s incredible story justice, that was out of the question. So it quickly became apparent that we had our work cut out producing something comprehensive – and special – in a relatively small timeframe.”
What was the process of developing the Admiral Book?
“There was such a wealth of stories we knew we had to cover in the Admiral book and that helped to provide a framework from which to map out the book. We trusted Lee implicitly with the design aspect, which meant that we could focus on telling the various stories. It really helped that we had a wish list of writing talent who all really bought in to what we were trying to achieve.
There were a lot of meetings and a lot of late nights. We worked feature by feature, shirt by shirt. I’d be researching and writing, say Coventry and the infamous brown shirt, while Rob would be working on Leicester.
Lee had a fruitful photoshoot at Classic Football Shirts and then we put out a call for the remaining shirts that we hadn’t shot. We were overwhelmed with the response and the second shoot in London was fantastic. Lots of shirt collectors turned up and we managed to get all of the key shirts in one place to be individually shot by a photographer, while a video was made of the day. The book really did feel like a living, breathing thing at that point.”
Who were the key figures that helped you tell the Admiral Story?
“There is a long roll call of people we’re indebted to at the back of the book and no doubt we missed some off. Ultimately, the book would be nothing without the kits, and so it wouldn't have happened without the collectors who were prepared to share their shirts and stories with us.
Early in the process, we spoke to Andy Wells, who directed a brilliant ITV documentary about Admiral’s rise to prominence called Get Shirty, which later became a book. It was the ideal starting point for this project and Andy was very helpful.
From there, it became obvious that we were going to need the help of someone who was around when Admiral took off and as Bert Patrick is sadly no longer with us, we sought out designer Lindsay Jelley who, fresh out of art school in the mid-70s, was given plenty
of artistic license to design some of the most iconic shirts of all time. Lindsay was very generous with her time and supplied some sketches along the lines of her originals, which we included in the book. Theo and his dad John were always on hand to provide their knowledge and expertise on all things Admiral, which really helped. And – as we're not fashion or social history experts by any stretch – we owe a particular debt of thanks to Andrew Groves, Jean Williams and Jacqui Mcassey, who each provided mini-chapters on how and why Admiral were such pioneers in the industry and how the replica shirt subculture was born and evolved.
The book has a generous sprinkling of the recollections of former players and it was an honour to speak to the likes of Alan Shearer, Eddie Gray, Tommy Hutchison and Lou Macari. Club historians, particularly at Leicester and Coventry, were very generous with their time. And then there’s John Devlin, who we’d seen as a talking head on Get Shirty, who added the icing to the cake with his wonderful shirt directory, which is a thing of beauty towards the back of the book. We’ve tried to make it as exhaustive as possible and a lot of work went into that. If you do spot anything that’s missing, it wasn’t through lack of effort!”
How long did it take to collate all the stories together?
“We had to be fairly methodical in terms of setting fairly hard deadlines and word counts otherwise we knew we’d get bogged down in the detail. Each club’s story was a book on its own and getting that down to a manageable length was no mean feat. Just identifying the stories took time – then researching them fully, conducting relevant interviews and writing everything up to the standards we set ourselves was a huge undertaking from every contributor.
We didn't expect to end up writing quite so much ourselves and it's quite unusual for a publisher – although there are some sensational writers who have contributed to the book, we have probably written about two-thirds of it. That's alongside the process of getting it printed, delivered, promoted and launched. We lived and breathed this book from our first meeting in October 23 until it launched in August 24!”
The book has been well received, did you expect the book to be as popular as it is?
“We’re biased, but it’s the best thing we’ve put out. Visually, it’s stunning, which is a huge testament to Lee’s design, and we think the writing really stands up too. It has to when you’ve got the likes of Harry Pearson, Daniel Gray and Jacob Steinberg on board, to name but a few. Plus, the shirts are such gorgeous things that we couldn’t go far wrong.
The Admiral '50 Years of the Replica Shirt' Book is available now.
