This is a hard thread to read, but, given the difficulties over the last several years, and the hyper aggressive complaints made by two people, I should make a statement here.
First, I will certainly admit up front, with continued sadness, that we *are* behind on royalties for the Chivalry Bookshelf, and are backed up to 2006 in some cases, 2007 in others. However, all royalties will be paid, just as previous debts were paid.
Second, I will also say outright that I am not surprised that Mr. Tobler and Mr. Mele--who I also thought of as friends until 2006--are leading this charge, particularly since they have a competing firm and are closely associated with Ms. Allen, who has a firm that competes with Revival.us. There are other complaints here and there in the thread which I will attempt to deal with; however, there are also a number of either falsehoods or severe differences of perception which may not be able to be resolved here. I am currently traveling and cannot enter into a debate, which also seems ill-advised if these gentlemen are considering legal action of their own. For the last five years at Pennsic neither of these gentlemen has made any effort to walk four booths down to discuss anything, but have been very free to complain loudly and often to anyone who would listen; there has been hardly any restraint in their vocality, which hardly constitutes reticence to leap into the fray.
REGARDING CHIVALRY BOOKSHELF
1) On the whole, I have *lost* money on the bookshelf, not "lined my pockets" with it. The project stated with a $50k investment by my wife, Ann, and over the years we fed it another $110k, rather than taking money out. I also gave up a very lucrative technology post in order to give it a shot. This state of affairs is what really drove the development of the second business, Revival.us. From the start, it was clear that the Revival business was rapidly overtaking CB, and in order to feed my family, the Revival business was the one that we continued to develop.
2) We paid royalties until late 2006, when the cash-flow for CB came sharply down. The biggest factor in the dramatic reduction in available funds came with my huge investment in Christian Tobler's In Service of the Duke. While beautiful and a masterpiece my Christian, this single project ran over-budget and came in at just short of $50k. To date, we have sold just $21k in sales for it. I had assumed, wrongly, that the book's costs would be recouped in a year, but that assessment was wrong. Unfortunately, a $30k hit in a struggling business is more than significant, it is catastrophic.
3) At the same time, also in 2006, the French magazine which we distributed, Medieval History Magazine, abruptly and without warning went out of business, leaving us holding about $20k in subscription commitments for a magazine which was now unavailable. At this was a French company who went bankrupt (they had a very fine line of magazines), we had no recourse. We did, however, either refund or give 100% purchase gift certificates. Technically this debt belonged to Harnois, as all of the funds had been sent to them, but we did not want to leave all of these customers holding the bag, so we made up the difference. It was expensive, but it needed to be done and was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, it came right as In Service of the Duke was going through production.
4) We lost our European distributor in 2006, as the founder of the Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal, was replaced by his son. With that transition their business reshuffled, and payments sent to us fell to a very small trickle. A subsequent distributor has sold even less and, in both cases, substantial stocks of books were lost.
5) Finally, during 2006, Mr. Mele and other members of the Chicago Swordplay Guild refused to participate in our joint WMAW/Schola Saint George Symposium held here in DFW. There was a great deal of ugliness written and posted about the organization of the event and predictions of a dire failure, which highlighted the very ugliest side of WMA politics. To be completely frank, this assault on the event given the many hours of coordination, production and the thousands of dollars fronted for it really threw me for a mental loop, and I resolved at that time to transition out of the WMA and possibly out of "sword stuff" altogether. This noise extended far beyond the event itself and I have to believe also contributed to slowing sales of books.
6) Mr. Mele's accusation that we failed to pay printers for the CB titles is false. We have paid every printer we have used--we have had one payment that was late, when the cashflow has been a problem in 2004--but this was paid completely.
7) The assertion that European rights have been sold and not paid for is untrue, although Mr. Mele could not know the details. In fact, we have only exchanged two sets of rights--one for Fighting with the German Longsword (Mr. Tobler) and one for Swordsmans' Companion (Mr. Windsor). Unfortunately, Mr. Tobler's work has generated only $250 worth of royalties paid pack to us (50% of those are due to him from that), and we have received $0 from Mr. Windsor's work. In both cases, we were to have received in trade the English rights to books by those publishers. In one case, we have never received the final manuscript; in the second, we have the manuscript but the translation has never been finished. Any sales of those titles accrue a 50% royalty as derivative sales to the authors. However, as neither is likely to see publication at this late date, it seems moot. We all lost on this one.
Dr. Forgeng's superb book on the Messer was delayed for the very same financial reasons as expressed above. It was due to fall into the same production quality as In Service of the Duke, but, being bitten once, as they say, we went back to the library to negotiate rights for what they call as "monograph" edition, but were unable to secure agreement on a figure that was marketable. I can neither afford nor justify another In Service of the Duke type-project when the first one sold so poorly. The museum wanted $10k for the rights to the "monograph" version, but that still makes it a $20k project--which we haven't had in the last five years and could not justify in any event with royalties outstanding.
Mr. Mele claims that Steve Muhlberger had never been paid for his two books, which is false. Like other authors, he has not received anything since 2006, although to be frank, the amounts we are talking about are exceedingly small (but are still a legitimate debt). Similarly, Mr. Hand still holds many hundreds of dollars of Chivalry Bookshelf stock which he has been free to sell, and presumably has done so. His English Swordsmanship is perhaps our lowest selling book of all time for us, and royalties for that are also very small. SPADA and Medieval Sword and Shield sell better, or did, but have also lost their market momentum. There is little on the balance sheet there, either, and we returned to Mr. Hand the second volume of English Swordsmanship, releasing the rights back to him, which made him angry. We simply did not have the funds to proceed.
9) So, to conclude on the Bookshelf, I freely acknowledge the royalty debt which I owe and which I will pay, as I have paid other legitimate debts in the past. However, one has to be in a position to have sufficient cash-flow to pay said debts, and as I will outline below, I have fought for the last four years to re-achieve such a position.
REVIVAL
Revival.us is a separate business largely run by Ann.
1) Talbot, I am saddened that you truly believe that I in some way stole from you. First, at no point did I ever send any of your pieces for production, casting or otherwise. If you can show any of my pieces that are drawn from yours, or which we have ever produced from yours, I will take back the statement above. But I assure you it did not happen. You indeed sell some of our books and stuff when I was cleaning up the mess from the failed Thornbird Arms shop (which some may recall there were four partners; *only* I every paid back any of the large debt that resulted). . As you well know, my erstwhile "partners" fled the business leaving me with a HUGE debt, and it took a full decade to work through. I could have declared bankruptcy and eliminated the debts, but did not. And there were complaints as I did it, but to my knowledge I finally did all the commissions I am aware of, and even three that were taken by other people in TA's name while I was away at Fort Knox. I apologize for the problems this may have caused you in showing my work and once again thank you for the consideration. Regarding sales at the booth, here I failed you. We very poorly placed the products, giving them about 1/3 of the booth but in an apparently ineffective way. We sold very little, and the shoes on that year carried the sales and drew far too much attention away from that side of the booth. The pairs of missing spurs I cannot account for; they were in the boxes when we packed up and left them for Nicole to pick up and return for you. I did not steal them, nor did we sell them and pocket the cash. Regarding your armour bits, yes, I do acknowledge the debt for these. But the ones in TOMAR are *not* yours, as I still have those at home in the shop. But on your book, I am not sure how you can claim anything was "stolen;" I put in many, many hours on tracking down permissions, but the project just didn't develop and we could not finish it. As you know, traditionally permissions are acquired by the author, and while I freely offered to do it for you, I grossly underestimated the amount of work and it never saw completion. Nothing of yours was ever, as you know, used in any of my projects and this was and is a disappointment, it is hard to see how it is in any way theft. Frankly, I did not know the spur and Pennsic sales issue was a big an issue as it appears here; I will find some way to fix this with you.
2) As for the accusation that we "ripped off" Pakistani craftsmen, this is very easy to answer, although I too must proceed with a limited response as we have initiated legal action pending in Pakistan as a result. My main supplier, for many years, repeatedly sent us sub-par and even substituted products. Over a nine year period, this amounted to $14k in goods and we talked back and forth about it many times in the course of our continued business relationship. Finally, in 2009, we made an order for Pennsic and advanced $9k against an invoice of the same amount. I was told that the products had been shipped, an outright lie, and then the vendor disappeared, to be replaced overnight by Westland Crafts, who offered many of our patterns direct and to wholesalers. We never saw a dime of that $9k in product, and we still have a claim for $14k in products which we could not accept upon receipt here in the states. Westland claims ownership over our gambeson and other patterns, which is one of the points in legal dispute, the other being the $9k payment made to them for fictitious goods.
3) The folks at the Revival booth have also made flying accusations to booth patrons that we ripped off Fettered Cock Pewter for the Fiore pins. I have never made any statement about this because I believed it was an honest misunderstading by the FC people, but, in order to be complete, here is what happened. I commissioned sculpting, molds and pewter castings from FC. We set the terms by email, and on the Ellefante pin, the first project, my commission appeared for sale on the FC website even before I'd received the ones I paid for. I found this distressing, as we had intended to use it for the Schola Saint George, so I contacted them and secured the mold rights for the rest of the three. They refused to grant it for the ellefante, however. We paid several thousand dollars for the sculpting and molds, which is WORK FOR HIRE. That means, we can create derivative works (for the three pins, but not for the ellefante). We did then create some in sterling silver and brass, which FC did not offer. Then, at the same Pennsic when we had Talbot's items and the large shoe display, the FC folks made their displeasure known in a very sharp way, claiming that we did not have the rights to change and replicate the design. But as work for hire, we did for the three pieces. We did not, however, have them for the Ellefante, pin, so I agreed to trade a "release of the molds" to them for our ability to sell all four pins. And, we removed them from the display immediately and never sold them at Pennsic again, except for one, which was sold my mistake by a person in the booth when specifically asked for it. She did not know the story or that we had decided not to sell them at Pennsic. Given that we "released the molds" to them and that they have subsequently sold many of them using the molds I paid for, this is not a debt but was an honest disagreement over what rights are conveyed in "work for hire." I am certain there is no ill-character on the part of the FC people, but I do not agree with their interpretation. They have been compensated for the disagreement already.
4) Regarding our early shoes, only the low boot has any relationship to Talbot's patterning. I acquired two from another craftsman and asked my vendor if he could make something similar, which he did. This was the forerunner of Westland Crafts. Yes, Talbot did the pioneering work on them, but the pieces we used as a sample were not made by Talbot, and the craftsman who did them had made it clear that he had left the business for good. This is the *only* reason we used these as a rough pattern. At the time, footwear was very, very hard to find and my initial thought was just to have a few to help the footwear problem. Yes, the play succeeded, but this doesn't constitute theft. If it does, then why do people not have a problem with Westland or with folks who copied my gauntlet patterns? This is an old debate within the re-enactment community.
5) What is *not* revealed my Mr. Tobler or Mr. Mele in their posts on Revival is that, also during 2006, Mr. Tobler was suddenly, in his words to me written in an email, "working for Nicole" [of Revival Clothing] as she abruptly and without warning left our association (literally overnight), so he has a business interest in his version of events, as does Mr. Mele, at the time Nicole's significant other and still, I believe, an associate. That this abrupt departure had been in the works for some time was clear from the fully finished (and very closely resembling) Revival Clothing site, which Mr. Tobler had created for Nicole, and from the shoes which appeared on the site a few weeks later, indicating that the project had been in place long before the post 2006- complaints happened. This was a coordinated start-up, done while we were all still friends and before the problems with the CB were cited. If not, no effort at "phone calls and emails" cited by Mr. Tobler were made to address the grievances. I have to conclude that during 2006 at least, and perhaps before, Mr. Tobler, Mr. Mele, and Ms. Allen were already working together as a group to set up and run their own business. More power to them, but it was hardly done above-board. And the attacks on me since have a financial and business component.
GAUNTLETS-
Vitus: As you well know, I offered to replace those gauntlets with a stainless pair, and explained to you at the time that I would get to them as soon as possible. They are still first on the list. Of course, we are no longer using that heat-treater--the very same guy who did the gauntlets *I* wear--and I object to your assertion that in some way I tried to defraud you or your squire. As I expressed to you in the FB message, I deeply regret the failure and have already offered a fix. However, as you also well know, I am finishing my dissertation and shop time has been limited.
In going with this heat-treater, I first had him do a pair that I wear still for testing, and they passed with flying colors. On the first production batch, however, they seemed fine until we got them into the field, at which point several broke. I took them off the shelf immediately and have an entire shop full of failed heat-treated gauntlets. We have 1) found a much better heat-treater 2) initiated a testing program for each batch and 3) replaced or offered to replace failed gauntlets and have made every effort to recall the three pairs still outstanding.
MY RESPONSE-
As may be clear from the above, the structural problems with the CB business were evident in 2005 but were starkly clear in 2006. We had already moved our house from CA to TX in 2004 in order to reduce expenses, and there was no further we could cut once we found ourselves beset by business opponents and my error in doing In Service of the Duke.
At that time I'd been out of technology management for five years, and it proved impossible to go back. We did not find ourselves with financial options aplently, so we fed the Revival business and tried to eke out enough to pay the bills, but made little progress, even with new products. Every step forward seem to yield exactly one step backwards. It put an extreme stress on the family, and with the 2006 ugliness with WMAW and the falling business, it was clear we needed a new plan. So I started graduate school to retrain in a new field--history--so that we could leave the sordid world of WMA politics a for the perhaps equally complex world of academic politics. I like teaching, and I think I'm reasonably good at it. A teaching fellow, however, makes $17,500 per year, which is where I've been the past two years (2009-10).
But a doctorate takes a long time and some time/effort. The Bookshelf went onto the back-burner, further reducing revenue possibilities (although I'd already concluded that it wasn't going anywhere and was in a rapid decline anyway). The plan was--and is--to add enough income that we can pay off the outstanding royalties, which we will be able to do in March and April, happily. We thought we had this licked last year, but things fell through. This year looks solid.
Our only income stream was until recently Revival, and it has survived, but not with any significant growth. It chews almost all of the capital brought in, leaving us with very little flexibility, chiefly because of servicing the business debt built up by the Bookshelf. Add to that the copying of our designs by others and the continued aggressive competition from the Revival Clothing and from Mr. Mele and Mr. Tobler's press, things have remained interesting while we've gone about changing our direction.
If authors want the rights to their books, as we have already returned to David Lindholm, then they should contact me directly for a negotiation. Our phone numbers have not changed in 10 years. Email is *not* a reliable channel for critical messaging, and the
brian@chivalrybookshelf.com email has not worked since 2008.
My communications during this time have been poor, I will freely admit. The attacks on WMAW (led by Mr. Mele) and the surprise exodus of friendship surrounding Nicole's business came as a sad surprise to me. I didn't respond well, and, things that I overlooked as a friend to Mr. Mele, Ms. Allen and Mr. Tobler in retrospect just make me feel stupid and sad. Unfortunately, by not answering their long campaign, it left the field to them and allowed them to drive the direction of the debate. Very foolish, on my part. They are not entirely wrong, but nor are they entirely right and they are selective in what they choose to report.
In short, I will remain on plan to finish the royalty payouts in April, and then there will be no further Bookshelf titles except for my own, and there are only three of these planned, if they ever come out. Revival.us will continue as a viable business because it is viable, especially once freed from the CB debt.
With Talbot, Vitus, or any other individual who feels personally wronged, I warmly invite you to contact me directly and we'll work out a solution. For Cuan, if my current employment allows me to attend Pennsic, then certainly, we can meet on or off the field to discuss this and any other issue you'd like to broach. If not, the next year I should be more available and at this point, we must have a fight, regardless of how things resolve (or don't). That offer remains open to all.
I understand that some or even many will not be satisfied, and I regret that in the extreme.
I have always said that chivalry is not a matter of acting with perfection (although I wish I were better at it), but is rather a question of making suitable amends after a wrong has occurred. Some of the things that happened in the business have been my fault, others have not. But I have been solely responsible for the communication which has not happened, and while the stresses accruing from a multitude of events corresponding at once in 2006 was great, that does not free me from responsibility and I will continue to pursue remedies.
I can be reached at
chronique_editor@yahoo.com.