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What took her so long? Rosemary writes ...

Way back in 1994, when some teachers wanted notes from my workshops, putting it all together resulted in a book-size collection of papers. What to do next? When an Australian publisher said, “We’ll publish it – provided you take out any reference to Māori”. That well and truly lit my fuse ... all the way to the local copy centre!

We sold most of what they initially printed and kept the spares under the desk at the George Parkyn Centre, which had opened by then. Every so often, when we were running out, we’d ask the copy centre to run off another 50 or so copies. It wasn’t glamorous – but Māori stayed in!

What happened next?
I revised the book slightly for a “second edition” and the copy centre continued to keep us in supplies. And then, there I was, sitting peacefully in my office early in 2004, when in came an interesting woman bringing me what still counts as the biggest surprise of my life. “I’m from Hodder Education”, she said. “Can we publish your book?” Guess what I said! And so the third edition came into being - and Māori stayed in!

And now?  Well, that came out in 2005, and an awful lot has happened in gifted education since then. An awful lot happened to Hodder Education too – they sold to another publishing firm which concentrates on blockbuster fiction, not education texts. So thanks to the wonderful Dorne at Learning Network in Auckland, I met the lovely people from Taylor and Francis in the UK.

Then it took a further two years from the initial proposal through to publication. If you’ve never been involved in publishing a book, it’s astonishing just how many little details have to be resolved. Some 40 different images, for example, some quite tiny and some needing a whole page, some needing re-sizing, re-thinking of placement for a different format, and all needing permissions updated – tricky when the original author of a poem you want to include has died and you have to track down heirs and successors and copyright holders in different parts of the world! But finally it has all come together, thanks to lots of help from the good people at Taylor and Francis, so now ...

So now EDITION 4 IS HERE! 

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