That's what a friend used to call me, anyway. He's now the Features Editor at BBC Wildlife Magazine, and good luck to him, because his talent and drive got him there. We worked together on several wildlife partworks - or 'continuity series,' as publishers prefer to call them - and because I'd worked on so many different partworks, about anything and everything from DIY to ballroom dancing, he saw me as a cynical old hack, which I suppose I was. But it's hard to be anything but cynical about partworks. Partwork publishing is a scam, a means of preying on those who can least afford to waste their money on such rubbish. The way it works is this. Instead of publishing a book, or even a series of books, that covers a subject at an affordable price, you string it out in a series of parts, Part 2 always coming free with Part 1, to tempt people to begin collecting them and so spend much, much more money. Most partworks fail, which leaves the collector dangling and out of pocket (and a team of editors and designers out of work). But some do okay, and run their course, enough faithful collectors sticking it out. A few partworks even do so well that the publisher extends them, so that people who have been buying what they thought was, say, a 64-part series find themselves obliged to carry on forking out money just to complete their collections. An inevitable consequence of this is a scraping of the barrel for what to write about. When Eaglemoss extended 'The Art of Fishing' we had already covered the main baits, but no matter. Hence we had ludicrous things like 'chips (fries) for chub'. (You catch a chub on, say, bread then stick a chip-baited hook in its mouth for the photograph.) The final insult to the collector is when the publisher then brings out the series in affordable book form. Caveat emptor!