1Introduction

This web­site (book) is an ex­per­i­ment—I’ve writ­ten it, I’ve drawn the pic­tures, I’ve in­vested my time and ef­fort in pro­duc­ing it, I’ve bought the fonts, I’ve paid for it to be hosted and I’ve en­joyed doing all of this (well the pay­ing less so—I am after all a York­shire­man^†1).

I wanted to pro­duce some­thing that had a cer­tain qual­ity to it, the sort of qual­ity that would be pre­sent in a printed book. There are a great many web­sites that look good (graph­i­cally) and there are a great num­ber that ex­plain to the n^th de­gree how some­thing works (and gen­er­ally these don’t look so good).

This, I hope, is a good com­pro­mise; I hope I’ve ex­plained things well and that I have cre­ated a site that is pleas­ing to the eye, is easy to nav­i­gate and, in short, has all the qual­i­ties you would ex­pect in a printed book—I hope it is some­thing you find agree­able and use­ful and wor­thy of your time.

Now you haven’t bought a book, you’ve just been look­ing at a web­site (this web­site) and that’s fine—have a good look around—see if you find it use­ful, I hope you do.

But that doesn’t mean it’s free. If you do like the web­site and find it use­ful, all well and good—I want you to use it and learn from it; but I also want you to sup­port it.

“How do I do that?” You ask — well that bits easy, you can:

1. Make a do­na­tion (I sug­gest £2-£15 though any­thing is wel­come)—do­nate the amount that best re­flects your ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the site:

Di­rectly with Pay­Pal:

or credit card:

Any­one do­nat­ing more than £5.00 will re­ceive a PDF ver­sion of this web­site.

2. Tell other peo­ple (free)—I can’t say this is as good as the other op­tion but ex­po­sure is bet­ter than noth­ing.

• There is no advertising on this website and I don’t want there to be. Please take the points above seriously; I’ve done my bit in producing the website, I like to think you will do your bit too by supporting it—enough said.

Michael Gledhill
April 2017

†1		someone once said that “Yorkshiremen are like Scotsmen, only not quite so generous”