Hello and welcome to Backlist, it's the podcast that gives new life to old books.

Today you find us on the desolate wastes of the planet calm surrounded by the shattered

remains of spaceships and a valley fringed by steep mountains. We're making our way to a grim

building at the valley's end as a storm ranges overhead and our path is illuminated by flashes of

lightning. I'm John Mitchenson the publisher of Unbound the platform where readers crowdfund

the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller author of the Year of Reading Dangerously

and joining us today are two doctors Dr. Unimakomak and Dr. Matthew Sweets.

Matthew Sweets is a writer, broadcaster, cultural historian and presenter of the BBC Radio

programmes Sound of Cinema, Free Thinking and the Philosopher's Arms. He has judged the cost

of book award, edited Wilkie Collins is the woman in white for Penguin Classics and was

series consultant on the Showtime Sky Atlantic series Penny Dreadful. His books include

Inventing the Victorians, Sheperton Babylon and most recently Operation Chaos, the Vietnam

Dessertes who fought the CIA, the brainwashers and themselves which was published by Pickazoo

in 2018. Pleasingly, last time I saw Matthew Sweets was when I bumped into him at the Matthew

Sweets concert. True, isn't it? And he was in the company of Albert de Petrillo, the

commissioning editor at BBC Books who commissions the doctor who range and who I spoke to just

yesterday so he could bring me up to date on a few key matters. So if you listen to this, Albert,

hello. And was it Albert who persuaded you to go and see Matthew?

It was his idea. I've always thought that it would be a good idea to be in the presence of Matthew

Sweets mainly because I assume that he gets as many communications, well, he might, I don't know,

he gets, occasionally get tweets saying, really love that concert you gave in the, in the

due drop-in in Nebraska. And I would say it's very charming of you to say so. But I assume he gets

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