It’s been a very exciting two weeks for me since coming back to work for the New Year because I’ve been building up to an announcement that (hopefully) you’ve all heard by now:

In October 2009 Egmont UK is releasing a sequel to The House at Pooh Corner, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus and Mark Burgess.

In case you were wondering, I think the book and decision to publish it has been done with a great deal of integrity, and I’m hopeful that it will be well received.

I point this out becuase a few people are unimpressed whenever anybody attempts to re-issue something that was once a classic. The level that people are unimpressed is almost directly proportional to how much they loved the original, so in the case of Winnie-the-Pooh you’d think that might be a lot.

However despite a few critical pieces, the news of the sequel was well received. Of course this was mainly down to the consummate skill of the publicity person responsible for how the news was released but I was thinking that there must be a few other reasons as well.

Firstly I think that so many sequel projects have happened in the last few years (Another new James Bond book, Peter Pan in Scarlet and so on . . .) and so many of them have been good, that the public are less likely to be immediately outraged when they hear about a new one - happily they’re more inclined to wait and judge the book on its merits.

But I also think that people’s love for Winnie-the-Pooh is so great that they are prepared to overlook all cynicism in the hope that the book might just give them some of the pleasure they had when they first read them.

So in the end all we can do here is be grateful for the immense coverage the announcement had, and hope that the book will indeed live up to the standards of the originals.

Anyone here have an opinion on this new sequel project, or any other recent ones?