Alexander Fullerton was a cadet at Dartmouth at the age of thirteen and went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean. His first novel SURFACE! sold over 500,000 copies. Then he worked on the 9-volume Nicholas Everard series that made his reputation.Steve Roud recently retired from his position as Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the author of many books on the subject, including The English Year, published to great acclaim in 2006, and The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of… Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. He is also joint author, with Jacqueline Simpson, of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore. His other work in folklore includes compiling the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally renowned computer databases of traditional folk and popular song.