Another day another charity book find (2.50 at a different village’s charity shop). Where last week we looked at a book authored by a drinks writer in the 1980’s we have a book authored by a classically trained author and journalist who has spent his entire professional career writing about just about anything other than food or drink in the early 90’s.

Mark Skipworth is a British author and investigative journalist with a specialism in engaging non-fiction works. This book on the history, production and marketing of Whisky as it was then in 1994. The first edition was published in 1987 but the version I am reading is the 4th edition from 1994.

The book starts with a detailed account of the backstory to a lot of the big name brands we see today. The start of mass production and exporting of whisky in Scotland was a real economic boom and bust story with a number of families becoming exceedingly wealthy. This is absolutely an educational and reference book and the tone can feel a little too dry and soulless at times.

The pictures are interesting however, the late 80’s and early 90’s was that fascinating time where microprocessors were in their early adoption and it’s an in-between time of manual engineering to ubiquitous personal computing power.

All in all this isn’t my kind of book. I can smell when a book feels like it was written as an assignment without that deep rooted passion. Today, this is the kind of thing that ChatGPT will be spitting out but at least it was written with the sweat of an actual human even if it was just for a publishing deal.