Horse-powered & Man-powered Transport
Hi to All Readers of Retrievia,
With effect from 18 Feb 2008, Retrievia will feature pages from the book “Horse-powered & Man-powered Transport – a philatelic excursion”. This book was co-authored by Dr Tan Wee Kiat, Noel Hidalgo Tan and yours truly. It was published in the middle of last year.
Wee Kiat is the oldest eldest of the three. In fact, he is already a grandfather of 5 lovely children. No, it is not that the short grandfather is running short of stories. Neither is it that our book is not selling well. (We never intended it for sale anyway.)
For the past several months, Mr Ivan Chew has very kindly been maintaining this blog and patiently posting one entry a day from old Wee Kiat’s old Retrievia series. Now, it looks like Ivan has finally run out of horsepower. It got Wee Kiat scrambling around for manpower to carry on the good work of Ivan. You guessed it right – yours truly was volunteered.
However, because I am lazy of my busy schedule, I initially thought that I could only manage to put up two posts a week on Retrievia. However, I found out that it wasn’t really that daunting posting one new page of the book every day (sorry, Ivan). That is even more frequent than how often I update my own blog (which is about once a week). As the book has more than 40 pages, the “horsepower and manpower” is expected to last slightly over one month. (Wee Kiat, you better start preparing the next series.)
Hope you will continue to return to Retrievia. Even if you already own a copy of the book, we welcome your comments.
Yours truly,
Victor Koo.
ReTRIeVIA 
I think it is a very good idea to put the pages of this book on ReTrevia.
Lam Chun See
17 February, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Well it’s about time! lol
just kidding. Glad to see you and Wee Kiat taking over. It’s an excellent idea to put up the book here.
Ivan Chew
19 February, 2008 at 2:04 am
It’s great to see the book online.
However, I’d like to suggest that the text of the book be entered into this blog, rather than just the scans of the pages. This would make it possible for more people to find the material on this blog using search engines like Google.
Hope this helps.
coleman yee
14 March, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Hi Coleman, thank you for your comments. I have considered what you’ve suggested before but because of lack of time and laziness then, I did not do it. But now, I think I can spare the time and is hardworking enough to put the text into each post to accompany the images. Will be taking this one day at a time, literally. Haha.
Victor Koo
14 March, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Hi! Coleman.
Thanks for visiting retrievia website and thanks for your advice
to make it more accessible. Victor has been kindly running this
website and he said he thinks he wil be able to implement
your suggestion.
Incidentally, we are considering putting our next book, “VIPs on Stamps”
as a follow-up to the “Transport” book. If we do, he will implement your
suggestion there as well.
I have to depend on Victor’s goodwill to do this extra work since I am not
blog-savvy and, worse still, lazy wrt learning to blog. (I guess as a
grandfather of 5, and helping to keep these 5 kids in line, I have a good excuse.)
So, I am lucky to have FOY’er friends to do all the hard work.
Regards,
wee kiat
tan wee kiat
15 March, 2008 at 10:56 am