Today is the official release date of Silly Beggar. It brings me enormous pleasure say that it is available *now* from all good book shops!

How exciting to think that this side-splittingly hilarious, beautifully-crafted and, um, humble book will be adorning the shelves of book stores up and down the land.

Over the next few weeks I will see this for myself as I participate in a wide variety of promotions and author events here in Scotland (see sidebar for details).

I hope you can join me, and if so I look forward to seeing you.

This book takes the art of acquiring the freebie to a whole new level of absurdity. Rejoice as the Customer Services departments of multinational corporations are fed ridiculous stories designed to make them part with their sweet logo-bearing bounty.

Bask in the bizarre accounts of penguin attacks, weird experiments, heroic alter-egos and many more fishy tales, each designed to garner goodies for absolutely nothing. Whether he’s playing the system or just playing games, James Spence demonstrates his comic genius via his uniquely entertaining emails.

The respondents often surprise us too by entering into the spirit of the author’s wacky world. With colour photos of the author and his collection of toys, mugs, vouchers and of course - T-shirts .

James is a dreamer with far too much time on his hands. He lives with his wife Tiff and cat Angel in Dunfermline where he dreams, schemes and screams in delight when he receives yet another brand new T-shirt through the post. He is the creator of ‘Dr Sheep and the Aardvark‘, unquestionably one of Scotland’s most popular online comic strips, enjoyed by thousands of comic fans around the world. One of his poems was recently published by Google in their book ‘Search Me’ by Neil Taylor. They also sent him 2 T-shirts!

• Published by Aurora Metro
• ISBN 978-1-906582-03-6
• Publication 14 May 2009