The Osprey super fan visits us, gets a tour round the office... and a special gift!

Here at Osprey we have always really enjoyed the time we spend with our fans, and the opportunity to talk about our books with fans. Getting some face to face time at shows, signings and events is always great fun, and is a great chance to find out what we should be doing (and where we could improve). With the advent of social networking our abilities to get in touch with customers on a daily basis have grown exponentially - and was one of the reasons why we set up this blog in the first place.

But nothing really beats meeting someone face to face does it?

Over the last few years an American Osprey fan, Troy, has been a huge friend to Osprey. Some of the more regular site visitors will probably know him by his user name ShalimarTroy. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook we got to know Troy really well - and he was always available to give us advice, feed back on projects we were working on and generally be brilliant fun. He even set up a Google+ fan page for us.

So when he got in touch with us about 9 months ago to tell us he was planning a holiday to the UK and was really eager to pop into the office for a tour and to meet some of the characters he had been chatting to online for so many years, we leapt at the opportunity.

And last week, we finally got to meet our super fan face to face!

We spent a great afternoon showing Troy and his lovely wife round the office - giving him the grand tour, which included the rather epic archive room (two copies of every Osprey book ever published) and our rather spectacular artwork safe (where we keep all the art from our illustrators before they are photographed for the books). We got the chance to introduce him to the entire Sales and Marketing team (hugs included) the editorial team (ideas exchanged) and even managed to get him 15 minutes with our Designers who showed him how one of our General Military titles gets a cover, and how that cover evolves.

It was fantastic to finally get to meet Troy, and after him traveling all that way to come and meet us we couldn't let him leave empty-handed... so we presented him with one of our last copies of the limited edition leather bound Men-at-Arms Celebrations!

Here is Osprey 'big cheese' Richard Sullivan presenting Troy with his gift!

And here is Troy meeting the Osprey sales and marketing team...

And a rather nifty 'in-action' handshake shot of Troy and I meeting...

Thanks for coming Troy - hopefully we will see you again soon!