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Laurence Cohn is a world-famous blues researcher, writer and producer, and he's putting together what appears to be the definitive Blind Willie McTell box set as a limited edition set, including a book and a DVD documentary. The box set has been advertised at http://www.bluesidol.com/store.html#anchorbwm since last fall as becoming available in Spring 2005.

I ordered a set this week, and got a bit of an unpleasant surprise: first, they charge your charge card immediately. Maybe that's obvious to others, but given that it's not yet issued, I assumed they were taking pre-orders and would charge my credit card when the box set was actually issued. Wrong.

Second, after they charged my credit card, a PR person named Candee Weinstein sent me an e-mail telling me, and I quote: "Larry Cohn is expected to be announcing very soon a revised estimated date of release for Blind Willie McTell. It will be placed on the www.blindwilliemctell.com website, so please keep checking
back for updates."

I'm not sure what that means in terms of the length of the delay, maybe it's a few weeks, maybe it's months and months, who knows?....but it wasn't encouraging that they took my money first, _then_ revealed the delay. To their credit, they offered my money back, but this is still a less than ideal way to deal with customers, IMHO.

Prospective purchasers should be forewarned about the release date change. As of today, they haven't bothered to revise their website which still claims a Spring 2005 release date. And finally, don't bother looking for an address or phone number for this company, they don't list one at their website. I did a WHOIS search at Network Solutions and found an address and phone number for one of Larry Cohn's partners....and the phone number is now defunct.