factbook.ktab.co.uk

The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation

The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation is a publishing corporation specialising in the creation of works of satire and silliness.

It is largely run by Statto and JTA.

History

Foundation

The Corporation was founded in 1998 by Statto and JTA, who at the time were on a school trip to Arthog, Wales.

The first ever publication was The Statto and John Concise English Dictionary, whose name was soon shortened to The Statto Dictionary, which sought to describe small parts of the English language in an overly complex and cynical fashion. It was inspired by a teacher at AGS, Dr Ehlers, who, unable to think of any other achievements during the week-long school trip to Arthog, awarded Statto the prize for “only person to call a spade a primitive human-operated soil moving device.” This was soon complicated further, resulting in “primitive humanoid-operated soil particulate realignment device,” and became the first definition in the first publication of the Corporation’s history.

Perpetuation

Having been brought together by the circumstances of unfair groups, the pair set about writing ridiculous numbers of Dictionary entries, as well as starting a number of so-called ‘peripheral publications,’ such as JTA’s Little Red Book, a collection of witty quotations, and Surviving Bus Journeys - For Fun! a guide to use of public transport.

These publications were tapped out by JTA on a typewriter, scribbled by Statto on cheap lined paper, and occasionally copied up on Word, printed out, bound with staples and shown around, giving Statto & JTA a limited audience of “whoever they could persuade to listen”.

Computation

It was not until the founders were in Year 11, some three years after the creation of The Corporation, that their publishing became accessible to a wider audience. Having previously relied upon the Adams’ Grammar School Library printers, they branched out onto the Internet. Their first ‘Net-specific publication, The Curse of the Big Nasty Rabbit, was a point-and-click rôle-playing adventure.

They took advantage of the now-defunct Freeserve, setting up a pay-as-you-go dial-up account with them which came with the free subdomain www.statto-jtapublishingco.fsnet.co.uk. The website there grew slowly, incorporating past works such as the Dictionary, and accruing a pitiful number of hits thanks in part to its utterly impossible-to-commit-to-memory URI, but mainly due to its content.

The next step came when they attempted to integrate KTAB News into this website; having a mere 15MB of space, it was decided to run the scam a second time and obtain www.ktab.fsnet.co.uk. Thus they continued, hand-coding HTML until the cows came home, had tea, watched the Lottery on telly, went to bed, woke up, milked themselves because it didn’t look like Statto & JTA were going to have time what with all that hand-coding of HTML, and then wondered why exactly they’d come home with Statto & JTA in the first place and left to find some grass leaving Statto & JTA with, three days and nine thousand lines of Eta Beta Pi HTML later, some curdled milk.

The decision was finally taken to actually pay for some proper web hosting in 2003 and, on December 18th of that fine year, www.ktab.co.uk was registered and hosted by SupaNames. Upgrading to the fascinating and slightly easier PHP, Statto & JTA finally had time to go and look for the cows who, it turned out, had emigrated to Bermuda.

The website continued unabated, getting ever more full with ever more rubbish, until in 2005, Statto transferred it to DreamHost who, so far at least, have been a lot better than SupaNames were. They also purchased kwazoig.com, which has yet to have a purpose.

Litigation

September 2005 played host to the beginning of the DSA Fiasco, during which the DSA attempted to bring legal action against Statto & JTA for the logo used in their spoof driving theory test. The correspondence continued over the next few months, with the DSA firstly trying to shut down the mock test altogether, concluding with the DSA scowling nastily because, once Statto had changed the logo, there wasn’t much that they could do.

Continuation

The Corporation now has a vast behemoth of a website, over one thousand pages in size, with comprehensive archives of past publications. Their adventures continue…

Bibliography

The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation has produced a vast number of publications in its short history. Here follows a list of the more significant in approximately chronological order:

Inventment portfolio

Statto & JTA also invented a portfolio of companies, under the umbrellas of which some of the publications fell. These include:

Unreal estate

Statto & JTA also invented a string of geographical locations in which to set their publications. These include:

Links

Category: The Statto-JTA Publishing Corporation

Category: Statto & JTA

© Andrew Steele & John Trevor-Allen 2005