MY writer contact in a village near Thirsk has been scooped. After countless hours researching every nook and cranny of his subject and confident - justifiably, because his accomplished book is an intriguing read - that he would one day find the right publisher, he has just forked out £14.99 to confirm that a rival has covered precisely the same ground.

Literally, that is: the 413 miles of the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh.

And my chap is delighted: "It's the best thing that could have happened," he said, after hearing that what should have been his own success, authorship rewarded by bumper sales in the run-up to Christmas, had gone instead to photographer Jon Nicholson, whose A1: Portrait of a Road (HarperCollins) has triumphed in the face of mixed reviews.

Why so pleased? It is not that the book, of mainly off-beat pictures plus a lengthy introduction nicely written by Nigel Richardson, has stolen the Thirsk man's thunder and put him out of his agony-by-rejection-slip. No, if there is any thunder involved it is the great clap of enlightenment which is sure to wake publishers up to the fact that the Great North Road is so much a national institution that it is worth a proper book which tells the fascinating full story.

The picture book's offerings ("uplifting", says one reviewer; "buttock-numbing tedium", says another) include a truckwash, traffic cones, a contraflow, stray sheep, an emptied breakfast plate at a transport caff and several shots of the motorway service area near Birtley. And "our" stretch of the road is represented by an overturned lorry near Catterick, the only photo between a good one of the elegant John Carr bridge at Ferrybridge and a sidelight on shopkeepers at Pity Me, Durham.

If people are so taken with the A1 that they will buy this slim volume in quantity, it will now occur to publishers, then double the print run for a history that runs from the great road's Roman origins; past the 200-mile march along it of King Harold - pictured below - to fight the Danes at Stamford Bridge; on to Samuel Pepys' 17th-century complaint that it was "torn, plowed and digged up"; and then to the mid-1950s' fact that its traffic was regularly halted to allow the Bedale Hunt to chase foxes across it.

Some of that may be remembered from a 1998 column which benefited from the Thirsk author's generosity with the fruits of his research. I was particularly taken by the story, surely apocryphal, of highwayman Nevison's 230-mile ride to York, where he asked the lord mayor the time at 7.45pm, immediately after an "impossible" journey made to establish an alibi for a robbery he had carried out less than 16 hours earlier near Chatham.

"Thirsk author" remains A1-vigilant while he awaits a verdict on sample chapters sent anew to HarperCollins since the success of the rival book.

He notes that Eddie Stobart, the Carlisle haulage firm which says high fuel costs mean it makes more money from memorabilia of its cult status than from its lorries, now has a depot on the site of an old RAF station alongside the A1 north of Stamford - the place where for decades there was a chilling reminder of the nuclear threat: a line-up of missiles, yards from the roadside, all pointing towards the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War, there were literally scores of RAF stations along, or very near, the Great North Road. In our own patch, there were such as Topcliffe, Dalton, Dishforth, Leeming, Catterick and Croft. By the end of the war, the eastern side of England was home to most of the nearly 500 RAF stations.

l Although "Thirsk author" won't break cover with his name until that deserved acceptance arrives, he is soon to have a web site with details of his A1 project.

STILL by the side of the old Great North Road, this time in Darlington town centre, I have my own scoop for you. Only a small one, mind; of 48in, to be exact. For that is the extra width that the developers who have bought Dressers on High Row intend to give to whatever frontage they build for one of the national shopping chains they are negotiating with.

An alleyway down one side of the business which has a century-and-a-half pedigree in the town is to be built into the new layout, says Mr Robert Cansick, a Thornaby-based director of the purchasers, the Terrace Hill group.

But panic not, lovers of Darlington's historic network of "yards", this is a private side entrance, not one of the quaint public wynds off High Row.

I shall add my pennyworth to the pressure which must be put on Darlington town planners to resist any "carbuncling" of the Dressers' site. High Row, at first-floor level and above, is still one of the most splendid provincial townscapes in the country, especially if you narrow your gaze against a winter-day's cobalt sky sufficiently to exclude the modern building at the north end.

The latter block, which includes the Abbey National bank, includes the site on which William Dresser began his business in the mid-19th century. He was later to take in the next-door shop but by 1966 so many extras had been added to the stationers' business that it had outgrown the original No 41 (once a pub) and next-door No 42.

A 50-yard move was made to today's shop, which had been vacated by drapers and haberdashers Luck's, another family-owned business whose closure was a shock to Darlington's system.

Oddly, while the Dressers' Northallerton shop also included in the sale is a grade-II listed building in the high street that was part of the Great North Road in the coaching era - indeed, the A1 for just one year in the early 1920s - the grander Darlington premises merely has conservation area status.

Terrace Hill, though, has already made a decent job of two nearby shops on High Row, including a grade-II listing: it bought them speculatively (from the property arm of the Prudential), installed Greggs the bakers and the Past Times gift shop as lessees and then re-sold to a private investor.

After Darlington-born Dresser left school eight miles away in Gainford, he was apprenticed to printer Harrison Penney across from High Row on the top corner of Priestgate. Penney had been been brought to the town by the Pease family as a like-minded Quaker and Liberal they could trust to run a business which was founded in 1809 and also sold books.

Newly a journeyman, William started his own business in his father's house on High Row and by 1858 was printing a rival to the 11-year-old D&S Times, called the Darlington Telegraph. When Penney died in 1888, Dresser took over his business.

Sons Tom and JC inherited in 1899 but soon went their separate ways with JC having a printing works at the bottom of Priestgate which he sold to The Northern Echo in the 1920s.

The Priestgate jobbing printers, keeping the name of Dresssers, continued until well into the 60s; the building became a carpet warehouse, later a discount foodstore and today stands empty.

Tom Dresser died in 1942 and the High Row shop, still with a printing side, was bought by Fred Mowbray, a typewriter salesman from Stockton, and brothers George and Jacques Rudd, paper merchants at Bishop Auckland; it is the third generations of these families - chairman Kem Dore, Michael Williams and Richard Dyke - who decided on this month's sale of the still-profitable business.

A Stockton branch ran from 1971 to 1990 and Northallerton opened in 1973 (extended 1990) after the purchase of the similar J Walker business. The latter also included a printing side, which Dressers kept going until 1997.

Terrace Hill takes possession immediately Dressers closes on March 31, with the alteration work for new occupiers scheduled to be finished at the beginning of June. In Darlington, where there is apparently a shortage of large shop premises in a main thoroughfare, a big attraction for national retailers is the 12,700 sq ft of space on three floors; by comparison, its nearby ventures for Greggs and Past Times offered a total 2,000 sq ft. The Northallerton shop may or may not go to the same retailer