  We present low-resolution optical spectroscopy and BVRI photometry of 453
candidate nearby stars drawn from the NLTT proper motion catalogue. The stars
were selected based on optical/near-infrared colours, derived by combining the
NLTT photographic data with photometry from the 2MASS Second Incremental Data
Release. Based on the derived photometric and spectroscopic parallaxes, we
identify 111 stars as lying within 20 parsecs of the Sun, including 9 stars
with formal distance estimates of less than 10 parsecs. A further 53 stars have
distance estimates within 1-sigma of our 20-parsec limit. Almost all of those
stars are additions to the nearby star census. In total, our NLTT-based survey
has so far identified 496 stars likely to be within 20 parsecs, of which 195
are additions to nearby-star catalogues. Most of the newly-identified nearby
stars have spectral types between M4 and M8.
