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Letter
Having just returned from the Austrian Wörthersee (from a wonderful hotel
in an 1891 villa which luckily seems to have changed very little in a hundred
years: rooms overlooking a large lawn and a wooden jetty on the lake, little
to do apart from swim and go for gentle walks) life at Persephone Books is
so hectic on the two days a week we are open that I cannot imagine how those
chic Parisians, who close for the whole of August, manage to remain calm during
catch-up September.
One of the reasons we remain busy is that our readers do not forget us, nor,
happily, does the press. Thus in Country
Life for 10th August there is an article about independent bookshops and,
accompanying a conventional enough photograph of books on shelves, a delightful
photograph of someone’s hands lovingly holding three Persephone books.
There is no caption saying, these grey books are Persephone books; it appears
that the readers of Country Life will recognise them as such. (The hands apparently
belong to Anna Dreda who runs Wenlock
Books winner of the Aurum Press Independent Bookseller of the Year
Award and always a staunch friend to Persephone Books).
Then we have been receiving telephone calls from new readers who have seen
the delightful review (and picture) of Gardener’s
Nightcap in House
and Garden and have taken advantage of its special offer. Others have written
to tell us about the reviews in America of Every
Eye (mentioned in the Fortnightly
Letter for 15th July) and Edge has kindly alerted us to its lovely
review of Good
Things in England.
The Wörthersee is where Gustav Mahler, and his wife Alma, built a house and
a writing hut in which he composed Symphonies 4,5,6,7, and 8. We walked up
to the hut, and to the top of the wood which he used to walk through to get
there. It was the servants who apparently took a steeper, quicker path, virtually
up a wooded cliff, to bring him his breakfast. Devoted as we are to Mahler’s
music, we could not help wondering how many women composers or writers managed
to organise other people into delivering their breakfast to their room of their
own in the middle of a wood…
Is there a feminist branch of ‘psychogeography’? No, I had not
heard of it either, but there was a very good article about it in the New
Statesman on 4th August. Apparently it is ‘the study of the specific
effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of individuals’. For some reason psychogeographers
are all men. Perhaps it is just that women have been writing about psycho-y
(Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway
walking about London, EH Young and her heroines living in terrace houses in
Clifton) but not calling it that?
And to end with: do have a look Fidra
Books’ website. They are reissuing some of the pony books by Joanna
Cannan (author of Princes
in the Land), and also the wonderful Bunkle books by Margot Pardoe
(1902-96). Many of Fidra’s titles will have been favourites of older
Persephone readers but the books my children used to dote on are the Bunkle
books. The first to be reissued is Bunkle’s
Brainwave on 4th September. It will be interesting to see how it weathers
in the twenty-first century.
Nicola Beauman
Lambs Conduit Street
15 August 2006 | 
