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Letter
‘I can't believe I've just discovered you. I'm
enthralled, amazed, astounded, enchanted and ecstatic!
Possibly some other nice adjectives too, but I'll save
those for when I start my Persephone collection. Adore
the most lovely endpapers!’ It would be boastful
to say that we receive emails like this often, but they
are not infrequent and mean a huge amount to us. This one,
from America, was likely to have been prompted by an item
about us in the March issue of Domino magazine.
Other compliments are more cerebral. Michael Moorcock,
who has always been a fan of our books (which is why we
were bold enough to ask him to write the Preface to The
Hopkins Manuscript),
began a review in the Guardian thus: ‘It’s
conventional to mourn the dearth of good idiosyncratic
publishers, but smaller presses are still turning out excellent
work. In England these include Savoy Books, Menard Press,
Persephone Books and PS Publishing, while Dalkey Archive,
based in the US has one of the most impressive lists in
the world’: we have to admit that one or two of these
we had to rush to google to look up.
Then again, sometimes we just appear in photographs, but stylishly so: on page
172 of Joanne Harris’s new book on The French Market the sharp-eyed
can pick out a row of Persephone books on top of an elegant small desk next
to a window seat.
Many of you wrote to us after there was an article about
Ootacamund in The Times (The
Times Raj
books 21 Jan 06): the author mentioned Mollie
Panter-Downes’s great book Ooty Preserved and
praised us for championing her short stories. Could we
not reprint the book we were asked? Alas not. (It would
not sell enough copies…)
Two other Persephone-related items: there is now an article
about Dorothy
Whipple on the Blackburn
website. And a new translation of a book by Javier
Marias called Written Lives has a piece about
Violet Hunt (the real-life Claire Temple in Norah Hoult’s There
Were No Windows); we have not read the book yet
but will report back.
Finally, Saga magazine chose A
London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes
as one of their ten best books for February. With the
better weather we will be re-starting our walks round
the streets of Islington in order to deliver Ann Usborne’s
postcard of the house where it was set. For those who
will not receive one, here it is:
Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
15 February 2006
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