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Letter
For all publishers January is stock-taking and royalty
statement month; however, the Persephone Books methods
for both are a little different from the norm. For the
former we count the number of copies of each book that
remains in the shop, add it to the number of books still
in store in Norfolk – and then we know, fairly accurately,
how many have been sold and how many are left. (Most people
in the book trade are now dependent on bar-code labels,
but we only put them on for some bookshops; otherwise we
prefer not to deface our beautiful grey jackets.) Once
we know how many books are in stock we know how many have
been sold, and then we can do royalty statements, the family,
the agent, or the author him or herself, receiving seven
and a half per cent of publisher’s receipts. This
is not a huge sum, but with a print run of 3000 yielding
around £2000 the authors or their estates seem to
be fairly pleased with their twice-yearly royalty cheques.
Apart from all this post-Christmas sort-out, the main
task is to get the books for 2006 into production: the
final proof-read of the March books, the copy for the jackets,
the choosing of the fabrics for the endpapers, the first
draft of the PQ. None of this would be possible without
James Twist, who has done all our design and computer work
since we first began in 1998. He comes to the office after
his day job and over olives and Cinzano (neither of us
will ever be able to drink Cinzano in future without thinking
of those evenings in Lamb’s Conduit Street as the
shops round about us close up and the only sound is of
people hurrying homewards), over our evening tipple we
work on the new covers and jackets, the PQ, the postcards,
the flyer… (We now have a very stylish A5 flyer,
if anyone has a shop or a hotel or even a doctor’s
surgery where they feel that a pile of A5 Persephone flyers
would not be annoying, please let us know and we will send
a batch.)
Another January task is to try and find some of the books
recommended to us over the preceding few weeks, Christmas
being far too busy to allow time for that kind of reading.
We either buy books off abe.com or
go along to the London Library or the British Library -
unless they are books one of us happens to have read already,
such as novels by Ann Bridge or Stella Gibbons or the Findlater
sisters, in which case we merely write a regretful postcard;
otherwise one of us reads the book; very occasionally a
Persephone Book is discovered (cf. the piece on 'How
we Choose our Books' on the website).
The book count has revealed that the recent
besellers have been Miss
Pettigrew, How
to Run Your Home without Help and They
Were Sisters. But Emily Hill, who has taken over
the running of the office from Jess (who has gone on to
better things) is reading Lettice
Delmer and loving it. 'In an easy to read verse
format,' Emily says, 'it brilliantly portrays a young girl's
sudden and brutal launch into adulthood. I'm not surprised
T.S. Eliot sang its praises.' Who knows, through Emily’s
efforts Lettice
Delmer may yet feature on our list of perennial
bestsellers: Miss
Pettigrew, Someone
at a Distance, Good
Evening, Mrs Craven, Few
Eggs and No Oranges, Good
Things in England, Saplings, Little
Boy Lost, The
Making of a Marchioness, Kitchen
Essays and The
Far Cry.
Meanwhile, the Ottawa Citizen has just published this delightful article
about us:
www.canada.com
Lastly - it is no longer quite so dark at teatime but this picture is very
much in the spirit of Lamb's Conduit Street at the moment:
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'Wet Winter Evening and a Book
Lover in Bloomsbury': Sicilian Avenue
WC1 in the 1930s. |
Nicola Beauman
15 January 2006
Lamb's Conduit Street
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