Letter

Summer has truly arrived on Lamb’s Conduit Street. We now keep the shop doors open all day to enjoy the warm sun and the lovely cross breeze wafting between the street and the back garden. It is a time of year when one is particularly conscious of the city’s vibrancy and spirit, and concurrently, of its history – especially here in Bloomsbury.

Having just read Leonard Woolf’s The Wise Virgins, Persephone Book No 43, such historical imaginings of the famed Bloomsbury literati have been forefront in my mind. I was further reminded of the past today, in fact, when a visiting customer asked if the rumour was true that Virginia and Leonard Woolf used the pillar-box across the road. We, of course, like to think so. Moreover, at the turn of the 20th century, the building Persephone Books now occupies was a grocer’s, so the Woolfs might have come through our front door to do their shopping.

This week another visitor to the shop brought up the Bloomsbury link through a discussion on walking London’s streets. Talking to him, I was reminded of my MA dissertation last year, in which I looked at the female flâneur, or urban rambler, in early 20th century London through Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays. Woolf was a self-confirmed ‘street-haunter’ of London, one who used the peripatetic, I argued, to seek out London’s elusive ‘soul’. It was with great interest, therefore, that I read The Wise Virgins, which contains clear biographical elements; one of the novel’s central figures, Camilla, shares many qualities with Virginia, who at the time of writing, Leonard had just married.

It truly has been a fortnight filled with Persephone’s Bloomsbury Group writers, as I have just finished Virginia Woolf’s Flush, Persephone Book No 55. I wanted to read this ‘biography’ in honour of Sasha, our beloved office Cavalier King Charles spaniel who very sadly died last week. A soothing tonic indeed to then read Woolf’s paean to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush. Virginia, who had a spaniel of her own, brilliantly captures the important role a dog can play in an owner’s life.

On a happier note, we are pleased to report that our summer books – Alas, Poor Lady and Gardener’s Nightcap – have been flying out of the shop. The fritillary endpaper on Gardener’s Nightcap is particularly redolent of the season. In Country Life Mark Griffiths praised the flowers profusely in an article entitled: ‘Thank goodness for the fritillaries of Oxford’. He notes that ‘these rare drifts of pixilated purple (…) capture sunshine like lanterns composed of the most intricate glass mosaics’. ‘Fritillary’ can now be purchased as fabric in the shop. We look forward to another flowery endpaper with one of our September titles, A Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff (see endpaper above).

Emily Hill
30 June 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street