Letter

As I write this the Lamb's Conduit Street Festival is happening – we are offering free mulled wine (and chat, bookish of course) and outside there is live music, various things to eat, artists exhibiting their work, a tug of war, face-painting and story telling. We are about to put up the Christmas decorations and are also painting the cupboard in Joanna's room (grey, naturally). She starts on Monday, her task being to launch the Persephone Classics. And a huge task it is: for example, she/we have to decide which books will be the classics; do a mock-up of the design; choose a printer; find a distributor; persuade bookshops to stock the books; find a publicist; and all this while keeping the cost as low as possible yet retaining the classiness of our look (the grey, the endpaper fabric).

Books No. 71 and 72 were to have been Winifred Peck's Housebound and some Dorothy Whipple short stories, but last week we discovered that the American Museum at Claverton near Bath is to have an exhibition called Dollar Princesses, about American heiresses who married English aristocrats: www.americanmuseum.org. This will run from March to October next year, and since dollar princesses is the theme of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle we have brought our autumn publication date forward and the book is being rapidly typeset. (Any fabric suggestions? It must be 1907, aristocratic yet domestic, American and English - the title of the book refers to shuttling back and forth over the Atlantic - and we need it soon…)

Recent Persephone events: last Saturday we took books to a village hall at West Stoke near Chichester; it was idyllically set among fields on a quiet road and was built about a hundred years ago as the village hall or school, so one had a very soothing feeling of people gathering there for meetings, teas, lunches and indeed parties for many many years. Forty-five Persephone readers came and had tea and WI cakes and bought books. The next day we went to see Annabel Munn, the incredibly gifted ceramicist and tile-maker who makes the Persephone mugs (as well as the jug and sugar bowl). We nearly fainted with joy when we discovered she has recently made our grey mugs and added a small circle of the same pinkish red that we use in the PQ. They are almost more beautiful than the classic Persephone mug if this is possible; and will be in the shop soon.

Then on Tuesday Hermione Lee gave the Second Persephone Lecture at the Art Workers Guild. It was about Edith Wharton and was a most beautifully structured and delivered talk about her life, her work, and the process of researching the biography (which comes out in February). We felt very lucky to be hearing about Edith Wharton weeks in advance of its publication and about a women who 'is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a fiercely modern author, writing of sex, love, money and war – a woman of strong convictions and conflicting ambitions and desires.'

Two nights later I went along to Queen's College, Harley Street (coincidentally Hermione Lee’s old school), where both Katherine Mansfield and Patience Gray went, and in the library (where all three must have worked) we drank wine and ate delicious food and talked about both of them.

'A true gem' is what Jane Mornement, one of the contributors to the Guardian's Books-Shoptalk–London's finest bookshops calls us. 'The official shop of the independent women's publishers, it is a joy to visit. From the bell that tinkles when you enter, to the stripped wooden floors, to the walls piled high with the beautiful dove-grey Persephone books (all with bookmarks to match the individual endpapers), and the knowledgeable and friendly staff. The atmosphere is conducive to spending the whole afternoon in there, perched on a low chair.'

Finally, do look at Scott Pack's piece about professional critics versus online reviewers, which is in response to Rachel Cooke's Observer article, 'Deliver us from these latter-day Pooters'. Hers was the best kind of journalism – well written, opinionated, and thought-provoking. Her basic point was that bloggers have taken over from the kind of people who used to talk on phone-ins and she questioned whether anyone with a serious interest in literature – or indeed in anything – should ever bother to read them rather than the kind of reviewers to be found on Arts and Letters Daily. As you can imagine, her views have caused huge debate in the blogosphere.

Talking of professional critics - do read Matthew Dennison's touching and perceptive review of The Fortnight in September in this week's Spectator.

Nicola Beauman
30 November 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street