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Letter
On Monday Persephone was at the Cheltenham
Festival, where we were moved into the big hall to accommodate the three
hundred people who had come to hear Salley Vickers, Penelope Lively and myself
select two of our favourite books to talk about. Penelope chose The
Far Cry and The
Carlyles at Home and I chose Someone
at a Distance and Manja;
alas, Salley Vickers had had to go home because she was ill (she would have
chosen The Priory and Miss
Ranskill Comes Home) so Penelope extended her talk and I was able
to touch on a few topics such as ‘how do we choose our books?’ After
some to-the-point questions we sold more than a hundred books in twenty minutes,
chatted to a good number of readers, and collapsed over a cup of tea with
Penelope Lomax, a Persephone fan who is on the festival committee and very
kindly organised the event.
Since then it has been a normal week in the shop, except not so normal because
I did Saturday and found it incredibly funny and a bit disconcerting. There
was the usual trickle of Saturday morning shoppers and then I was asked whether
I would exchange four copies of The
Wise Virgins because some members of a book group had started reading
it and didn’t get on with it. One of them had already taken her copy
back to Ottakars, even though she didn’t buy it there! Do people
do this? It would never occur to me to exchange a book because it didn’t
take my fancy once I’d begun it. Yet apparently it goes on all the time.
(But isn’t this what libraries are for? or am I just being annoying?)
James (computer whiz) and me were no sooner recovering from this over Cinzano,
our normal tipple, an opened bottle keeps so wonderfully well, I tell James
that when he gets to Delhi next year – for, good grief, three years – and
drinks Cinzano on the rocks one humid evening, his nostalgia for our quiet
evenings in Lamb’s Conduit Street will be so great that he’ll come
straight back; anyway, no sooner had we recovered from the Wise
Virgins exchanger when a man came in and told us (‘may I speak
frankly?’) that he didn’t like the way our books are printed. I
bristled, rather as a mother does when someone criticises her child, couldn’t
think of anything to say and longed to be Claudia FitzHerbert, cf. her ‘Diary
of a Stockmistress’ columns about life at the wonderful QI
bookshop in Oxford. She always managed to find a polite retort and was
funny about it.
Then the afternoon was redeemed by a flow of lovely customers and by a man
who bought every single book for his wife; and as the street grew dark and
James went off to a young-marrieds dinner party in Clapham we went back to
North London thinking how varied life is – the delight and charm of the
audience at Cheltenham, the crossness and criticism of the book-exchanger and
the print-deplorer, the good humour and kindness of all the other Saturday
afternoon customers and of ninety-nine per cent of Persephone readers.
Curiously, I had managed to slip The
Wise Virgins into my talk at Cheltenham and am glad I did. It
is a superbly written book, not as good as Howards End but in
that league. I cannot recommend it highly enough for a book group! And
of course it comes into the new Victoria Glendinning biography of Leonard
Woolf, published this month. At the (excellent) Cheltenham
Art Gallery I found this poster, which I have never seen before. It’s
from the Robert Opie collection:
Now I’m going to make some flapjacks as per the wonderful yarnstorm.blogs.com the
only blog I ever seem to find time to read. So anyone coming into the office
this afternoon will be offered tea and flapjacks.
Finally, do come along to the Bloomsbury
Festival next weekend - The Lamb’s Conduit shops are participating
by having a blown-up photograph by Mark Thomas in the window. Ours is of
Emily – and of course of a bookshelf of Persephone books.
Nicola Beauman
15 October 2006
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street | 
