Letter

London is quiet this week because of half term, but the air is intense with the atmosphere of Valentine’s Day - even on the tube the young man strap-hanging next to me was clutching a couple of long-stemmed red roses. Many Persephone books are good February 14th presents, for example Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Making of a Marchioness and Mariana; yet the most crucial book on the subject of romantic love remains Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (which we sell in the shop, of course, along with the other ‘fifty books we wished we had published’).

Our excitement this week has been the installation of 'google analytics', which tells us how many people go to our website each week and even, spookily, where they live (Cambridge, Bombay, Adelaide). Emily keeps reading out statistics and we wonder about the whys and wherefores, for example why did twenty people go to the page for The Victorian Chaise-longue in the last couple of days? A possible reason, that we can’t know about, is the vast blogging community: although we subscribe to 'google alerts' ('persephone' and 'books') it is very idiosyncratic and much more likely to tell us about a reference to the underworld and reading than about one to Persephone and Books. In any case, most of the mentions we receive in the press do not make google, for example, She magazine ran a picture of some of our books and India Knight recommended Miss Pettigrew; but we would not have known about this unless customers started coming into the shop to tell us.

(If you live in London, do buy Time Out in ten days time and you should find a feature on us and a picture of Emily sending out the orders; we love Time Out - and apparently they love us - and are very pleased that we have been in the Time Out Shopping Guide for the last few years.)

The April books are due from the printer in a couple of weeks; and a few weeks later we should be getting the latest batch of reprints - Miss Pettigrew, for the seventh or eighth time, Every Eye, for the second time, The Montana Stories and The Village. It is wonderful when we 'have' to reprint, although some would say that we had misjudged the demand and should have printed more in the first place, thereby saving a great deal of money; on the other hand we have to balance this with storage costs.

Dr Jenny Plastow of the University of Hertfordshire has reviewed There Were No Windows by Norah Hoult for the Ford Madox Ford Society newsletter (the book is based on the last years of Ford’s ex-lover, Violet Hunt). It is a long, extremely appreciative review and her assessment is that it is 'a compassionate, amused and engrossing study of the onset of dementia - one of the few in English literature.' We are running a short story by Norah Hoult in the April Persephone Biannually, or the PB as we must now learn to call the PQ. We have been sent a newly-discovered photograph of Norah Hoult:

© Francis Stoner 2007

Finally, if there is anyone reading this who lives in or near Manhattan and would like to come to the Persephone Tea on Saturday April 14th, here is the letter which we have just sent out to East Coast Persephone readers. I am tremendously looking forward to this, the second event we have had abroad (the first was in Cape Town for Hilda Bernstein’s The World that was Ours) and hope to meet some of the American readers with whom I have so often exchanged emails.

Nicola Beauman
15 February 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street