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Letter
Last week we had an office outing to the National
Theatre’s Coram
Boy, which is adapted from Jamilah Gavin’s
excellent novel. It was the most inspiring, imaginative
evening because the play, in keeping with its
subject-matter, has a raw, rough-edged, genuine
quality that kept the audience enthralled.
The book, and the play, were inspired by the
history of the Foundling
Hospital, the grounds of which, now called
Coram’s
Fields, are at the top of our street; when
the first foundlings were admitted in 1741, Lamb’s
Conduit Street had already been built for more
than thirty years: we sometimes imagine the women
with their babies walking past our house and going
on up towards the Hospital. The
National Theatre programme has part of a 1746
map of London (reproduced below) showing the Foundling
Hospital in the middle of Lamb’s Conduit
Fields (although our part of the street was then
still called Red Lyon Street). American readers
will be pleased to know that Coram Boy
is opening on Broadway in May.
Otherwise: last week Emily went to Kings Lynn
to do the annual count of our books – they
are stored there and then every three weeks we
have two or three thousand delivered; a film company
came in to to see us and we tried to persuade
them that all our books would make great films
(perhaps not the cookery books, although Vicomte
de Mauduit had an extraordinary life); we
showed a great film, They
Were Sisters, based on the Dorothy
Whipple novel; meanwhile we are getting closer
to making a decision about the look of the Persephone
Classics (to be launched in the spring of 2008),
who will print them, how they will be distributed…
Do read this thought-provoking review of Princes
in the Land, this lovely New Statesman
review of Plats
du Jour, and take an admiring look at
the picture of my beautiful new hot-water bottle,
knitted for me by Jane of yarnstorm.
There have been so many comments on the yarnstorm
blog about my ‘bouillotte’ that I
feel rather embarrassed, or is it smug, that the
grey cable stitch, which I snuggle up to every
night, is the object of so much envy!
We have at last sent House-Bound and
The Shuttle (our two new books for the
Spring) to the printer. They were a great deal
of work; the former - presumably because it was
published during the war - was littered with errors
and typos (picked up by Kitty Blair and Harriet
Lambert, our stalwart proof-readers); and the
latter we decided to cut by a quarter ie from
700 to 500 pages. It is time-consuming and tricky
making sure the narrative flows along and that
there are no references to someone or something
that has been cut out earlier on.
Finally, there was a photograph of Sarah Waters’
study in the interesting Guardian series of ‘Writer’s
rooms’;prominent above her desk was
her bright red ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’
poster. You can buy this from Barter
Books or from us in Lamb’s Conduit Street;
we can exclusively reveal that Sarah came in to
buy her poster from us.
Nicola Beauman
30 January 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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| Coram's Fields Map |
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