| Letter
I have just come back in some some triumph
from a trip to our new German printer, GGP in
Possneck. Last Monday they printed the first
three Classics, Someone at a Distance, Good
Evening, Mrs Craven and Miss
Pettigrew Lives for a Day. They
look simply beautiful, though I say it myself,
and are recognisably a Persephone book. The
selling process starts this week – I am
going to Pan Macmillan (who are doing our sales
and distribution) to talk to the sales reps,
five hundred of each of the covers have arrived
in the office to be sent out to anyone whom
we think might be interested in them, and on
Tuesday the books arrive on huge pallets at
Swansea, Dartford and (a thousand of each title)
in the shop. Here is the cover of Someone
at a Distance:
One of the reasons for speeding along with
the publication process is that the film of Miss
Pettigrew will be released in
the US in March and in the UK later in the
year. Click
here to view the trailer.
Cranford on BBC1 on Sunday evenings
is hugely enjoyable and interesting, and the
acting superb. AA Gill wrote about it brilliantly
in the Sunday Times, remarking that ‘you
will see better acting on television in any given
week than in any other dramatic medium. Simply
in terms of skill, range and honesty, television
buries film at the moment.’ I am
not sure that I completely agree with this but
I did agree with his conclusion: ‘We have
a particularly strong cast of actresses who find
themselves in their prime. The reason there
are so many of them in Cranford is that
the only people who will write decent parts for
them are dead lady novelists, and that’s
not just a shame, it’s a sinful waste of
a great national resource.’
The Sunday Times also
had a fascinating interview with Nick Hornby,
who bravely declared that he thinks a lot of
modern books are boring because ‘quite
a misguided literary culture has grown up in
the twentieth century that says a book has to
have a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness
of language. At the same time, I think
this literary culture has developed a mistrust
of comedy, and also, quite often, of narrative. It
has turned novels into something they were never
meant to be. They’re read by very
few people and talked abut by very few people,
while vast swathes of the population are vaguely
repelled by them.’ I can reveal,
without I hope being indiscreet, that Nick Hornby
sometimes comes into the shop and buys books,
so we can be sure that he does not think our
books lack comedy and narrative; Persephone books are serious,
but because they are entertaining you have to
have to be quite subtley responsive to see the
serious moral purpose – which our
readers are of course.
Here is a charming and thought-provoking article by
Harry Eyres about Mrs Dalloway and
whether or not novels are good for us. And, to
continue the theme of the last Fortnightly Letter,
here is a thought-provoking article by
Brian Aldiss about climatic meltdown and science
fiction. I admired the polemical wit of
the opening: 'If only we had called it "climate
climax". Climate climax sounds like
something worth worrying about...Alas, global
warming sounds all too soothing, especially for
those living in Skegness.'
Nicola Beauman
Lambs Conduit Street
30 November ‘07
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