Letter

So the new Biannually and Catalogue have gone out, the orders are starting to come in and we are only a couple of days away from the busiest month of the year (which, curiously, is November not December). As always, it is interesting seeing whether one book sells more quickly than another. This week it is the Dorothy Whipple short stories, The Closed Door, because of the wonderful readings of five of them on the radio last week (they can still be accessed on the web here, some Whipple fans having been able to listen to them several times!) 

But as Christmas approaches the other two books will catch up – The Young Pretenders is ideal both for children aged between about 9 and 14 and for adults who will see in Babs one of the great characters in fiction, and On the Other Side is perfect for the historically-minded and for anyone who wants to compare it with Few Eggs and No Oranges, A House in the Country and our other books about the war.  Both The Closed Door and The Young Pretenders were reviewed in the Spectator, on 20th October and 27th October. 

The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week was Joel Joffé, who features prominently in Hilda Bernstein’s The World that was Ours because, at the Rivonia Trial, he represented Hilda’s husband Rusty, and of course Nelson Mandela and the other ‘men of Rivonia’.  He has just published his own account of the trial, The State Vs. Nelson Mandela.

The radio has been on in the background a lot this week as we have been busy doing all the things connected with publishing the new books: sending out the standing orders, decorating the shop windows (where you can see the dress fabric we used for The Closed Door), welcoming the ‘envelope stuffers’ who nobly come to the shop to send out the 1500 Biannuallies and Catalogues to those living abroad (our printer, Lavenham, does the 8500 to those in the UK).

We did find time to go to the opening of the fourth, and alas final, part of the Geffrye Museum exhibition of the urban domestic interior, at which Sir Nicholas Serota commented on the continuity of English domestic life over the four exhibitions so superbly guest-curated by Charlotte Gere. You can see a few of the paintings here.

And I just about found time to read the papers, being especially mesmerised this week by the obituary of Countess Andrée de Jongh who created an escape route for allied airmen out of Nazi-occupied Europe which you can read here.

Finally, here is the lovely Persephone bookcase belonging to one of our readers:

Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
30 October 2007