| Letter
I am just off to Minneapolis, to meet the people
at Consortium, our new American distributor. I
am very much looking forward to it, although
the journey there is a little more complicated
than walking up to King’s Cross to talk
to the people from Pan Macmillan (our British
distributor)! April 24th is the official
date when the three Persephone Classics will
be in bookshops here; in the States Miss
Pettigrew should be available
a month earlier to coincide with the film. And
by then we hope to have the audio book, which
Frances McDormand is recording for us in New
York at the end of January. Here is a sweet
article about Winifred Watson that appeared in
the Newcastle
Chronicle.
We have also
been busy getting the three April books (the
grey books or, officially, the Originals) to
the printer. But one of the enjoyable things
about this quieter, post-Christmas period is
that we have more time to talk to people who
come into the shop. Some
are on holiday and make a special trip, some
have seen mentions of us in magazines (for example,
the author of a recent piece in Elle about
Bloomsbury said that she ‘popped into tiny
Persephone Books for their lovely reprints of
lost literature’ before going to Camden
Passage, Margaret Howell, and Simon Finch for
first editions). Then Wendy Holden in Red magazine’s
February issue chose as her favourite book (‘romantic
heaven’) Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The
Making of a Marchioness.
And January’s 25
Beautiful Homes chose
our ‘beautiful books’ as one of their
twenty-five ‘shopping finds’.
All
these mentions bring new customers to the shop
and to the website. As do, for example,
reviews of Adam Gopnik’s Through
the Children’s Gate (just
released in the UK in paperback). The Observer wrote: ‘His
writing is founded on a playfulness that is the
opposite of light heartedness. Gopnik’s
carefully looped arcs of association and comparison
have all the earnestness of one of his children’s
games but, as with a child playing, there is
also honesty. His observations are a delight
when they correlate, but equally pleasing when
his world-wise but not world-weary thoroughness
avoids neat conclusions. A section on Molly
Hughes’s book, A
London Child of the 1870s,
pursues the sense that ‘there
was some real connection with our word and Molly’s’,
yet the chapter ends with an admonition: Gopnik
is not connected to Molly ‘by the strange
serendipity of things’, nor ‘because
our lives are alike’. Instead, ‘I
am connected to her because there are no ordinary
lives.’ It’s
the sort of sage epiphany that lifts Gopnik’s
writing above individual experience into something
universal, if never universalizing.’ You
can of course read the whole of Adam Gopnik’s
piece about A
London Child of the 1870s in
our edition of the book, for which he wrote
the Preface.
Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
15th January 2008 |
