Letter

       Turmoil elsewhere but a very quiet fortnight at Persephone Books. Here is Lucy Kellaway’s comparison of today’s financial woes with Mary Poppins. And here is a trenchant article by Chris Blackhurst in the Evening Standard. In some ways the calm in Lamb’s Conduit Street has been useful: we have been able to get the Biannually and the Catalogue to the printer (it starts being sent out on Monday) and peacefully save the data base (which we also send to the printer) and other tasks like that.  We now have 11,000 UK readers, 2000 people living abroad (our kind 'envelope stuffers' come in and mail to them) and two thousand people who will get a letter asking them, very very politely, whether they wish to stay on the mailing list because, it seems, they have not bought a book for eighteen months.

   When the new Biannually has gone out we expect the peace and quiet in the office to come to an end! Book buyers are (we hope) not greatly affected by a recession, or an economic downturn, or a credit crunch – whatever name you choose – because books are perceived as good value.  Indeed, how lovely to be able to give someone a copy of the Classic Miss Pettigrew or Someone at a Distance for £9 (which is what it is from us, although it can still sometimes be found on the three for two table); or indeed to buy any of our eighty-one grey books for £10 from us (£12 in other bookshops).

   For those of you who can get to Lymington in Hampshire there is an exhibition opening this week which runs until 10th January. Gill Clarke, who wrote the book on Evelyn Dunbar and curated the exhibition to accompany it, has now curated The Women’s Land Army: A Portrait and written the book.  Works by Evelyn Dunbar, Laura Knight and Randolph Schwabe will be featured. And do look at some of the decorated papers collected by Tanya Schmoller over fifty years.  They are so beautiful that we are tempted to start another small publishing house using decorated papers on the endpapers, which is what they were meant for in the first place – so the exhibition is called To Brighten Things Up.

   The most interesting book I have read this week is Real Food by Nina Planck who started the farmers markets in London.  Now I am reading a novel by Gissing called Isabel Clarendon - it was hard to track down but is slightly disappointing.

Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
15 October 2008