Letter

An old friend, and a great supporter, of Persephone Books died this week: Peggy Jay was a formidable and life-enhancing matriarch quite unlike anyone else.  I wrote a little piece about her for the Independent, and do read the other two pieces - by Ruth Gorb (who by the way wrote our preface to A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair), and by Julia Cleverdon, which brings out Peggy’s irreverence for domesticity, combined with a devotion to her friends and families, which was, oddly enough, a brilliant combination.  Peggy was the generation that never learnt to cook (was this the same generation that never learnt to type?) and she was hugely puritan about the kind of values expressed so eloquently by Jane Brockett on yarnstorm.  Yet the two of them would have had a great deal in common. Curious.

January is a time of wishing one had been less hedonistic at Christmas, scurrying to get the tax return in on time, and assessing past and future.  At Persephone Books, where we still have not caught up on data-basing the pre-Christmas orders (very nearly), we are taking a deep breath before three events that are, for us, pretty major (or may be): the launch of the film of Miss Pettigrew at the beginning of March in the States, and possibly here in May; the launch of the first three Persephone Classics at the end of April; and the opening of a second Persephone shop.  It is this last that you may not have heard of before, and yes it has all been rather a rush.  But we have been looking for a while and just before Christmas found a tiny shop in Kensington Church Street, just opposite Sally Clarke’s and along from the Churchill pub (the one with the glorious greenery hanging outside). It will be run by Sophie de Brant, I will be there one day a week, and we hope that all those West London dwellers who never go east of Oxford Circus will enjoy discovering Persephone books for the first time.  We will also sell new books, and will order them in, so we hope The Persephone Bookshop, Notting Hill Gate (which is what it says on official documents) will become as much a part of the Notting Hill landscape as Persephone Books has become in Bloomsbury.  (We are very proud that the new tourist map handed out to people when they arrive at King’s Cross/St Pancras has a picture of our shop in the Bloomsbury section!)

(Actually it’s a picture of the outside of the shop but I thought you might enjoy this.)

There was a nice mention of On the Other Side in Monocle : ‘This is the Second World War you never hear about – an ordinary German civilian’s version.  Living in liberal Hamburg, Wolff-Monckeberg was neither Nazi nor dissident.  The touching everyday account of how Hitler’s Third Reich turns her country into a hateful, alien place comes in the form of letters written to her children abroad.’

Here is an interesting and thought provoking piece by James Wood about what constitutes a fully-rounded character in fiction and here is another interesting article about blogging

Last week we again showed the 1924 silent film of The Home-Maker, which hugely impressed everyone.  Here is a good piece about the book by a Persephone reader, who calls it one of the finest twentieth century novels she has read - we agree, we agree!

Finally, for anyone who has not yet seen the trailer of Miss Pettigrew, here it is on the Apple site.
 
Nicola Beauman
59 Lambs Conduit Street
30th January 2008