RSS Letter

15 July 2010

In the Observer for July 4th Rachel Cooke told readers that when she went on holiday she would be taking Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary as her neglected classic.

30 June 2010

There is an end of term feeling here because we have sent the two new books, and the Persephone Ninety (all ourfabrics in a diary for 2011), to the printer: the moment for discovering typos has passed.

15 June 2010

Whilst Nicola, Fiona and Clara were fulfilling all the special offer orders, Lydia was in China. She writes:

30 May 2010

One of the regular attendees of the Wednesday evening book group, Christine Godwin, has written about The Casino, the last book we discussed...

15 May 2010

May we recommend the latest exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, A Garden within Doors: Plants and Flowers in the Home.

30 April 2010

So the orders are flowing in but all of us in the office are clearing our diaries tonight in order to listen to 'Monsieur Rose' on 7.45 on Radio 3.

15 April 2010

We are back from holiday and concentrating on getting things ready for the two new books that are published next week - the Biannually will be sent out on Monday to UK readers, a week later to those abroad.

30 March 2010

Here are some charming photographs of the apartment in the film of Miss Pettigrew.

15 March 2010

The Fabian Tracts are now online as are the original notebooks in which Maud Pember Reeves and her friends recorded the women of Lambeth's weekly expenditure

28 February 2010

When people write to us with suggestions of books that they would like to see reprinted we try to reply quickly

15 February 2010

Last week English Heritage unveiled a new blue plaque to commemorate the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61).

30 January 2010

Last week Lydia was in Rome, this week I was in Leipzig, and went to La Traviata at the opera house and to a Bach Cantata at the Thomaskirche, which is where the Cantatas were originally written; and walked around Leipzig in the snow.

15 January 2010

This is the list of the ten 2009 bestsellers at Watermark Books and Caf� in Wichita, Kansas

30 December 2009

In The Bookseller, The Hungerford Bookshop's co-owner Emma Milne-White picked Noel Streatfeild's Saplings as her 'Reading for Pleasure' favourite.

15th December 2009

As I write this I am listening to a Woman's Hour interview with Alice Walpole, HM consul-general in southern Iraq.

30th November 2009

Last week I went to a talk in the Guildhall Library about their collection of cookery books.

15th November 2009

The Times ran a list of the 100 best books of the decade.

30th October 2009

The new Persephone Biannually and Catalogue have been sent out

15th October 2009

Author of Persephone book no. 81 Miss Buncle's Book, D E Stevenson had one very famous cousin in the writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

30th September 2009

Swansea University's English Literature department is running a course on Gender and the Great War this autumn.

15th September 2009

I have read several very good books recently - the newest Penelope Lively Family Album, the newest Sebastian Faulks A Week in December (the satire on the literary world is particularly good) and a wonderful memoir by Celia Robertson called Who Was Sophie?

30th August 2009

Here is an extract about the goddess Persephone from pp 59-61 of Karen Armstrong's new book called The Case for God...

15th August 2009

There is a very empty August feeling about London, and indeed we have closed the Notting Hill Gate shop for two weeks. Here we have been busy because of this article about us in You magazine in the Mail on Sunday. Lots of people have rung and or asked for a biannually and catalogue on the internet, and a gratifying number of people have made the effort to come to Bloomsbury and visit us.

30th July 2009

We are back from Port Eliot (cf. this week's Persephone Post and also cf. this evocative description), our clothes have dried and we have had two good nights' sleep, which have given us the energy to tackle various looming tasks - royalty statements, working on the translation of the N�mirovsky short stories we are doing next spring, beginning the October Persephone Biannually, doing a final proof read of the autumn books and so on.

15th July 2009

Lydia has recently read Sarah Waters' new novel The Little Stranger and writes: It is an English country-house ghost story inspired by, amongst others books, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948).

30 June 2009

We celebrated our tenth birthday during the week of June 15th - 450 people bought two books and received one for free on the internet and 250 people did the same at the shop on June 18th, when coffee, scones, salads, brownies, canap�s and prosecco were served all day.

15 June 2009

My recent evenings have been spent watching Max Ophuls films: his version of The Blank Wall (one of my favourite Persephone books and a great holiday read) was made in 1949 as The Reckless Moment.

30 May 2009

This Fortnightly Letter is being written on one of the rare warm evenings of the year so far. I have been in a deckchair all afternoon, immersed in the privately printed Diaries of an Edwardian writer whose novels I have never read - Mrs Henry Dudeney.

15 May 2009

We had the first teatime Persephone Book Group in the shop yesterday - nine of us had tea and seed cake (from the Farmer's Market in Truro) and talked about Someone at a Distance.

30 April 2009

'Flowers and gardens do not spring from our heads without a history' wrote Robin Lane Fox in the Financial Times in an article about Katherine Mansfield.

15 April 2009

There has been a little ripple of Whipple articles recently - one by Claudia FitzHerbert in the Daily Telegraph

30 March 2009

There was a review of the audiobook of Miss Pettigrew in the Guardian. It was by Sue Arnold and she concluded: 'Yes, it's funny and charming but be warned - there are less charming references to people having a Jew somewhere in the family or being related to Italians and, even worse, Italian ice-cream sellers. Oh well, I dare say Mrs Dalloway felt the same.'

15 March 2009

Jeanette Winterson wrote an article about Shakespeare and Company, the long-established and unique Paris bookshop

28 February 2009

The picture below, of our windowbox, is symbolic of our resolution to get better with the camera. This was prompted by other people on the web being so clever about photographs, and the realisation that when our new website goes live at the end of April we must ourselves be cleverer.

15 February 2009

So the three April books are printed and quite soon it will be time to write the next Persephone Biannually, send off the database to the printer and mail what are now twenty thousand Persephone readers. It will also be our tenth birthday. Funnily enough, I can clearly remember our first mail-order customer ringing up in the spring of 1999. I had come back from the Country Living Fair, at which we had a stand, and from this we gleaned our first one hundred names; one of these rang up on the Monday morning after the Fair and I can see myself sitting in the basement in Great Sutton Street thinking, gosh, our first order. I have a feeling she ordered Someone at a Distance - which would be appropriate as Dorothy Whipple is one of the mainstays of our list.

30 January 2009

Alas, it is the season of deaths: when we showed the film of The Pumpkin Eater at the BFI last week, it became a tribute to the late Harold Pinter (who wrote the script) and the late John Mortimer (Penelope Mortimer's husband). But the death of John Updike really is the end of an era (to use a tired phrase). His fifty years of writing life were unparalleled - why on earth did he never win the Nobel Prize? - and there is no other novel like Couples. (At one point Penguin had let this go out of print and we tried to reprint it - nice try we thought). Also Updike's criticism in eg Hugging the Shore was incomparable.

15 January 2009

After a busy Christmas we were very much looking forward to the January Book Group about Thea Holmes' portrait of Victorian London's most eminent couple: The Carlyles at Home (Persephone Book No. 32). And we were delighted when the custodian of Carlyles House invited all twelve of us to discuss the book at the house itself, even though it is officially closed for the winter.

30 December 2008

We recently walked round Lambeth looking at some of the surviving houses that were the homes for the women in Round about a Pound a Week: Sally Alexander had talked about the book on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London and was so eloquent about the fantastic efforts those 'home-makers' made to run their homes and look after their families as well as they possibly could that we wanted to go and have another look at the streets they lived in. When I came home I reread an article by Margaret Drabble about Amber Reeves. She was of course Maud's daughter but I had forgotten about her novel A Lady and Her Husband (1914) and will be rereading it as soon as possible., courtesy of the London Library.

15 December 2008

Madoff and Blagojevich in the same fortnight - if you were a novelist and making up names for fraudsters you might think blag and made-off rather far fetched. It makes the villain in They Knew Mr Knight seems rather boringly-named. But the book is still as relevant as it ever was and I only hope there are not too many people like Thomas and Celia Blake whose lives have been turned upside down by the Madoffs of this world. There has certainly been a surge in Mr Knight sales recently but maybe it's a coincidence.

30 November 2008

I have just come back from three very restoring nights in Paris: the November events (the House and Garden Fair at Olympia, Bridport Literary Festival, the St Paul's Girls' School Christmas Fair, etc etc) were fun but exhausting and we have all needed a short holiday to get over them! We went by Eurostar (of course) and stayed in the sixth arondissement, at L'Abbaye, and it was the kind of luxurious rest that we badly needed. Also I bought trousers, brogues, a sweet outfit for the eighteen month-old grandchild (Liberty print-ish shirt over pantaloon trousers with braces, cuffs at the ankle in the same print, a cashmere cardigan over them, exceedingly French), a heavenly cot blanket for the grandchild expected in January, and so on and so forth. This morning we went to the organic market on the Boulevard Raspail. And that was the extent of it, apart from delicious meals, hot baths and - essentially - breakfast in bed.

15 November 2008

The next Book Group in the Notting Hill Gate shop, led as usual by Claudia FitzHerbert, is about Katherine Mansfield's The Montana Stories and Journal. To celebrate this, and as a foretaste of the new 'Author of the Month' page on our soon-to-be-revamped website, we are reprinting a piece Claudia wrote for this month's Literary Review. It is about the newly-published Volume 5 of Katherine Mansfield's Letters which, like The Montana Stories, focuses on 1922:

30 October 2008

There is snow outside although still only October - but it provides a good excuse to do nothing in the evening except read beside a log fire. And we are cosy in the shop as we database, serve customers, answer the phone and stuff padded envelopes with books - twelve mail bags a day go out at this time of day. In any case we are trying to conserve our strength before next week, when we have a stand at the House and Garden Fair at Olympia: we hope some of you will be there and please do introduce yourselves. Indeed offers to help on the stand/fetch cups of tea would be gratefully received.

15 October 2008

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.

30 September 2008

I have just come back from New York, where my son-on-law is filming the second series of Flight of the Conchords. Thanks to my heavenly Mac Book Air I was able to write the Persephone Biannually there; it will be sent out on Monday October 20th and should reach UK readers later that week and overseas readers by the beginning of November. I found it slightly surreal writing about the very English (or rather Scottish) Miss Buncle's Book and the exceedingly rural The Country Housewife's Book in the urban atmosphere of Brooklyn's Boerum Hill. But the authors of both books would very much have approved of the Park Slope Food Co-op; formed thirty-five years ago, it is a not-for-profit small supermarket which has thirteen thousand members. Everybody has to work for three hours a month and in return can buy amazingly fresh, local food for twenty to forty per cent less than in a conventional shop. And of course it is an incredible way of creating a community.

15 September 2008

We hope that if you are reading this Fortnightly Letter you received our email about Someone at a Distance being on Book at Bedtime - here is the link if you missed it or want to listen again. (If you are not on our email list please let us know; but do not expect endless emails as we only send them out about half a dozen times a year.) Dorothy Whipple was mentioned in a review in the Guardian of a new history of the publishing firm John Murray: 'The Murray list now included Axel Munthe, Conan Doyle, Fran�oise Sagan and the furiously prolific Dorothy Whipple, who was responsible for single-handedly using up most of the firm's wartime paper ration.' She was not, of course, furiously prolific (alas) but it is true that her two wartime novels, The Priory (1939) and They Were Sisters (1943) are very long.

30 August 2008

Apologies that there was no Fortnightly Letter two weeks ago: I was in the Cotswolds while Rosie, in London, was besieged with orders for Miss Pettigrew. We were in Ebrington near Chipping Camden, from where we went to Hidcote and other wonderful Cotswolds villages. And in our very nice cottage (rented from Rural Retreats) we had local vegetables - sweet corn, spinach, new potatoes, onions, plums, blackberries; and read two biographies of CR Ashbee, who moved his Guild and School of Handicraft to Chipping Campden in 1902. The Guild specialised in metalwork, jewellery, enamelling and furniture and later produced books. Its aim was 'to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist - which is individualistic and often parasitical - and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage.' In Chipping Camden, at the Court Barn Museum there is an exhibition of the work of Margaret Calkin James, which includes lengths of the fabrics we have used for The Runaway and Gardener's Nightcap.

30 July 2008

Only two weeks until the film of Miss Pettigrew opens in the UK, but alas there is not apparently a premiere - maybe all the kind of people who walk down red carpets are in St Tropez. Nevertheless, it will be exciting for British readers of the book finally to be able to see the film. (And here is an article about Amy Adams starring in the forthcoming film of Julie and Julia - an excellent book - with Meryl Streep.) The dvd of Miss Pettigrew is also released in the States at the same time (although having said that I'm not sure if it's legal to import it to the UK while the film is on general release). What is a shame for us is that a search for Miss Pettigrew on amazon.co.uk brings up, quite rightly, both the book and the audiobook; but on amazon.com you wouldn't know it existed unless you went specifically to the audiobook section. So, although Frances McDormand's reading has won an Audio File magazine Earphones Award 'for exceptional audio performance' we have had to ship most of the audiobooks back to the UK. And I am not telling you this is order to have a moan but to give you some insight into the difficulties of being a publisher...

15 July 2008

July is being a very theatrical month for us at Persephone Books. First The Chalk Garden (cf. the 15th June 2008 letter) which is most strongly recommended - the performances are sold out but there are ten seats every day that you can queue for; then, next week, it's the new play by Amy Rosenthal (who worked at Persephone Books for a while!) which is about DH Lawrence and Frieda, and John Middleton Murry and Katharine Mansfield on holiday in Cornwall. The play, which is on at the Hampstead Theatre, is called On the Rocks and you can read a few of the (excellent) reviews here. Sarah Hemming began her review in the Financial Times:'This is the time of year when couples who have arranged to go on holiday together suddenly have a moment's doubt about the wisdom of the enterprise. A trip to Amy Rosenthal's new play might be therapeutic. For no matter how frosty the atmosphere might become over the cooking rota, it surely cannot be as grisly as the experiment in communal living on view here.' Too late to change plans now, and most of us won't be in a situation where one genius plus wife goes on holiday with another genius plus husband, but an intriguing play for anyone who is going to be bent over a unfamiliar stove in a rented cottage pretending they are Alice Waters (cf. Chez Panisse menus for this week) while being unusually jolly and loquacious.

30 June 2008

We have just received the (rather wonderful!) covers for the next three Persephone Classics, which are Mariana, Little Boy Lost and Kitchen Essays (to be published in October). The latter has had a little boost recently because it is mentioned in Kate Colquhoun's Taste: the Story of Britain through its Cooking, newly out in paperback. In it Kate Colquhoun writes about a new breed of cookery writers which emerged in the 1920s: they were 'wry, cultured and ineffably polite, their outlook was as light and refreshing as their souffl�s, chaudfroids, iced coupes and chicken mousses; they loathed starch and delighted in discernment... Agnes Jekyll cooked 'friendly' rice pudding with marmalade and egg yolks and re-baptised roast leg of mutton the more alluring 'Gigot de six heures', a modern take on Eliza Acton's version with its cloves of garlic, vegetables, claret and brandy. She simmered tomatoes in consomm�, straining and softening them with whipped cream into a soup, and she transformed mashed potato from stiff tastelessness into something 'not much thicker than a well-made apple sauce', thinned with butter, stock or boiling milk and mashed with a clove of garlic.' And so on.

15 June 2008

Last week we showed the 1964 film of The Pumpkin Eater at the BFI. Thirty-six awestruck Persephone readers watched what seemed to us to be one of the greatest films we had ever seen. �The script (by Harold Pinter) was extraordinary, the direction (by Jack Clayton) ditto and it was one of the most profound, and saddest, films I had ever seen about the relations been men and women (in this case the married couple played by Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft). Yet it is very hard to see The Pumpkin Eater unless one is lucky enough to catch it on late night telly. (However, the book we have just republished by Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, will be discussed on Radio 4's A Good Read this Tuesday afternoon June 17th at 4.30, repeated at 11pm on Friday 20th June).

15 May 2008

Yesterday we had a lunch in the office at which Valerie Grove talked about Penelope Mortimer and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. She said that while she was researching her book, A Voyage round John Mortimer, she began to realise that, although John Mortimer is a hugely popular and successful novelist and playwright, his first wife Penelope is actually the better writer. Valerie told us something about John and Penelope's turbulent married life and also pointed out how extraordinary it was that Penelope managed to write at all when so much was going on in her life. The story in the current Persephone Biannually, for example, is completely autobiographical; but it takes a great writer to sit with her family all around her (Valerie described the Mortimer household as being one of continual coming-and-going, every piece of furniture covered with the children's things, Penelope never able to have 'a room of her own') and yet produce great literature. (Do look up Penelope's entry in the DNB by the way; this is free for British readers - you can access it very simply by typing in your fourteen digit library card number on this page).

30 April 2008

The news came through last week that the film of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is being released in the UK in August. We discovered this in an article about the film in the Observer and were touched to see that the journalist who wrote the story had remembered Emily Hill's comment way back last year - that 'when you have finished reading Miss Pettigrew you want to put on a frock and go out to a party': a wonderful summing-up of both book and film.

15 April 2008

The new Biannually is going out tomorrow and should arrive by this weekend; although of course it will take a while to reach our overseas readers (whose copies are put in envelopes by the six kind Persephone readers who come and spend the day in the office in order to send out the fifteen hundred 'foreigns'). Most of the content of the Biannually is on our website, but although more than half our readers are regular web-users, we are a long way from abolishing the hard copy. In any case we do not want to abandon the 'flick and click' principle (you flick through a catalogue and then order on line or ring up with the hard copy beside you from which you have already made your choices).

30 March 2008

Christina Hardyment came to the office last week and talked about her book Dream Babies. She started by reminding us that the concept of the ordinary runs through many Persephone books and that many of them touch on family life; and she quoted from the first page of Persephone Book No.41, Hostages to Fortune (''My word', Catherine thought, 'that's not a baby, that's a person'') and from The Home-Maker, Persephone Books No.7, and also from Rosamond Lehmann's A Note in Music and Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love to illustrate this theme. She then talked about a child-care 'guru' who wrote contemporaneously with these writers, Charis Frankenburg, an Oxford graduate who wrote Common Sense in the Nursery in 1922 (reprinted several times over the next twenty years). Mrs Frankenburg was extremely sensible about things like giving babies lots of fresh air and not over-stimulating them; and she concluded her introduction by saying, wisely but controversially, 'Let the final word be this: Children should be, of all the people in the house, the most important and the most seriously considered, but they should think that less attention is paid to them and to their likes and dislikes than to any other member of the household.'

15 March 2008

The last days of winter before, we hope, a warm spring: the April books are in and being sent to reviewers, the Persephone Biannually is being written, and when I have time I catch up on the reviews of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (here, for example, is the one in the New York Times) or with the various websites that tell me how much money the film has been taking in America. It is interesting to us Brits that the opening of a film is so different over there. Here, we tend to read the advance publicity or the reviews and trickle along, whereas in the US the success of a film can stand or fall on how much money it makes the first weekend it is open and then in the subsequent couple of weekends. Miss Pettigrew has done pretty well and so far has 'made' $4.7 million.

29 February 2008

Last week we had a Persephone Lunch in the shop at which Juliet Gardiner, author of Wartime: Britain 1939-45, The 1940s House and many other books, discussed literature about the Home Front during the Second World War.

15 February 2008

I took the car down to Bloomsbury today because I wasn't feeling amazing, and on the way listened to Desert Island Discs. The castaway was Oleg Gordievsky and it was one of the most astonishing Desert Island Discs I have ever heard (this was the repeat and alas they don't put it on line). First of all I felt incredibly moved and upset by the horrors of the twentieth century and all that happened during the Cold War; then I was moved by Gordievsky's bravery, although of course that isn't quite the word (but I've no idea what other word to use) to describe what he did; and when he reached his final choice, the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim playing Lincke at the 'Berliner Luft' concert - I sat in the car park and cried. This was not displaying the stiff upper lip Gordievsky talked about admiringly.

30 January 2008

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.

15 January 2008

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.

30 December 2007

This is a magical time of year when we firmly put a notice in the shop window saying 'Closed until January 2nd' and settle down to ten days of enjoying family, friends, good food, long walks, reading and, in my case, getting ahead with the three Spring books. I am in Cambridge, where we sit by an open fire and do nothing more energetic than bicycling to the market to buy tangerines and fennel and chestnuts or venturing to the (new) John Lewis to buy trousers. But one of the main joys of Cambridge for many people is Kettle's Yard ,the house bought by Jim Ede fifty years ago and beloved since then by generations of Cambridge residents and visitors.

15 December 2007

This has been the busiest week of the year in the shop, made busier this year because of our new online facility whereby readers can order a book a month for six months or a year, either for themselves or a friend. As we pack up the first book we always feel rather envious of the recipient having six, or twelve, good reads coming through their letterbox during 2008. But there are still wonderful books to surprise and absorb even us. We have just been overwhelmed by Earth and High Heaven, a 1944 Canadian novel by Gwethalyn Graham. It was a huge success at the time and won the Governor General's Literary Award. If anyone reading this would like to get a copy from abe.com and tell me what they think, I should be very grateful. The Canadian journalist who gave it to us knew we would love it, and we do - but would it reprint?

30 November 2007

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:

15 November 2007

This is the week of the Country Living Fair, where you will find us again at the Business Design Centre (the old Royal Agricultural Hall) in Islington) - at Stand P26 from Wednesday to Sunday afternoon (14th-18th). A variety of Persephone friends have come to help us, and amidst the crafts and fashions in the large hall we hope to find some new readers for Persephone Books.

30 October 2007

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!)

15 October 2007

The last two weeks have been dominated by the post strike, by the rush to get the Biannually and the Catalogue to the printer (why does one always leave everything to the last minute?) and by a day at the Frankfurt Book Fair to meet the German publisher translating The Far Cry, the French one translating Cheerful Weather for the Wedding - and a Spanish one whom I hope will be translating something...

30 September 2007

Almost idly on Friday I wrote an email letter to the five and a half thousand subscribers to our email list offering them a free book if they ordered The Fortnight in September and another book before the end of September. I did this partly because every other mail-order organisation that I admire (Boden, Crocus, Wall, Brora, Cath Kidston, Bloom, The Linen House) sometimes has some kind of offer, and in any case a hundred people seemed pleased with the free hessian book bag we gave away in July; and partly to remind loyal Persephone readers that we are still here even though the Biannually does not go out for another three weeks.

15 September 2007

The excitement this week was going to see the film of Atonement and glimpsing a Persephone book in one of the very last frames: when the heroine, Briony Tallis, now elderly, is being interviewed about her book that is an 'atonement' for what she did sixty years before, the interviewer is holding the book and it is in the format of a Persephone book.

30 August 2007

The sad news has arrived of the death of Julia Briggs two weeks ago. She was a brilliant academic, teacher and writer. She was a good friend to Persephone, gave a wonderful lecture on Virginia Woolf at one of the Persephone conferences at Newnham - cf her book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life - and wrote the excellent Preface to There Were No Windows by Norah Hoult, Persephone Book No. 59.

15 August 2007

A little-known play by the Swedish playwright Victoria Benedictsson (she was apparently an inspiration to both Ibsen and Strindberg) is currently showing at the National Theatre. 'While I'm not sure it has the ambivalence of a timeless classic, it constitutes...a major act of reclamation' wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian. He added: 'The excitement lies in an unknown play combining an autobiographic authenticity with a statement about the role of women in late 19th century society.'

30 July 2007

When Persephone Books began publishing in 1998 there were two things I particularly wanted to do, but I reluctantly thought better of both of them: one was to print our books with uncut pages, as the French do, and to supply a paper-knife so that Persephone readers would have the joy of cutting the pages of their novels (like Anna in Anna Karenina).

15 July 2007

Many people have gone away on holiday and London has begun to have an enjoyably quiet feel. Even Emily is in France for ten days, before she leaves Persephone to go to Penguin. I cannot imagine how we will manage: we all so much appreciate her warmth, energy and efficiency and she will be hugely missed in Lamb's Conduit Street. (For the moment the office is being run by Celia.)

30 June 2007

In the last two weeks Emily and I have been to Kent and to Yorkshire. In Kent fifty Persephone readers came to Great Maytham Hall near Rolvenden, the setting for The Making of a Marchioness, The Shuttle and The Secret Garden. We had tea and Tom's lemon cakes, Anne Sebba gave a wonderful talk about Frances Hodgson Burnett, and we explored the beautiful gardens and in particular the secret garden. The house in which Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Shuttle was demolished and replaced by the existing one, designed by Lutyens, but the estate at Maytham 'first took shape in the early Saxon times' - and the Saxon background is an important part of the book.

15 June 2007

I am now nine months pregnant, with my baby due any moment. So I am passing the time here in Los Angeles by getting on with Persephone-related business, reading The Shuttle, and - of course - pining away for all the hustle and bustle and wallflowers of Lamb's Conduit Street. Wallflowers are scarce in these parts, but to make up for it I have a lemon tree in my garden, plus an avocado tree at the end of the street, which means that the main hazard of my day has become trying to avoid having one of the enormous fruit that fall from it landing on my head on the way to the shops. Yikes.

15 May 2007

A 'Crew Pass' hangs around my neck as I write: I have just come back to the office from the film set of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, F block, Ealing Studios, London W5. It has certainly been a day to remember. At 10am Nicola and myself, Henrietta Twycross-Martin (who 'discovered' Miss Pettigrew and wrote the preface), as well as Keith and Sandy Pickering, Winifred Watson's son and daughter-in-law, met at Ealing Broadway underground station and walked the ten minutes to the studios. Sodden but excited, we arrived at the gate and were led into the front office, where we met the production staff and Maggi, the associate producer, gave us our passes before taking us to the set.

30 April 2007

Just after I wrote the last Fortnightly Letter I 'shuttled' from England to America and spent ten days in New York. Emily and I had sent out letters to our East Coast readers and we were delighted that sixty of them were able to come to a Persephone Tea in an Episcopalian church hall on Madison Avenue. We served tea (in paper cups from Dean & Deluca, because it was their grey with white lettering that inspired our colour scheme nine years ago), scones with cream and jam (very English) and brownies (very American); I talked, about Persephone Books in general and Anne Sebba talked about Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle; and we tried to ensure that people met each other, exchanged addresses and, we hoped, started to plan a Persephone reading group in New York. (The next London reading group, by the way, is this Wednesday, May 2nd, from 6.30-8 in the shop, and the book under discussion is EM Delafield's Consequences; everyone is welcome, although please telephone first if you would like to come.)

15 April 2007

'Shakespeare, who had the deepest penetration into nature, has summed up all the charms of beauty in two words: 'infinite variety'.' This, from William Hogarth's 1753 Analysis of Beauty (and from which Alan Hollinghurst coined the title of his Booker Prize winning novel The Line of Beauty), captures the essence of Hogarth's work, now in a special exhibition at Tate Britain. On seeing this excellent show last week, the similarities to Persephone Books' ethos and Hogarth's vision particularly struck me.

30 March 2007

The Persephone Biannually (the first, after thirty-two Persephone Quarterlies) has gone to the printer. Now we are getting ready for the April mail-out; hoping for some reviews of the two new books; enjoying a very funny piece by Charlotte Smith in the Sunday Express 'S' magazine about How To Run Your Home without Help (this will be reprinted in the Biannually); and looking forward to the Classic Serial this Sunday April 1st and the following Sunday April 8th (Easter Sunday). This is an adaptation by Michelene Wandor of The Making of a Marchioness and its sequel The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (both of which are included in our volume, Persephone Book No.29) starring Lucy Briers, Joanna David, Miriam Margolyes and Charles Dance. Do try and listen, it should be fun.

15 March 2007

The shop buzzed with activity this past fortnight as we continued to grapple with design options for next year's Persephone Classics; set up and sorted out the software programme Constant Contact which allows us to send out emails to everyone (if you are not on our email list, do sign up in the new box on our homepage); sent off review copies of our spring books, The Shuttle and House-Bound; arranged the summer events; and held our ninth book group.

28 February 2007

Whereas many Londoners have been queuing for the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain or the Canaletto exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this week, we have been enjoying two tiny but equally wonderful London exhibitions. One is the portraits of Women Writers at the National Portrait Gallery, and the other is Home and Garden at the Geffrye Museum . The first is simply twenty-four black-and-white photographs of novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Brazil, Georgette Heyer, Rosamond Lehmann, Dodie Smith and Rebecca West. Noel Streatfeild is among them, here is the unusually informal 1936 portrait by Bassano:

15 February 2007

London is quiet this week because of half term, but the air is intense with the atmosphere of Valentine's Day - even on the tube the young man strap-hanging next to me was clutching a couple of long-stemmed red roses. Many Persephone books are good February 14th presents, for example Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Making of a Marchioness and Mariana; yet the most crucial book on the subject of romantic love remains Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (which we sell in the shop, of course, along with the other 'fifty books we wished we had published').

30 January 2007

Last week we had an office outing to the National Theatre's Coram Boy, which is adapted from Jamilah Gavin's excellent novel. It was the most inspiring, imaginative evening because the play, in keeping with its subject-matter, has a raw, rough-edged, genuine quality that kept the audience enthralled.

15 January 2007

After Christmas is spring-cleaning time for shopkeepers. It is of course lovely when the shop is full of people and the phone rings non-stop, but we are very much enjoying the chance to chat, listen to Classic FM (except for the chat) and Radio 3 (except for the modern and choral music), sort things out (which bookmarks need reprinting?), saunter off to Konditor and Cook to buy a treat - and tidy up.

30 December 2006

On the last evening of a very busy week, the last week before Christmas, we took in the sign-board, drew the blinds, opened a bottle of champagne and drank a toast - to ourselves and to Persephone readers; then we departed into the night, Nicola to North London by tube, Joanna to Hammersmith by bicycle and Emily to Dulwich by bus. And we did not reassemble until all the carol-singing and Scrabble, goose and red cabbage, presents and country walks, that are the essential part of an English Christmas were over for another year. Then, on the last Friday of 2006, Joanna and I filled three mail-bags with the (mostly American) internet orders that had come in over Christmas. And tomorrow is the first working day of 2007.

15 December 2006

This has been the busiest November/ December we have ever had, partly because Christmas has started so much later this year. Why is this? you may ask, Persephone readers always being very interested in the less literary aspects of what we do - turnover, sales, bestsellers. We try and find explanations but a genuine one, in my view, is that the huge and ever-present concern about global warming (in Britain this is being the warmest December ever known) has made people less consumerist, keener to return to the days when Christmas really did only last for Twelve Days.

30 November 2006

As I write this the Lamb's Conduit Street Festival is happening - we are offering free mulled wine (and chat, bookish of course) and outside there is live music, various things to eat, artists exhibiting their work, a tug of war, face-painting and story telling. We are about to put up the Christmas decorations and are also painting the cupboard in Joanna's room (grey, naturally). She starts on Monday, her task being to launch the Persephone Classics. And a huge task it is: for example, she/we have to decide which books will be the classics; do a mock-up of the design; choose a printer; find a distributor; persuade bookshops to stock the books; find a publicist; and all this while keeping the cost as low as possible yet retaining the classiness of our look (the grey, the endpaper fabric).

15 November 2006

This is being written just after Remembrance Sunday. Nowadays we remember everyone killed in war but for many people, myself included, the day, and the two-minute silence, are bound up with the First World War. If there is anyone reading this letter who has not read William - an Englishman, may we urge you to do so? It is one of the most extraordinary books ever written about the Great War and will never date. Our other book about those terrible four years is Nicholas Mosley's Julian Grenfell, not a book with universal appeal but inevitably mesmerising to those who start reading it.

30 October 2006

Someone came into the shop a few months ago and we were talking, as one does, about climate change and I said that we had ten years to sort ourselves out. They looked at me as if I was barking, or at least as if my only motive was to try and sell The Hopkins Manuscript. I wish I had been barking, but the Stern Review today makes it clear that global warning has become the reality many of us were dreading.

15 October 2006

On Monday Persephone was at the Cheltenham Festival, where we were moved into the big hall to accommodate the three hundred people who had come to hear Salley Vickers, Penelope Lively and myself select two of our favourite books to talk about. Penelope chose The Far Cry and The Carlyles at Home and I chose Someone at a Distance and Manja; alas, Salley Vickers had had to go home because she was ill (she would have chosen The Priory and Miss Ranskill Comes Home) so Penelope extended her talk and I was able to touch on a few topics such as 'how do we choose our books?' After some to-the-point questions we sold more than a hundred books in twenty minutes, chatted to a good number of readers, and collapsed over a cup of tea with Penelope Lomax, a Persephone fan who is on the festival committee and very kindly organised the event.

30 September 2006

Autumn, and soon it will be dark when we shut the shop. It's the time of year when people who live in cities forget about the countryside for six months and rediscover winter evenings reading, listening to music and toasting teacakes in front of the fire; thoughts of gardens vanish for another year and houses become more important. In fact those Persephone readers who have bought Gardener's Nightcap will be following Muriel Stuart's advice: 'The tidy gardener who reduces his garden to a tidy level every autumn is dallying with many lives. In Nature the dried stems and withered leaves stand above the plant, protecting it from frost, and from the winds that dry the roots.' In other words, Muriel Stuart believes, leave well alone - the dead foliage should remain as protection for what is about to grow.

15 September 2006

We have been back to normal shop hours for two weeks now: the shop windows have been redone (a handsome picnic basket is the 'prop' for The Fortnight in September, a Kennedy poster for The Expendable Man), the blue winter pansies are in the window boxes and we have had a spring/autumn clean ready for the pre-Christmas rush.

30 August 2006

Alas, the summer is nearly over. This week the shop has returned to normal opening hours; next week the book group re-starts (on September 6th), the new Persephone Quarterly goes out (on the 7th) and our four stalwart 'envelope-stuffers' will come and 'do the foreigns' (on the 12th).

15 August 2006

Having just returned from the Austrian W�rthersee (from a wonderful hotel in an 1891 villa which luckily seems to have changed very little in a hundred years: rooms overlooking a large lawn and a wooden jetty on the lake, little to do apart from swim and go for gentle walks) life at Persephone Books is so hectic on the two days a week we are open that I cannot imagine how those chic Parisians, who close for the whole of August, manage to remain calm during catch-up September.

30 July 2006

On Nicola's recommendation, I saw Mike Leigh's play 2000 Years this week at The National Theatre . I went with great interest and subdued expectation, for despite listening to Nicola extol its praises, the production received very mixed reviews.

15 July 2006

It's quite hard to adjust to London life after a week's holiday in Cornwall: my niece's wedding on the headland overlooking the Godrevy Lighthouse (as in To the Lighthouse) was followed by a heavenly few days in The Landmark Trust's Frenchman's Creek (picture below). This small granite cottage, typical of hundreds in Cornwall, was derelict until the Trust rescued it in the early 1980s and restored it; as always with Trust properties they took great care to respect its origins as a labourer's cottage. Thus, for example, cars are left a quarter of a mile away (although in good weather they can be brought further along the track) and luggage/shopping put in a wheelbarrow, and there are no table and chairs outside, just stripy deck chairs and, for meals, a small round C18th 'occasional' table and stools that we carried outside and covered with a linen tea-cloth.

30 June 2006

Summer has truly arrived on Lamb's Conduit Street. We now keep the shop doors open all day to enjoy the warm sun and the lovely cross breeze wafting between the street and the back garden. It is a time of year when one is particularly conscious of the city's vibrancy and spirit, and concurrently, of its history - especially here in Bloomsbury.

15 June 2006

During June 1918 Katherine Mansfield was in Looe in Cornwall. 'Jour Maigre' she wrote on the 26th. 'On Wednesday mornings Mrs Honey comes into my room as usual and pulls up the blinds and opens the big French windows. Letting in the dancing light and the swish of the sea and the creak of the boats lying at anchor out in the Roads, and the sound of the lawn mower and the smell of cut grass and syringa and the cheeky whistle of [the] blackbird. Then she comes back to my bed and stands over me, one hand pressed to her side, her old face puckered up as though she had some news that she didn't know how to break gently. ''Tis a meatless day' she says.'

30 May 2006

The Lamb's Conduit Street Festival has come and gone, leaving behind a trail of empty glasses from the free Pimms we had on offer, cake crumbs from the Women's Institute stand outside our door, new Persephone readers' addresses, and, despite the torrential rain and gale force wind, much good cheer. Now, along with everyone else, we are longing for warmer weather so that we can leave the shop door open all day and enjoy the life of the street.

15 May 2006

We have been delighted, in recent weeks, to welcome readers from Bas Bleu to the shop. For those non-Americans who are not lucky enough to receive their catalogue, this is a wonderful mail-order book supplier, but what books! The genius behind Bas Bleu, Eleanor Edmondson, put in her most recent catalogue: 'Off to London on your travels? If so, be sure to visit Persephone Books, a little shop on Lamb's Conduit Street (don't you love it?), within walking distance of Russell Square and the British Museum. There, Nicola Beauman and her small staff publish the most delightful, and Bas Bleuish, books. (We'd love to offer Persephone editions in our catalogue, but, alas, the economics of importing books from the UK just doesn't work for us.)...If you do visit, be sure to say 'Hello' from Bas Bleu!' - and several people have.

30 April 2006

We had a good scrub of the back windows this past week, in what still seems a rather vain attempt to invite in the sun. Alas, we await the day when we can leave the back door open and have lunch in the garden. Maybe by the next fortnight's letter?

15 April 2006

Fifty Persephone readers came to the lunch in Oxford celebrating the publication of Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan; Lyndall Gordon and Charlie Lee-Potter, both Oxford residents, spoke most interestingly about the book. The former pointed out how convincing Princes is about our mothers' generation and about that marginal state of mind, recalled in her mother's habitual self-definition, 'I'm only a housewife at the bottom of Africa.' And Lyndall claimed to be unsuited as a foreigner to comment on such an English book, remarking on her puzzlement over apparently secret codes of manners such as pulling on gloves in the right way.

30 March 2006

We have had an especially hectic couple of weeks at Persephone Books, the result (we think) both of Mother's Day and the wonderful picture on the front of the new Persephone Quarterly. This is by Harold Knight who, 'if he was not the English Vermeer, he brought many of the fine qualities of the Dutch old master into his work. Some critics wondered why he had not attained a higher eminence. Perhaps there is something in the remark that [his wife] Laura (Knight) made more than once. "I stood in his way." She never tried to explain how.'

15 March 2006

There is a very distinct rhythm at Persephone Books: the new Quarterly goes out in early March, early June, early September and early November. For the first three quarters we are very busy indeed during the first week after people have received their newsletter; for the second week we are busy, but not quite so frantic; and then things begin to go back to 'normal', which is a steady but manageable flow of orders.

28 February 2006

A warm hello from Lamb's Conduit Street, where I've been holding down the shop the past few weeks while Nicola's away writing. Typically a quiet time of year, February has been unusually lively as we've welcomed a steady stream of visitors. In addition to the more local drop-ins, many have crossed the pond from my native North America - some from the United States who saw the blurb in Domino magazine and others from Canada who read about us in the Ottawa and Toronto papers - and very kindly tracked us down on their London sojourns.

15 February 2006

'I can't believe I've just discovered you. I'm enthralled, amazed, astounded, enchanted and ecstatic! Possibly some other nice adjectives too, but I'll save those for when I start my Persephone collection. Adore the most lovely endpapers!' It would be boastful to say that we receive emails like this often, but they are not infrequent and mean a huge amount to us. This one, from America, was likely to have been prompted by an item about us in the March issue of Domino magazine.

30 January 2006

The excitement of the last week has been the jackets, pinnies, aprons and dressing-gowns arriving from India. We are about to unpack and iron them, finalise the price, hang them up and post photographs here. We will be able to send all the items by post, except for the jackets which we feel have to be tried on in the shop.

15 January 2006

For all publishers January is stock-taking and royalty statement month; however, the Persephone Books methods for both are a little different from the norm. For the former we count the number of copies of each book that remains in the shop, add it to the number of books still in store in Norfolk - and then we know, fairly accurately, how many have been sold and how many are left. (Most people in the book trade are now dependent on bar-code labels, but we only put them on for some bookshops; otherwise we prefer not to deface our beautiful grey jackets.) Once we know how many books are in stock we know how many have been sold, and then we can do royalty statements, the family, the agent, or the author him or herself, receiving seven and a half per cent of publisher's receipts. This is not a huge sum, but with a print run of 3000 yielding around �2000 the authors or their estates seem to be fairly pleased with their twice-yearly royalty cheques.

30 December 2005

I spent Christmas at Spitalfields, a couple of miles east of Lamb's Conduit Street, in the 1719 silk-weavers house at 13 Princelet Street owned and let out by The Landmark Trust. Brick Lane is at the end of the road and the call to prayer mingles with the bells tolling at nearby Christ Church; here my daughter Fran, who works part-time at Persephone Books when she can, was married on the Friday after Christmas.

15 December 2005

The late autumn is always busy at Persephone Books because this is the time when we leave the cosy environment of Lamb's Conduit Street to meet Persephone readers who cannot get to London. In October Nicola went to the new Woodstock Literary Festival and talked about Hostages to Fortune (set in nearby Deddington) over a wonderfully 'proper' tea in Polly's Teashop. A week later she was at the Three Ways House Hotel at Mickleton near Chipping Camden, where a lunch club was asked the deliberately provocative question Are you Bored by Contemporary Fiction?, and responded with enthusiasm. In early November there was a Persephone tea (with Farmer's Market cake and madeira) in Truro to which forty local readers came; one result is that a Persephone Reading Group is being established near Bodmin, do ring the office for details if you would like to join it. Then, in late November, the day after the new Lamb's Conduit Street Festival (free mulled wine at Persephone Books, a band on the corner by The Perserverance, pattern cutting demonstrations outside the tailor) we went to Sherborne, to the headmaster's house, for another readers' tea. Finally, in early December there were two parties in the shop, again with tea and madeira but this time with Konditor and Cook mince pies.

30 November 2005

The Persephone Books website first went up in 1999. But it is time for a redesign, and with our new look comes a fortnightly Persephone letter which will contain the kind of news which is too ephemeral to go into the Persephone Quarterly. In this respect reading this blog and looking at the photographs will be like a virtual visit to our Lamb's Conduit Street offices. Those who have been here know that the shop runs straight into the area where Jess and I have our desks, and occasionally people have been startled to be part of a less-than friendly dialogue with a printer, or to have to pick their way round a delivery of 1500 books. Yet whatever is going on most visitors seem to enjoy being briefly part of life at Persephone Books.