Persephone in Bloomsbury

Our first three years in Bloomsbury have been enormous fun and we realise daily what luck it was to have moved here. Some Persephone readers are able to come into the shop in person (59 Lamb's Conduit Street WC1, nearest tube Russell Square, open between 9am and 6pm from Monday to Friday, Saturday 12-5).

Pevsner wrote that this is a 'lively local shopping street, a rarity now in inner London'; we have a newsagent, doctor, dentist, greengrocer, delicatessen, the funeral parlour that 'did' Nelson in 1805, another bookshop, an optician, a bicycle shop, and numerous cafés.

In some ways the street's best time is first thing in the morning, when people are having breakfast at Sid's next door, the greengrocer is opening up, nurses are going to the hospitals, and there is an air of traffic-free urban bustle which can only be compared to a stage set. We feel curiously French here and when things were quiet in August pinned up a metaphorical notice saying 'If this was Paris we would be closed'. This is partly because we can buy such wonderful croissants; partly because one of our books, Little Boy Lost, is set in France; mostly because we associate this kind of friendly street life with the French - for it is indeed rare in London.

'Bloomsbury,' people say, 'how appropriate,' and we are pleased, though uncertain whether they mean the fact that there traditionally were and are many publishers round and about, or the even more flattering comparison with people like the Woolfs and Duncan Grant who, famously, left Kensington in order to come and live the anti-bourgeouis life in Bloomsbury.

In Jacob's Room (1922) Virginia Woolf wrote: 'The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb's Conduit Street, the scarlet van rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter look up, half frightened, half curious... Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from the Court past midnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts while the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor... and let them in. The bitter eighteenth century rain rushed down into the kennel.' The pilllar box is still on our corner.

Until the 1960s our shop was the local grocer's, where Leonard and Virgina Woolf might well have shopped, their flat at 37 Mecklenburgh Square being only two minutes away. Then, in September 1941, 'Meck' (as Virgina called it) was destroyed by bombing. Visiting, they could 'stand on the ground floor and look up with uninterrupted view to the roof while sparrows scrabbled about on the joists of what had been a ceiling; bookcases had been blown off the walls and the books lay in enormous mounds on the floor covered in rubble and plaster.' But Virgina rescued her diaries, '24 vols... salved; a great mass for my memoirs.'

Ordering books from Persephone

You can see a complete list of Persephone Books and order online here. Or you can email us, telephone on 020 7242 9292, send a fax to 020 7242 9272 or write to the following address: Persephone Books Ltd, 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB All Persephone Books cost £10 each plus £2 postage (see more information on ordering). We can now send a book a month for six or twelve months - more >