Letter

     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.

   Not long after that we had our first website, then a redesign, and this spring we shall have another redesign with various additional features such as a ‘search’ facility, a page for reading groups and so on.  Although in essence the website will not be any different, it should be subtly improved.

   This weekend I went to our local library and got out a dozen books of the kind that even I, a bookaholic, would not buy – diaries/memoirs by Joanna Lumley, Katharine Whitehorn, Simon Gray, James Lees-Milne and so on will be perfect February reading.  Otherwise I have just read an excellent short novel called Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman, which I strongly recommend.  It is illustrated with some Cassatt paintings but in fact this would be a superb novel even without the pictures.

   At the weekend we went to The Pitman Painters at the National Theatre. We had been encouraged to go by a reader who came in to the shop and raved about it, and here is Rachel Cooke’s thought-provoking review in the Observer. Afterwards we went to the foyer to see some of the wonderful Ashington Group paintings.

  The Church Times runs a reading group and this month it is reading House-Bound by Winifred Peck. Here is what Terence Handley Macmath (who wrote the Afterword to the tremendously topical They Knew Mr Knight) said about it.

   But the best news is that one of the front gardens near us in North London is a carpet of snowdrops.  And we have brightly coloured primulas, or should it be primulae, in the shop windowboxes.  I could never even begin to rival Jane Brocket! But have resolved to be niftier with a camera so I could at least have the primulas in this Fortnightly Letter.

Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
15 February 2009