This is being written on the very day that 8000 Persephone books in 500 boxes are arriving at the new Persephone bookshop in London. Speaking as a backroom girl I have no idea how this figure has been arrived at but presume that we are having more of the bestsellers (Miss P, Fortnight, all the Whipples) and maybe just one or two boxes of the ‘quieter’ sellers (Lettice Delmer, Amours de Voyage, Marjory Fleming). But every single one of our 155 titles will be there when we open, at 10am on Wednesday November 4th, with the proviso that this is very much a ‘soft’ opening, i.e. we won’t have had permission by then to change the shop's exterior  and we might not have everything in stock. So there may be a slight air of chaos. But please visit if you can, on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday from 10am - 6pm and Saturday from 11am - 5pm. The address is 1 Scala Street, London W1T 2HL, it’s just behind Goodge Street Station, 5 minutes walk from Tottenham Court Road station and 15 minutes from Oxford Circus.

A second statistic: we have so far had over 1000 entries (and counting) for your ‘ten best novels’. How these are going to be collated in order for Fran to announce which the ten favourites are overall we have no idea, but she has a plan. We have already acquired a long list of books we have never read, this will keep us going for years. And who knew that people loved The Cazalet Chronicles SO much? (To recap: please send us your 'ten best novels', in no particular order, before the end of October. More info here.)

Third and final statistics, all of them deeply sobering: 1) after we watched the 1953 film of Little Boy Lost at the Persephone Readers Day (the film is good but not a patch on the book) we reminded the audience that at the end of the Second World War there were a million orphans in Europe; 2) apparently Elon Musk has given $277 million to Trump and the Republicans; 3) over 65,000 children have been killed or wounded in Gaza in the last three years. In their different ways all these statistics are devastating. But apart from empathising as much as we possibly can (and, yes, we have been to see NAZA) what on earth can we do apart from go on with our little lives?

We are very sad if You and Yours on BBC Radio 4 is going to be axed. Obviously it is only listened to by the retired who are at home making lunch, but it’s a horrible blow for that small select group. Winifred Robinson is the most perfect interviewer. Perhaps she could go to the Today programme, where each interviewer is more annoying than the last. They are so aggressive; she is so sympathetic and empathetic.

Some very very good news: Rules (the restaurant) has been given to the National Trust. One is inclined to say like a grumpy old man, thank god some things don’t and won't ever change. Although we rarely go to Rule’s, we like to know it's there.

At the (wonderful) Reader’s Day last Saturday someone told us that their favourite Persephone book so far was Out of the Window by Madeline Linford. We were thrilled as it’s been quite a slow burn. Could we recommend anything else similar? Well, in one sense it’s unique. But then we thought of Dorothy Whipple, who the questioner hadn’t apparently read. How we envy her, with eight marvellous novels waiting for her!

This beautiful painting is at the Burton Art Gallery in Bideford, Devon. It’s Judith Ackland at work in the cabin by Mary Stella Edwards (her lifelong partner).

We have been reading David Kynaston’s excellent new book Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965-66. As the novelist Anthony Quinn said in his review in the Observer: ‘British women in the 1960s remained very much second-class citizens. The general expectation was for marriage, motherhood and the eternal demands of domesticity. Even for educated women the ceiling was low, their presence in white-collar professions mostly limited to secretary. If they wished to apply for a mortgage, the signature of a male guarantor was required.’ This last was particularly enraging, but then it was all enraging, we just didn't know it at the time. In fact the most upsetting chapters are Ten and Eleven about slum clearance: it’s unbearable that ‘they’ were allowed to knock down perfectly repairable terraced housing and force people into tower blocks. Our very own The Sack of Bath, helped turn the tide in the early 1970s but alas even today ‘they' still prefer far more profitable new-build to renovation.

Recently there has been a lot of sorting and chucking of papers (so that one day our children don’t have to). Sometimes a gem is uncovered. A 1970s article about the (rather good) history of Jonathan Cape quoted its rejection of Lord of the Flies: ‘"It does not seem to us that you have been wholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea. We would suggest, however, that you might care to offer it to Messrs André Deutsch." They turned it down as well.’ We love stories like this. It just shows that there is no such thing as ‘good’ taste or ‘correct’ judgement: often it’s just pure chance which books do well and which don't.

When we first wrote to our readers about opening a shop in Scala Street, we tried to list some of  the reasons why it seems such an appropriate location for a Persephone bookshop. Now another reason has come to light: Eric Ravilious (and therefore almost certainly 'our' author Tirzah Garwood) visited Pollock's Toy Theatre shop, then in Hoxton Street, when he was at the Royal College of Art. This is why some Pollock's material can be found in Tirzah's scrapbooks and why we shall focus on the Pollock's/Garwood connection on the Persephone Post in the near future. Here is a small film to be going on with: at the beginning there is a sheet of figures which might well have been drawn by Tirzah especially for a Pollock's Toy Theatre. For those who would like to visit the shop in its present incarnation in Leadenhall Market or Croydon here are the details.

And what have we been watching? Well The Durrells was our August/September treat (sometimes, in the summer heat, we might just as well have been in Corfu). Then we watched Middlemarch (again) and Daniel Deronda (again), both SO good. Now we are a bit bereft. Although of course there is the new series of the heavenly Sam West version of All Creatures Great and Small.

Nicola Beauman,

8 Edgar Buildings,

Bath.