Thank you for visiting the Persephone Books website. If you don’t see the answer to your question here, please e-mail us at info@persephonebooks.co.uk, call us at 01225 425050 (outside the UK +44 1225 425050) or write to us at Persephone Books, 8 Edgar Buildings, Bath, BA1 2EE.

Where can I buy a Persephone book?

Can I buy Persephone books from my local bookshop?

Do you have a catalogue?

How much does it cost to be a Persephone subscriber?

How long will my books take to arrive?

Do you have a wrapping service for presents?

Yes – this costs an extra £2 per book for tissue paper, £3 per book for Cambridge Imprint patterned wrapping paper, or £8 per book for reusable fabric gift wrapping (pictured below).

Do you sell your own book tokens?

Why the name Persephone?

How do you choose your books?

Here at Persephone Books we are often asked how we choose our books. Well….

1. Persephone Books arose out of years of being at home with small children: so much time to rediscover C20th women writers, and to buy books for 20p or go to the London Library, and come home with an armful of forgotten books. Once the children were older there was time to read in the British Museum reading room and browse in secondhand bookshops. Now there’s the Internet.

2. We have to completely and utterly love every book. It is a cliche of publishing that a book will not sell unless someone is passionately behind it. Each must have a special quality to justify the expense / commitment of its re-publication.

3. Quite a few of our titles are written about in Nicola Beauman’s 1983 book A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914-1938. A mixture of literary criticism and social history, this book influenced our choice of titles in other ways, for example its focus on women’s everyday lives: what we think of as ‘domestic feminism’. Our books are linked by the idea of 'home', though of course that doesn't preclude their characters having a career or flying an aeroplane.

4. Our books mostly date from the mid-C20th, though some appeared earlier (A New System of Domestic Cookery is our earliest: 1806) and some later (Emmeline and Still Missing were both first published in the early 1980s). Why this focus on the 1930s and 1940s? A quick answer is that women simply wrote so well then! But also many were well educated, yet society was not yet ready to allow them to work outside the home: writing was a good compromise.

5. Ideally ‘the novel tells a story’ (EM Forster). In other words, we prefer books that are page-turners and a guaranteed good read. They must, for example, have a proper plot.

6. People kindly suggest books: Henrietta Twycross-Martin told us that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was her mother’s favourite; the late Neville Braybrooke sent us his wife Isobel English’s novel Every Eye. Sometimes we realise that a book of classic quality is unaccountably not in print (Mariana, Little Boy Lost, The Expendable Man). 

7. Finally, we occasionally find books in rather odd ways. Lettice Delmer was ‘puffed’ by TS Eliot on the flap of another book; Fidelity —a superb book —was advertised on the back of Elizabeth Jenkins's Virginia Water, which is not so good; the author of A Happy Tree was mentioned intriguingly in Virginia Woolf’s Diary; we read an obituary of the author of One Afternoon in the Guardian, etc.

And thus, just like the goddess Persephone emerged back into the light, so do our books.

Do you have any jobs available? Or work experience opportunities? 

We do occasionally have jobs available working in the bookshop, yes. Please e-mail us at info@persephonebooks.co.uk with your CV and also telling us a little about your favourite Persephone book. We are too small, however, to offer work experience - sorry.

Would you like to publish my book?

Would you like to publish my grandmother’s book?

Do you really all stop for tea and cake every day at 4 o’clock?