Persephone Books

We found the wonderful Persephone Bookshop on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London the other day. From the shop they also run their ‘Longtail’ publishing business. Persephone finds out of publication great literature that has been all but forgotten. These novels, mainly written by women, are reprinted and bound in their signature gray covers (the inside covers feature patterns or prints from the year that the book was first published). The About section on their site says:

Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. We sell mainly through mail order, through selected shops and we have our own shop.

The first book they published was William – An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton which was originally published in 1919. Even at that time, Hamilton believed in equal pay and birth control, and her ‘personal revolt was feminist rather than suffragist.’ (And just to let you know, the inside covers (pictured) feature an Omega Workshop linen, dating from 1913 when the novel begins. With its pattern of abstract shapes outlined in black ‘Pamela’ has an appropriate austerity; yet the soft curves evoke the Belgian hills and the blue, green and purple recall the suffragette colours.)

Their business model makes us think of the debate around the extension of copyright. Persephone reprints out-of-copyright books that an extension of the length of copyright would forbid. While an extension would well support content creators who are still in demand, these creators remain a tiny minority of the number of creators over the last century. If the extension was made, Persephone and other curators would be unable to save lesser known but important authors and their works from oblivion.

Persephone Books