The Micropublisher Lives

Who'd have thought that a small press, publishing in a narrow niche could thrive, or at least break even. But that's apparently what Persephone Books in London is doing. They put out beautiful little paperback reprint editions of forgotten early-to-mid-twentieth-century literature mostly about and by women. Each one also receives endpapers drawn from paper and fabric patterns created the year the work was first published.

Persephone is up to 66 editions. Recent highlights include Virginia Wolff's Flush (#55), which tells the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning through the titular eyes of her dog, a 1939 science fiction novel by R.C. Sherriff, The Hopkins Manuscript (#57) that imagines the moon tumbling into the earth, and Kay Smallshaw's 1949 manual on living in a world of reworked class relations, How To Run Your Home Without Help (#62).

04 August 2006; 0 comments