Books & Poetry

Beautiful endpapers are a hallmark of Persephone's publications

Persephone Books
Time Out pays a visit to one of London's most bucolic book publishers

Alma Books
According to the Times, Richmond-based Alma Books was ‘one to watch’ in 2006. We catch up with them to find out why

Short Books
Startiing life as (yep you guessed it) a short books publisher, Time Out finds they are now a broad church

Snowbooks
We speak to the winners of Small Publisher of the Year at last year’s British Book Trade Awards

Persephone Books
The floors are wooden and the walls decorated with vintage railway prints. Classic FM pours soothingly from the radio and books – of course – are piled high. Lamb’s Conduit Street has always been praised for its ‘village atmosphere’, but Persephone Books, at Number 59, is like stepping into Hay-on-Wye.

Appropriately named after the Greek goddess of the underworld, Persephone is both independent publisher and retail outlet. Most of the shop’s stock is their own: resurrected fiction written predominantly by women during the inter-war years which had either been neglected by larger companies or gone out of print altogether.

Nicola Beauman started the list in 1999 after developing a passion for little-known books by authors like Dorothy Whipple and Susan Glaspell while she was at home bringing up her children. The heroines she discovered were, like her, ordinary middle-class women who had gone to university but abandoned the academic life to raise families. Despite the books’ everyday scenarios and accessibility, there was something quietly profound about them, and she felt sure they would speak to other women. As her office manager, Emily Hill, puts it: ‘It was feminism with a small “f”.’

Among the 70 numbered titles are more obscure tales by well-known writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Other names are less familiar but have proved their worth by selling well, thanks, in part, to Persephone’s staff who excel at communicating their enthusiasm for the books to customers. Design is very important to Persephone: each book has an elegant dove-grey cover and its own distinctive endpaper with matching bookmark taken from a fabric issued in the year the book was originally printed.

'Now, where did I put that book...'

Persephone started life in Clerkenwell. Now based in Bloomsbury – spiritual home of the bluestocking – it makes a quarter of its money from shop sales. Another quarter is made selling to wholesalers who, in turn, sell on to big players such as Amazon. The remaining half comes from mail order sales via a 10,000-strong mailing list which extends all over the world, from France to South Africa.

Until now, Persephone has published two ‘new’ titles each quarter – the next new ‘installment’ (as faithful subscribers to their Quarterly view it) is in April. However, these will shortly become biannual for a while to allow a new venture, Persephone Classics, to be launched. These will be smaller and blurb will be added to the back covers. (They are still debating how the endpapers can be retained and transferred to the front cover – a vertical band of pattern running down the side of the front cover is a strong contender.) Their stalwart fans were alarmed by this development, and wondered if Persephone was about to sell out. Hill says not: ‘We want to make it more democratic and to reach more people.’

Bestseller ‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson (20,000 copies).

Persephone Books, 59 Lamb’s Conduit St, WC1 (020 7242 9292/www.persephonebooks.co.uk) Holborn tube. Open Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, alternate Sats 12noon-5pm.

Alma Books
According to the Times, Richmond-based Alma Books was ‘one to watch’ in 2006. Set up in 2005 by Italian husband-and-wife team Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini, Alma (Spanish for ‘soul’) was preceded by Hesperus Press, also founded by the couple in 2001.

Another imprint – they’re busy, these two – One World Classics has been established to reinvigorate classic novels which have been unimaginatively produced by bigger publishers. With a combination of high-quality binding, beautiful covers and new introductions by contemporary writers, the pair hope to endear the classics to a new generation who might previously have been put off by flimsy paper and cramped typesetting.

The couple use acid-free paper and ‘sawn’ binding (as opposed to the more common ‘perfect’ binding) – expensive touches which sound like financial suicide for a small independent – but Gallenzi says they ‘wanted to go back to the traditional values of publishing. Intellectual property is the most valuable commodity there is. It’s paying off. We have a good reputation and we deliver.’

Considering its founders’ Italian backgrounds, it’s no surprise that roughly 40 per cent of Alma’s output is fiction in translation. (They’re about to establish a prize to encourage young translators.) And as with most small publishers, the relationship between editor and author is much more intimate than it would be at a corporate imprint. Established authors who don’t need big advances often prefer the smaller publishers’ approach, and Gallenzi believes in ‘building up the profile of the author’.

Bestseller ‘Remainder’ by Tom McCarthy (5,000 in hardback, 20,000 in paperback).

Alma Books (020 8948 9550/www.almabooks.co.uk).

Short Books
As the name implies, the founders of Short Books originally intended to produce only books that were, well, short: around 40,000 words long and compact enough to fit in your pocket. Initial releases covered a disparate selection of engaging non-fiction topics, from Camilla Parker Bowles to the Soham murders. They should have been great successes but sadly the literal-minded filing systems of chain book stores was their undoing. Aurea Carpenter, who founded Short with fellow ex-journalist Rebecca Nicolson in 2000, remembers popping into one of the major bookshops and being crestfallen to find ‘British Teeth’ – William Leith’s darkly humorous analysis of our fixation with all things decrepit – in the dentistry section.

Though it now focuses on standard-format books, Short’s still a broad church: its roster includes Francis Gilbert’s horrifying classroom memoir ‘I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out of Here!’, gift-orientated books such as Harry Mount’s bestselling love letter to Latin, ‘Amo, Amas, Amat… and All That’; and lifestyle titles such as Nina Grunfeld’s ‘The Big Book of Me’ and Time Out health columnist John O’Connell’s ‘I Told You I Was Ill’. They no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts because it would leave them no time for anything else.

New for 2007 is a foray into adult fiction, a move which the team say feels like a natural progression as they love reading fiction so much. They’ll begin with five titles which couldn’t be more different, from an Icelandic saga to an ‘anti-chick lit’ dark comedy.

On the whole, the work at Short is done by committee, with everyone mucking in and deliberating over cover designs and typography. They produce between 12 and 15 titles a year. Short excels at publicity, thanks partly to the impressive contacts Carpenter and Nicolson built
up in their previous lives as journalists. Newspaper serialisation is often arranged six months before a book goes on sale.

External support comes in the form of the Independent Alliance, overseen by Faber & Faber. Members – which include Canongate, Atlantic and the hugely successful ‘indie major’ Profile, in a corner of whose Clerkenwell office Short camps out – get the benefit of Faber’s established sales and distribution network, whereby their reps sell Short’s books on to retailers in return for a percentage of their profits.

Bestseller ‘Amo, Amas, Amat… and All That: How to Become a Latin Lover’ by Harry Mount (100,000 copies).

Short Books (020 7833 9529/www.shortbooks.co.uk).

Snowbooks
The Snowbooks team’s Pentonville Road office might be small, but in this cramped space they’ve produced enough notable books to win Small Publisher of the Year at last year’s British Book Trade Awards.

Snow had an unlikely start, created as it was by two people with no previous publishing experience. Thirty-two-year-old managing director Emma Barnes worked (unhappily) in management consultancy before founding Snow in 2003. Before that, she worked as a buyer at B&Q and at Superdrug, where she met Snow’s co-founder and chairman, Robert Finn. ‘We would hatch plans together and it took ten years for them to come to fruition,’ she says.

Snow’s three full-time editorial staff are involved at every stage of the publishing process, from cover design and typesetting to publicity, though each book is overseen by a single editor who treats it as his or her ‘baby’. For instance, with new SF release ‘Lint’ by Steve Aylett, Snow’s James Bridle not only approached the author in the first place but went on to design the eye-catching comic-style cover. Such is the scale of this job that Barnes prefers to call her trio of editors ‘publishers’.

Snow’s list contains crime thrillers, chick lit and martial arts books, but Barnes doesn’t take on poetry or children’s fiction, believing those genres to require specialist skills. They’ve also built up fruitful relationships with behemoth retailers such as Waterstone’s, initially by doing something as simple as sending them a clear and well-illustrated spiral-bound information pack of their titles.

‘It’s absolute bollocks that retailers don’t look after small publishers,’ says Barnes. ‘When we posted Waterstone’s our info pack they rang up and said ‘who the hell are you? The pack is amazing. Come in and talk to us.’

Snow accepts unsolicited manuscripts, as long as they’re submitted by email. In fact, this ‘small but nimble’ publisher goes further, and even dares to question the need for the literary agents who traditionally act as brokers between authors and publishers.

Bestseller ‘Adept’ by Robert Finn (50,000 copies).

Snow Books (020 7837 6482/www.snowbooks.com).

Other petite publishers
Arcadia Books
‘World writing’ is this Fitzrovia-based firm’s specialist field, from translated fiction to memoirs and gay and gender studies. Incorporating the imprints of BlackAmber, EuroCrime and Bliss.
Arcadia Books (020 7436 9898/www.arcadiabooks.co.uk).

Bitter Lemon Press
Launched in 2003 and based in W11, Bitter Lemon Press has carved a successful niche as a provider of classy thrillers from overseas, including the US, Australia, Latin America and continental Europe.
Bitter Lemon Press (020 7727 7927/www.bitterlemonpress.com).

Black Dog Publishing
This small Shoreditch publisher specialises in illustrated books, with an emphasis on high production values. It covers a wide remit of non-fiction subjects from architecture to music and fashion.
Black Dog Publishing (020 7613 1922/www.bdpworld.com).

Haus Publishing
Established itself as a publisher of quality biographies in 2002. Its ‘Life & Times’ series details the lives of people who have changed the world, ‘from Beethoven to Marie Curie’. In 2005, Belgravia-based Haus branched into travel literature (rather than guides) with the Armchair Traveller series.
Haus Publishing (020 7584 6738/www.hauspublishing.co.uk).

Pushkin Press
Has a loyal following for its elegantly presented books. Focusing on English-language versions of classic but neglected European titles. Located next to Regent’s Park, Pushkin celebrates its tenth birthday this year.
Pushkin Press (020 7730 0750/www.pushkinpress.com).