Women Printers, Publishers, Booksellers Today
Of all the motives that propel women into careers in printing and the book arts, fame is not one of them. If anything, it is a feeling that Nicola Beauman shared when she established Persephone Books in London, nearly twenty-five years ago. All Persephone books have a signature dove-grey cover and bespoke endpapers, part of an intentional design that Beauman says is an essential part of the experience she wants to produce for readers of her books, as it is so “important to take pleasure from how they look and feel.” In an age dominated by digital media, it is not surprising that attention to and appreciation for the material details of texts—typeface, paper source, the way words and images are arranged on a page—are of growing importance.
Virginia Woolf
A Writer’s Diary
London: Persephone Books, 2012
Persephone book no. 98
On loan from the collection of Elizabeth Frengel
Nicola Beauman established Persephone Books in London in 1999 and made a mark re-publishing out-of-print and overlooked books by women writers. Many of their books are concerned with women’s domestic and social issues and were originally issued in the mid-twentieth century. The 150 titles now in the Persephone catalogue have a signature look: identical dove-grey French-flapped covers on the outside and bespoke endpapers on the inside, all with designs that relate in some way, materially, to the themes of the texts they envelop. The endpaper and bookmark design for Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary is taken from the 1953 first edition dust jacket designed by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who contributed design work to the Hogarth Press, when it was headed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.
