persephone & omega

It may seem at first as though this post focuses on the gris rather than the verdigris.  The colors step in further below.  If you're impatient for pigment, imagine my stumbling across the bookshop in question on a cool, grey Christmas Eve afternoon years ago while sporting a lime green winter coat and red shoes.

27th Feb: Persephone.  Photo by scribbletaylor, 2009

 

Persephone Books is a small bookstore in Lamb's Conduit Street in London.  It is warm and welcoming and feels, to my recollection, like a milliner and print shop and early twentieth-century dry-goods store packed into one.  All their books are stacked on low, open shelves above worn wooden floors and have identical silver-grey covers.  Every book also shares an identical price of £10, so that readers can be unfettered from cost concerns and the distraction of dazzling dust jackets and instead be drawn to what they really like. 

Persephone republishes works of fiction and nonfiction, mainly by women, whose copyright has expired, whose existence has been nearly forgotten, or whose manuscripts have never before been printed.  In doing so, Persephone re-opens glimpses into the lives of imagined and historical women whose words are still vibrant even as you sense the dust falling from their stories with every page's turn.  

Most entrancingly, each novel, anthology, or diary is bound with endpapers reproducing a fabric or wallpaper design that is historically relevant to the time of the book's writing, or to the circumstances of its setting.  The snippet of endpaper below comes from a linen fabric designed in 1913 by Vanessa Bell, artist and older sister of Virginia Woolf, in the early days of the Bloomsbury artists' collective The Omega Workshop. 

It adorns the inside of Persephone's publication #43, Leonard Woolf's The Wise Virgins, which Woolf began writing on his honeymoon with Virginia in 1912 and completed the next year.  I don't know where any of the original fabric is still housed, the detailed circumstances of its creation, or if it even was given a name.  One place to start looking for answers may be the catalogue of an exhibition of Omega textiles shown at the Courtauld Institute in 2009.  The online summary of the show is quite good.   

If only there were a Persephone Fabrics as well, in the business of reprinting the abstract-graphic beauty of the Omega linens!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

~ F u r t h e r   r e a d i n g ~

• A lovely photographic composition of Persephone + vintage textile, by Rosa Pomar 
• The success of Persephone Books and my other favorite bookseller-publisher, New York Review Books, in reviving neglected literature.  At mediabistro.com
• The cookbooks in Persephone's collection.  At thekitchn.com
• Persephone Books' own blog, The Persephone Post

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .