The Persephone Books shop on Edgar Buildings in Bath occupies a single room of about 340 square feet, with three tall sash windows that face west over the Royal Crescent traffic. On a damp Wednesday in late April, the shop's manager Eliza Mort was unpacking the seventeen newly arrived copies of the press's 158th title, a reissue of Norah Hoult's 1944 novel There Were No Windows.
The dove-grey jacket is the same shade Persephone has used since its first book in 1999. The endpapers, as always, reproduce a textile pattern contemporary with the book's first publication. The Hoult endpapers are taken from a 1942 furnishing fabric by the Manchester firm Edinburgh Weavers.
Adler had come to Bath to see whether the shop's reopening, after the long London closure between 2021 and 2024, had changed the press at the level of its choices. The press now publishes from Bath with a staff of six, including the founder Nicola Beauman, who at eighty-two still selects the spring and autumn lists.
The selection method has not changed in twenty-six years. Beauman reads, in the course of a typical week, between four and seven candidate titles, mostly novels by women published in English between 1900 and 1965, mostly out of print since the 1970s. About one in forty makes it onto a list.
The Hoult is a representative choice. Norah Hoult, who was born in Dublin in 1898 and died in Greystones in 1984, published seventeen novels during her lifetime, most of them about the lives of working women in London and Dublin. There Were No Windows, her ninth novel, is about an elderly woman with dementia living alone in a house in Kensington during the Blitz.
The book was reviewed warmly in 1944, sold modestly, and went out of print by 1953. It has been quietly admired by perhaps a hundred readers in the intervening seventy-three years, most of them encountering it through library copies. The Persephone first printing is 2,800 copies, the standard print run for the press's autumn-and-spring schedule.
Adler read the book over two days in the small hotel up the hill from the shop. The novel is shorter than its reputation among Hoult's admirers had suggested, 198 pages in the new edition, with a preface by the critic Lara Feigel that runs to 2,400 words. Feigel's preface is the closest thing the book has had to a major critical reading in English. It is also, in a sense, the third life of the book.
The first life was 1944. The second was the small underground readership of the 1980s and 1990s, when copies of the original Heinemann edition were traded between collectors of mid-century women's fiction. The third life is 2026, with a print run nearly equal to the original.
What Persephone does, considered as a publishing strategy, is more particular than its founding mission of recovering forgotten women writers makes it sound. The press has, since 1999, been very specific about which forgotten women writers. The catalogue is dominated by writers from the British middle classes, mostly though not entirely English, mostly though not entirely white, mostly though not entirely writing about domestic life in the period between the two wars.
There are exceptions. Persephone publishes Dorothy Whipple, who fits the pattern, but also publishes the American Mary Webb, the Irish Kate O'Brien, the Australian Christina Stead. The catalogue's centre of gravity, though, is recognisable from across a room. The textile-pattern endpapers, the dove-grey jackets, the matching bookmarks: it is a visual project as much as a literary one.
The visual project has been criticised, fairly, as a particular kind of nostalgia. The dove-grey jacket evokes the Penguin uniform editions of the 1940s. The endpapers evoke a vanished domestic-textile industry. The shop on Edgar Buildings, with its three sash windows and its small green sofa, evokes a Bloomsbury that has not existed as a literary neighbourhood since at least the early 1990s.
None of this would matter if the books were not, in fact, good. The fact that most of them are is what has kept the press going through the difficult years of 2008 to 2014, when the original Lamb's Conduit Street shop nearly closed, and through the pandemic years that finally did force the London closure.
The recovery work is also more serious than the visual project's softness suggests. Persephone has, in twenty-six years, restored to print novels by Marghanita Laski, Dorothy Whipple, R. C. Sherriff, Winifred Watson, Diana Tutton, Susan Glaspell, and dozens of others who had been completely unavailable in English. Several of these writers, most notably Whipple, have since been picked up by larger publishers on the back of the Persephone editions.
The Whipple recovery is the press's clearest commercial success. Dorothy Whipple's They Were Sisters, first reissued by Persephone in 2005, has now sold somewhere between 28,000 and 34,000 copies across all editions. Whipple's other novels, all of them now back in print at various publishers, sell in similar quantities. None of this was true in 2004.
The model, considered as economics, depends on slow turnover. The Hoult will, on present trends, sell its 2,800-copy first printing within fourteen to twenty months. A second printing of 1,500 copies will follow if reorders justify it. By 2030 the title will likely have sold somewhere between 4,500 and 6,000 copies, modest by trade standards but solid by the press's own standards.
Beauman has said, in interviews and in conversation, that she expects the press to outlive her. The succession question is real. Persephone has been, since its founding, a press whose taste is one person's taste. Beauman reads the candidates. Beauman writes most of the press's catalogue copy. Beauman chooses the endpapers.
The transition, when it comes, will require finding either a single editor with comparable taste or a small editorial board willing to share responsibility. Neither option is straightforward. The single-editor model is harder to sustain across generations. The board model risks blurring the taste that has been the press's signature.
For now, the shop on Edgar Buildings is open six days a week. The 2026 catalogue contains eight titles, four in spring and four in autumn. The Hoult is the spring lead. The autumn lead, announced for September, is a first reissue of Pamela Frankau's 1934 novel The Devil We Know, last available in English in 1962.
Adler left the shop on a Wednesday afternoon with a copy of the Hoult, a copy of an older Persephone title she had been meaning to read, and the receipt printed on the press's pale grey card stock. The total was 28 pounds, paid in cash. The shop, like the press, does not move quickly. It does not need to.