On a Tuesday in late March, Mara Tollemache sat at a kitchen table in Stockbridge, north Edinburgh, and counted forty-two spines. The books were stacked in three columns on a beech tabletop that had served, by her own account, as the imprint's first shipping desk in 2005.
Sort of Books, the press she co-founded with the editor and translator Iain Glen-Roberts, turned twenty-one this spring. Tollemache does not call it an anniversary. She calls it the year the imprint became older than its first published author was when he wrote his first book.
The list is small and odd. It includes a Polish travel writer in translation, a memoir by a retired Highland midwife, a 2011 essay collection on Scottish weather, and a single book of recipes from a hill farm in Argyll that has stayed in print, against every reasonable expectation, for fourteen years.
The press operates from two rooms above a former chemist's shop on Raeburn Place. There is no reception. The door is sometimes locked when Tollemache is on the phone, which is most of the morning.
"We started by accident," she said, pouring tea from a brown pot. "Iain had a manuscript he could not place. I had a small inheritance. We printed fifteen hundred copies and sold them out of a car for nine months."
That first book, a translation of The Salt Path of Galicia by the Spanish essayist Eulalia Reverter, has now sold just over thirty-one thousand copies in the United Kingdom. Tollemache is careful to note that this is across two decades and three editions.
The economics of a small imprint are not romantic. Sort of Books publishes between two and four titles a year. It carries no full-time staff beyond Tollemache and a part-time production editor, Cal Quintrell, who comes in on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Distribution runs through a Glasgow warehouse that also handles three other Scottish presses. Returns from chain bookshops average about eighteen per cent, which Tollemache says is high enough to take seriously and low enough not to redesign the list around.
The list itself is the point. Glen-Roberts, who died in 2022, used to say that a small press exists to publish the books that no other press would publish exactly that way. The phrase is now printed on the colophon of every Sort of Books title.
Cal Quintrell, asked what that means in practice, gave a slow answer. "It means we keep the long sentences," she said. "It means we do not retitle. It means the cover is the third conversation, not the first."
The press is known, in a small way, for its covers. They are designed by a typographer named Hester Penrose, who works from a studio in Leith and refuses to use stock photography. The 2024 reissue of Reverter's first novel carries a single line drawing of a salt pan, scaled at thirty per cent of the cover area, with no other ornament.
Penrose has designed every Sort of Books title since 2009. Her fee, Tollemache said without prompting, is below the market rate, and Penrose has refused several attempts to raise it.
There are practical limits to a press of this scale. Sort of Books has missed two scheduled publications in the last five years, both because of paper supply problems in the post-pandemic period. Tollemache wrote to the authors involved and offered to release the manuscripts to other publishers. Both authors waited.
The reissue programme, which began in 2018, has been the press's quiet success. Sort of Books has brought back eleven titles by mid-century Scottish women writers, most of them out of print since the 1970s. The Naomi Mitchison reissues alone have, by Tollemache's account, paid for the imprint's office rent through 2027.
Asked what she has learned in twenty years, Tollemache did not answer for some time. She got up and put the kettle on for the third time that morning. The kettle, she noted, was the only piece of equipment in the office older than the imprint itself.
"You learn that a book finds its readers slowly," she said eventually. "You learn that a print run of two thousand can take seven years to sell, and that this is not a failure if you priced it correctly. You learn to trust the warehouse and not the bookshop."
The press's next title, due in October, is a novel by a debut writer from Stornoway. The print run will be eighteen hundred. Tollemache expects, on the basis of past form, that two-thirds of the run will sell in the first year. The remainder will sell, or not, across the rest of the decade.
Glen-Roberts left no will when he died, and the imprint's ownership has been quietly reorganised as an editorial trust. Tollemache holds the majority share and a younger editor, Cal Quintrell, holds a smaller portion. The terms are not public and Tollemache did not offer them.
What is public is the colophon, which now reads: Sort of Books, Edinburgh, since 2005. A small press for books no one else would publish exactly that way. The colon has been added in the past year.
On the way out of the office, past the stacked forty-two spines, the visitor noticed a single framed sheet on the wall above the kettle. It was the original 2005 invoice for the printing of the Reverter novel. The amount, in handwritten ink, was seven hundred and forty pounds.
Tollemache said she had kept it not as a memento but as a baseline. "It is the smallest number," she said, "that has ever paid for a real thing in this office."
The next forty-two spines, she added, would take longer.