Persephone Books - London

Persephone Books is a Publishing House and a bookshop based in London. It is dedicated to the publication and sale of books written by "mid-twentieth-century (mostly) women writers". It has a delightful and classy book design in silver grey with the endpaper of each book made of colourful and elegant patterns reprinted in bookmarks that come with each book.

Persephone Books was born in 1998 and has since then grown into a culty Publishing House, for its ability to have rediscovered some lost classics and published unknown forgotten excellent authors, "our books are also linked by the idea of 'home', though that doesn't preclude their characters having a career or flying an aeroplane. Mostly, though, a grey Persephone cover is a guarantee of a good read".

I visited the shop during my last trip to London, last September, and found it very welcoming. I had known about it for a few years and really wanted to go. I was not in the least disappointed and after browsing for a while, I chose to buy Diana Gardner's The Woman Novelist and Other Stories (will talk about it as soon as I finish it) first published in 1946 and the bookshop's beautiful, big resistant and, of course grey, tote bag.