Q: Can you tell us more about Handheld Classics and your mission to bring forgotten fiction and authors to new readers?
A: Handheld seemed to come out of nowhere, but in hindsight it was obvious that I would, eventually, end up setting up a publishing house to republish forgotten fiction. I’ve been an academic researcher for thirty years pursuing the fiction and authors that time forgot. I’ve also been an editor for about that length of time too, first in civil service publishing, then in academic editing. I’ve never worked in trade publishing, so I was taking a big risk when I decided to set up Handheld, since I was entering some very competitive waters. But, not knowing what I did not know, I just surged ahead and did it anyway.
Handheld Classics is our core list, with 20 titles in print and nine more scheduled. The Classics are mostly by women, all but one are fiction, and all but one were originally published between 1900 and 1950. Many of our Classics are by well-known authors who fell out of fashion, and several of our best-sellers are by total unknowns, popular in their day, but who didn’t survive the passage of time, or disappeared from sight. Being a literary historian by trade, I know this period of literature very well, and my instinct for eschewing the obvious in search of the forgotten has served the Classics well.
Q: You are Handheld’s commissioning editor, editorial director, production manager, image researcher, print buyer, and publicity & marketing coordinator. That's quite a to-do list! How do you juggle so many positions?
A: I have a lot of freelance help! My first collaborator was my husband: he manages all Handheld’s finances and book-keeping, with our accountant, which is a relief as I am terrible at that end of the business. Our elder daughter manages our YouTube channel and edits our videos in her free time from teaching. Our younger daughter, a linguist, used to type and proofread for me, and still assists me with translations when needed. We have worked with an outstanding designer from the beginning, Nadja Guggi of Messrs Dash + Dare, who has her own business but is as closely connected to Handheld as if she were a partner. Our website and data are managed by another outsourced company, Siserone, who were also with us right from the start. I have a freelance publicity assistant based in London and I work with a PR man in Philadelphia to help me with US marketing. Our new Instagram manager is a Classics PhD in Dublin in real life, but she ventriloquises me expertly, so our social media is seamless across all our platforms.
But the rest is me, and I am a very organised and hard-working person. Being a mother I am also expert at multi-tasking and maximising my time. Picture research is one of my favourite jobs; I did print-buying in my civil service editorial job; and I love editing. I will take on more help, when we can afford it, hopefully in marketing, and we’re currently thinking about taking on a freelance series editor to manage a new list. This summer Michelle, our metadata freelance who normally digs me out of CoreSource holes, will be taking charge of my emails when I’m away. For the first time in years I won’t be taking my laptop with me on holiday.
Q: Can you share a forthcoming Handheld Press title you’re excited about and why?
A: All of them, naturally! I am in a state of constant flux about which book I babble about most. We’ve just finished the agreements for a phenomenal novel about aviation in the 1930s, which we’ll republish with the author’s WW2 short stories in November 2022. I am about to plunge into the arrangements for our first crowdfunded campaign for an anthology of supernatural stories from archaeology (the cover reveal attracted 122k likes on Twitter so we’re trying a Kickstarter). And I am about to start production on a gorgeous nature classic from 1946 that we’re bringing out in January 2022.
But really, the book I am most excited about right now is our next one, Frances Bingham’s biography Valentine Ackland. A Transgressive Life. This is our first commissioned biography, for Handheld Research, of Valentine Ackland, a British lesbian cross-dressing Communist poet, and the lifetime companion of the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner. It’s the first of our books that reviewers are requesting review copies of in advance, rather than us sending copies hopefully into the void. It’s our first book to be launched by a bookshop with an online event (Gay’s The Word, 13 May). And it’s the first book in a very long time for which we’ve actually had a live author to pitch to festivals and events. We have high hopes for this one. It is also, of course, a superb story, like all Handheld titles.
Q: What are you currently reading, or a recent book you really loved?
A: Last night I finished gobbling Paula Byrne’s biography The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, which has been long awaited, and very much needed by Pym-fanciers the world over. It’s very, very good. Also sad, and revelatory: with so much new material, presented so well. Paula is an excellent biographical researcher, and she can tell a story superbly.
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