The room is destroyed, fragments of a life busted open like a piñata are scattered around. The lights are flickering, what lights there are left, just that single bulb in the kitchen, its weak yellow light no substitute for the big bright floor lamp that lays in a twisted heap in the corner. It would be more…
Whatever happens, believe in yourself, believe in life, believe in tomorrow, believe in everything you do, always!
This is not a dig at this post. I love a vibe! Coming across this combination of photos - the first of the storefront of Persephone Books, a formerly-London-now-Bath bookshop that specializes in reprints of underacknowledged or unknown women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the second of indiscriminate piles of second hand books - is extraordinarily funny to me because the Persephone Book is neatly iconic.
Every Persephone Book, save for the fourteen Persephone Classics, is wrapped in a cover of Persephone Grey. The endpapers are printed with textile designs from the year the text was originally published. Each book has matching bookmarks printed with the same textiles.
The London shop, exterior pictured above and in my panorama pictured below, was on Lamb’s Conduit Street, which is a delightfully chewy British name. The panorama doesn’t convey how tight the space was: lined with wooden shelves, rows of tables into the back staff rooms, all settled with neat piles of grey books seated next to neat piles of matching bookmarks.
The employees stop their work every day at 4pm for tea. One chronicles life as a Persephone girl on their Instagram. It is as rambling, charming, and enrapturing as you imagine.
The second photo in op is so aesthetically incongruent with the iconic Persephone look that I cackled when I first saw them together.
Two households, both alike in dignity, but plainly different vibes, you see.
