Dear readers,
Well, we did it – we published all twenty-two books we set out to in 2020. Thanks so much to the amazing Valley Press team, the brilliant freelancers we worked with, the authors who trusted us with their work, and everyone who has bought a book this year; couldn't have done it without you. (I'm amazed we did it at all, frankly!)
There are four recent titles I haven't quite got around to introducing to you yet, and considering the time of year, I thought I'd write them up in the form of a "gift guide". If you do feel inspired to pick up any of these books as presents, please note that our last "post trip" for 2020 will be just after 9am on Friday 18th December, so be sure to get your orders in before then.
With that noted, it's onto the guide, which includes my best guesses as to the kind of person each book would appeal to. Of course, philosophers have long argued that other people are essentially unknowable – so you may want to get all four just to be safe...
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Title: She Wrote the Songs: Unsung Women of Sheet Music
Author: Patricia Hammond
Perfect for: Those intrigued by Victorian society and culture; musical history buffs; anyone you think would be upset at the thought of great and talented women being overlooked.
Publishers' notes: The author of this book is a woman on a mission: to rescue the female composers of "parlour songs" (essentially the pop hits of the Victorian era) from the margins of history and bring them back into the spotlight where they belong. To this end, she has produced a lively, passionate, deeply personal volume filled with tales of political reform, personal empowerment and the unique role women have played in British musical history.
She is also a supremely talented singer; if you click here you can enjoy a 50-minute-long concert with Patricia and pianist Andrea Kmecova performing songs mentioned in the book. Adding to the "giftiness" of this publication is the fact we went all-out on the printing quality; it's a hardback with a gorgeous gold foil illustration by Fitzpatrick Designs (who also took this classy photo):
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Just 500 copies of this hardback edition have been printed, so you may like to grab one while you can – the next run will be a humbler paperback effort (not that there's anything wrong with those!) The book also includes various photos and artwork from the era, some of which you can see here, alongside a useful introduction to the author's cause and this whole fascinating area of history.
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Title: A Suitable Love Object
Author: Rebecca Swift
Perfect for: Much-loved friends and family with a deep appreciation for poetry.
Publishers' notes: Rebecca, or Becky as I've come to know her, is something of a national treasure in literary circles. This book had a unique journey to print; following the author's tragically early death in 2017, I read in this Guardian obituary that Becky "had been putting together a manuscript of poems which she hoped to publish". Somehow I knew instantly, and instinctively, that the poems would be phenomenal and that Valley Press was the right home for this book, so I reached out to her estate – and the rest is history.
The poems have been described as 'beautiful, wry, brimming with intelligence and love', and the book also features a foreword by Michael Ondaatje, an introduction by Kamila Shamsie, and a cover by acclaimed Penguin Classics designer Matthew Young – with flaps, and printed on a special "uncoated" card at his request. It also includes one of my favourite poems of all time, which I'll share in the new year (Becky wrote that her heart 'leaps towards the spring' in January), but here's another of my favourite verses, about incrementally moving on after lost love:
"Free, almost, to enjoy the ordinariness of being
alone; to catch a sad bus in the rain, to go shopping,
to worry about the bills and the washing-up;
fail to do what I now even fail to imagine to do."
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Title: Journeying
Author: Paul Sutherland
"I know, by the look in your locked sight
that you wish you could’ve stopped the pages
and seen what had been written for us."
Perfect for: Philosophical, spiritual, deep-thinkers – people who like a good journey, and not necessarily in a geographic sense.
Publishers' notes: If this book sounds familiar, it's because it was first published by a youthful Valley Press more than eight years ago. Following the author's comprehensive, 400-page New and Selected Poems in 2017, I had quietly retired this earlier volume – but people asked after it so regularly that a return to print became inevitable. (This is the rare occasion when the phrase "back by popular demand" is an accurate summary of what happened.)
Though the book has been redesigned to match our current standards of design and typesetting, the words are the same as in 2012 – and what words they are. Back then, just 18 months into my professional publishing career, I was blessed to work on what (for my money) still stands as the crowning achievement of Paul's fifty years of writing. If you give your careful attention to this book and find yourself neither moved or inspired, I will eat my publisher's hat; or if you like, personally come to your house and check your pulse (someone should).
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Title: The Minnow Would Be Lost
Author: Nora Chassler
"He was the fearless crew
Now who’s confused?
This could be
In any order
Go back
Go back"
Perfect for: Open-minded eccentrics with a sense of literary adventure. A good test is to tell them the titles of Nora's last two books, Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space and Madame Bildungroman's Optimistic Worldview. If they respond "wow, sounds like my kind of literature!" – this is the right person (and clearly someone worth keeping in your life).
Publishers' notes: The long-awaited third Nora Chassler book at Valley Press has been known under various titles since April 2018, when I asked after the manuscript and Nora replied: "I have it but am afraid to send it". (These included Itheherome, and the title as it is now but in lowercase, starting with a comma and a space, i.e. ", the minnow would be lost".) The titular phrase comes from the theme song of the classic TV show Gilligan's Island, but prior viewing of this is not required. In context, it's a fragment of memory from Nora's childhood, one of many fragments in this wonderfully challenging and compelling work.
The Minnow is an "epic poem" in three parts – plus some interludes, with names like "The Proem", "A Sociopath", "Another Sociopath", and my favourite "th: (the voiceless dental fricative)". It is a journey to the centre of the mind of one of the most unique, daring writers ever to hold a pen; you might also say (quietly, when she's not around) that it's the Chassler equivalent of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
I've not met anyone with a lukewarm opinion about Nora's writing; reviews of her last book included Sean Ono Lennon declaring "in a hundred years having known Nora will be the other thing I am remembered for", and Rónán Hession calling her "the best writer you’ve never heard of". The world now has a fresh 134 pages to get its head round; I can't wait to hear what you think of it.
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As ever, many thanks for reading this email; I really appreciate your time and attention, and I know the authors do too.
I'll leave you now, to what I hope is a happy and peaceful last few weeks of a year that, for most of us, has been anything but. We'll always have books, though, and – whisper it – we've already finished the first few titles for 2021, so if your shelves are still standing by then, I'll be back in your inbox soon with a fresh attempt to overload them...
– JM
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