A conversation with Kate Macdonald, founder of Handheld Press
How did Handheld Press get its name?
Once I realised that I wanted to set up a publishing house to bring forgotten fiction back into print, the company’s name had to be something to do with holding a book in the hand, because that’s what reading is all about: holding a physical object with the words on or in it to read, be it paper or digital. There’s also a secondary meaning, of leading someone by the hand to discover new things to read. So I decided on Handheld Books. Then I started looking for the domain name for our website, and Handheld Books wasn’t available … arghh. So I happily changed to Handheld Press, which was available, and has a more traditional and more wide-ranging feel to it.
Tell us about the company ethos. Has it evolved over time?
It’s been refined a little bit, to become more realistic! In the beginning I wanted to sell stories about people’s lives (Handheld Research: memoirs, letters and biographies) as well as fiction and non-fiction (Handheld Classics). As well as bringing lost authors back into print I wanted to publish new fiction by living authors and to establish a list of new science fiction and fantasy by women. This list of new fiction (Handheld Modern) grew to two titles before I realised that I had taken on too many books for me to manage on my own (the Handheld Classics and Handheld Research were intense to work on). I also had to admit that I did not know how to market new fiction; it’s a very crowded sector of the book trade, and I had never worked in that area before, so after a year I ditched Handheld Modern, reverted the rights of the two novels we’d published, and focused thereafter on the Classics. I still published some Handheld Research, but the Classics were our strength.
Tell us about some of your favourite titles
My preferences from the books we’ve published tends to be affected by my enthusiasm for the authors, especially those on whom I’ve done a lot of research and have come to feel as if I knew them personally. Rose Macaulay is my favourite, without a doubt, because she is so unexpected, eccentric and loveable, glittering with intelligence and no nonsense. I love her dynamite collection of squibs and essays, Personal Pleasures, which we republished a few years later. It took me weeks to research the introduction for that because of all the new words she invented and the bizarre stories she told that needed unpicking to see what she’d invented and what was actually true. I am also very proud to have published Latchkey Ladies by her close friend Marjorie Grant, which is an extraordinary and thrilling novel from 1921 about single women’s lives in London at the end of the First World War. Single women then were experiencing new freedoms, but when one of them becomes pregnant the story is very familiar.
I delight in Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford because it appeals to all ages and is just a perfect, fun, moving, story of a young woman who comes to London in 1931 to find a job because her fiancé isn’t interested in getting married yet and she wants to prove she can support herself for a year, and all sorts of shenanigans ensue when she finally gets a job in the book departments of a well-known London department store on Oxford Street. It’s told in letters, memos and telegrams and illustrated with swift and telling line drawings: I bought this for £3 at a book sale, started reading it on the train and nearly missed my stop, it is that good. But bizarrely, it’s been forgotten for decades, as have been the authors, who used to be highly prolific best-selling romance novelists and well-regarded historical novelists too. I love our anthologies of supernatural short stories, because these too recover excellent women’s writing from the archival dustbin of history. These stories were forgotten because the authors were women. In this genre, the people who established and nurtured the genre of supernatural-horror-Weird-fantasy from the 1920s onwards (editors, critics, and authors reviewing each other) were largely men, and very few of them paid much attention to women’s writing. Handheld was able to redress this ridiculous imbalance with Women’s Weird and its successors. I’m very proud of having commissioned these anthologies and got over 100 stories by women back into print which would otherwise have been very difficult to find.
Do you have any reading recommendations (fiction and/or non-fiction)?
It’s hard to recommend books to people without knowing their tastes! Here are a few.
If you want dramatic adventure and teeth-on-bone tension, try John Llewelyn Rhys’ The Flying Shadow, about a 1930s flight instructor trying to teach his pupils how to fly and not kill each other in the sky.
If you want a passionate, rhapsodic trans-Atlantic love story as the Second World War looms, try Sylvia Thompson’s The Gulls Fly Inland.
If you want a glorious biography of a cross-dressing lesbian Communist poet and her serial love affairs from the 1920s to the 1960s, the most important of which was her lifetime relationship with novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, do read Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life by Frances Bingham, which was shortlisted for the Polari Prize.
If you grew up reading Good Housekeeping in the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll remember Betty Bendell’s delightful and uproariously funny columns, My Life and I, now collected in one volume of domestic astonishment and social fauxs pas. Period delight.
Is there anything else you would like to share with Postscript’s readers?
Handheld was set up to bring forgotten fiction and lost authors back to life, and we did that successfully for eight years. Now the time has come to close the books and do other things, it is a great pleasure to know that the books we’ve published have yet another life in the Postscript catalogue, and I hope that they will delight you as much as they delighted me.
