Nicola Beauman

Persephone Books has recently arrived in Kensington Church Street.Pendle Harte meets its founder, Nicola Beauman

Nicola Beauman is very Kensington, though she’s spent surprisingly little of her adult life here. Having set up Persephone Books in Bloomsbury in 1999, a small publishing outfit with its own friendly shop, she has now opened a second shop in Kensington Church Street, thanks to a fortuitous combination of local connections and a benevolent landlord.
“I’m a born and bred Kensington lady,” says Nicola, who grew up in Addison Avenue and is enjoying being back in W8. “I’m waiting for someone I was at school with to come into the shop but it hasn’t happened yet.” Nicola is enormously elegant and quietly charming, stylishly dressed in an outfit from Denbigh Road’s Wall (“please mention them, their clothes are so wonderful”) and visibly bookish.
Neglected women writers are Nicola’s main interest, mostly female novelists of the 20th century novelists whose works were forgotten and left to go out of print – and these are the books she set out to republish under the name of Persephone. All the titles are stylishly bound with simple grey covers and inner sleeves reproducing a textile print from the book’s original year of publication, making them instantly identifiable as a library. “I very much like French books, and I wanted something plain and uniform, and I like grey,” explains Nicola simply. She chooses all the fabrics herself – “I find them all over the place. The V&A, the Whitworth, the Wiener Werkstätte library… or people give them to me.” And the books themselves are also mostly chance finds of Nicola’s. “It’s quite easy – you just have to find the copyright holder. We’ve got one book that we haven’t found the copyright person for but that doesn’t matter because if they turned up we’d just give them the money.” People do send things in, of course, though mostly they’re not up to scratch. “It’s all to do with how it’s written and that’s a very personal thing. You can tell if a book’s good from the first paragraph really,” says Nicola.
It’s a feminist press, though one without a political agenda, and it’s not exclusively about women writers, or exclusively novels – “We’ve got five cookery books and five men,” says Nicola. “EM Forster is my favourite writer and some men just fit in. And cookery fits in with the woman’s world.” Themes of domesticity, underachievement and family run through Persephone’s list, which includes such writers as Penelope Mortimer, Monica Dickens, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Noel Streatfeild as well as many less familiar names.
2008 is a significant time for Persephone, which as well as opening a second shop, is basking in the glory of having its bestselling title, Winifred Watson’s Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day made into a film, just as, coincidentally, they were reprinting it. A new series of Persephone Classics with picture covers is proving popular and is stocked in Waterstones along with some other Persephone volumes.  The new shop is small, beautifully decorated and very busy, with a constant flow of customers and lots of chat. Just like a local bookshop should be, in fact.
At its new home, Persephone has absorbed old local institution Elgin Books, the much-loved bookshop that was priced out of Elgin Crescent several years ago leaving a bookshop drought in W11. It kept going with a loyal fan base of mail order account customers. Elgin Books’s Sophie de Brandt is managing the new shop and she has brought a few of the old ways with her. “Tony Mackintosh [husband of owner Mary Mackintosh, who sadly died soon after the shop closed] has bequeathed the remnants of Elgin Books to us. We always used to hand deliver books locally, it’s an old Notting Hill service and we’re doing that now too. It’s lovely to continue the Elgin Books legacy because it’s very much missed,” says Sophie. “We have a fantasy that in winter, people might be at home and think, oh I’d like a book delivered, whereas in the summer they go out more,” adds Nicola.
But how does an independent, niche bookseller come to rent a shop in a street where rents are so prohibitively expensive that the only newcomers in recent years have been estate agents, chain stores or dubious bureaux de change? It’s no coincidence that the shop is on the site that was last year displaying an independent shops campaign. The shop is owned by John Scott, a local landlord on a mission to put some character back into the area and to diversify the shopping options. As leader of the Notting Hill Improvements Group, Scott has for many years championed small independent traders selling accessible wares and aesthetically pleasing environments over chains, and when one of his shops became available he spent a long time looking for a suitable tenant, someone who would enhance the street with a bit of character. Nicola Beauman had been considering Kensington for a while, and when she saw a sign outside the shop advertising a favourable rent for the right tenant, she embarked on negotiations. Scott is a big admirer of the de Walden Estate and how it has rejuvenated Marylebone , and only the fact that he doesn’t own the entire area is stopping him implement similar policies.
Nicola and Sophie are loving Kensington Church Street. “It’s nice getting soup at Sally Clarke’s,” says Nicola. And nobody could disagree with that.  l