When a midlist novel slips out of print notices, fades from the pages of review roundups and ends up mis-shelved in used bookstores, it isn't always because it's bad. Often it's a casualty of marketing cycles, publishing trends and the attention economy. I've made rescuing such books a small art...
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Interviews
Interviewing a small-press editor is one of the most rewarding things I do....
Reading Guides
It happens to me quite often: I want to read a foreign-language book that...
Reading Guides
I once found a single marginal note in a seventeenth‑century pamphlet—a...
Deep Reads
When I pull a secondhand book from a shelf and find handwriting in the margins,...
I once found a single marginal note in a seventeenth‑century pamphlet—a terse reference to a forgotten pamphleteer who'd had a brief, scandalous career and then disappeared from the bibliographies. That tiny footnote felt like a door left ajar....
When I pull a secondhand book from a shelf and find handwriting in the margins, I feel the particular kind of curiosity that made me fall in love with bookshops in the first place. Marginalia—the underlinings, exclamation marks, date-stamped...
I always come back to small presses when I want to be surprised. They are the places that publish the books I wouldn't have known to look for—the slim, stubborn voices that resist genre boxes, the translations that feel like private transmissions,...
I want to convince you of a small, delicious experiment: choose one single overlooked novel and let it reshape the way you read for months. Not a shortlist, not a genre binge, but one book chosen with curiosity and a willingness to be led. I’ve...
When I started doing author interviews and scouring the small-press landscape for Storyscoutes Co, I quickly realised that the best route to discovering an overlooked voice often runs through the people who make books happen: small-press editors....
I first fell in love with restored annotations the way many of us fall in love with marginalia: by accident. I was working through a battered copy of a neglected early-20th-century novel in a secondhand shop when a slipped page revealed pencil notes...
I still remember the small thrill of picking up a paperback with a cover I didn’t recognise, reading the back blurb, and feeling certain I’d stumbled on something quietly brilliant. Too often, though, those pleasures are complicated by...
I found the paperback by accident — wedged spine-out between a gardening manual and a book on urban planning, its stickered price peeking like a small, mischievous flag. It was mis-shelved, the kind of discovery that makes a bookseller’s heart...
I’m often asked which small-press imprints are worth subscribing to—whether you mean a literal subscription that lands a book through your letterbox, a membership that unlocks special editions and pre-orders, or simply following a press so...
I still remember the first time an annotated edition made me see a book I thought I knew in an entirely different light. I had picked up a battered novel from a secondhand stall because it kept surfacing in the margins of other books — an author...