My two favorite times of year are the times I finally get to reveal, after months of excitement on my part, the next set of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press. It so happens that that time has arrived again!
When I mentioned an upcoming announcement a few weeks ago, I said the new titles would be coming in August. But work has progressed so well that Rupert at DSP has decided the rollout should be in June instead. So even less time to wait than expected, and we already have the covers ready to show you, something we don't usually have finished at announcement time.
My teaser had mentioned that we would be publishing nine titles in all by two different authors, both being reprinted by us for the first time. It's actually one book by the first author, whom many of you will know from a Persephone reprint of a wonderful earlier novel, and eight books by the second, which are so vanishingly rare in their original editions that I'm amazed and grateful to have been able to get hold of them at all.
I had failed to mention that we're very much in Scottish mode for this batch!
Ready or not...
We've adapted the original cover for our new edition.
Second, if you've been reading my blog for a while, you must have already guessed that the author whose books are vanishingly rare (but won't be after June) is none other than MOLLY CLAVERING, currently best-known as the close friend and neighbour of D. E. Stevenson for many years, but soon to be known as a brilliant and delightful storyteller in her own right.
We're publishing an excellent cross-section of both her early and later works in this batch, including her four novels from the 1930s (originally published under the pseudonym B. Mollett) and four of her later novels from the 1950s. The latter include Mrs Lorimer's Quiet Summer, her best-known book thanks to it's being reprinted in the U.S. by the People's Book Club under the title Mrs Lorimer's Family, and Near Neighbours, first rediscovered and reprinted by the fabulous Greyladies Books in 2015. The former are a striking intro to Clavering's early work, with earthy humour, rural Scottish settings, and wonderful descriptions of the countryside and village life in the 1930s. While she will inevitably be compared to D. E. Stevenson, the earlier novels in particular show her to have very much her own style and sense of (slightly rowdy and solidly down-to-earth) humour.
Original dustjackets for Clavering's books are hard to find (and not always the most enticing), but we have adapted the original cover of Near Neighbours for our new edition.
I owe a debt of gratitude to several people for fueling and enabling what has been a multi-year obsession with tracking down Clavering's work. Clavering's cousin Michael Stewart started me off by providing loads of information about her books, which I consolidated into a post here. The tireless Jerri Chase provided me with information about the 1950s novels as well as photos of dustjackets. Shirley at Greyladies stoked the flames by blazing a trail to do the first reprint of a Molly Clavering title in over 50 years. And, in particular, I have to thank Grant Hurlock (as I have many times before) for making it possible for me to read most of these books. He went above and beyond all his previous achievements in getting hold of them, and their reprinting wouldn't have happened without him.
Hope you're as excited about these new titles as I am!
