Welcome!
Michael Walmer has set about publishing a list where the main ingredient is quality. Authors will be sourced from all over the world, with a love of erudition, be it elegant or rough-edged, simple or complex, poetic or blunt, or all of these!, as the enlivening and guiding principle.
New And Upcoming
The imprint is set up as a boutique print-on-demand operation, but unlike other POD publishers runs as a standard small house, with care and attention given to design and presentation. Many authors will be followed through to create 'complete works' sets, or as near as we are able given available rights. Only works and writers which the publisher respects and likes will be published.
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Authors
Mary Webb
MARY WEBB was born Mary Gladys Meredith in the village of Leighton in Shropshire in 1881. At the age of 20 she developed symptoms of Graves’ disease, keeping her in somewhat ill-health for the rest of her life. She married Henry Bertram Law Webb, a teacher, in 1912. Her first novel The Golden Arrow, published in 1916, was followed by five others, as well as essays, poems and stories. Her fifth and most famous novel Precious Bane was awarded the Prix Femina. Mary Webb died still relatively uncelebrated in 1927 at the age of 46. Soon after her death the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, spearheaded a campaign of recognition of her talent, gaining her posthumous bestseller status and cementing her reputation as a writer giving a twist of modern genius to the classic tradition of Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte.
Charlotte Smith
CHARLOTTE TURNER was born in London in 1749. As a result of her father’s reckless spending, she was required to marry very early, at the age of 15, Benjamin Smith, the violent son of a wealthy merchant. They had twelve children. Her husband was eventually incarcerated for debt, and she joined him in debtor’s prison. Her first publication, a book of poetry entitled Elegiac Sonnets, was published while she lived there in 1784. After release from the prison, the couple moved around trying to avoid Smith’s creditors; she finally left him in 1787.
Smith settled near Chichester and her first novel, Emmeline, was published very successfully in 1788. It was followed by nine more, as well as essays, children’s books and further poetry. She grew increasingly radical, and embraced the growing movement for the rights of women, as well as the huge political changes that accompanied the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.
A legal dispute over her father’s will, starving her of funds, had been churning through the chancery system for many years, since his death in 1776. It was not settled in her lifetime. Having hitherto earnt enough through her writing to support herself and her children, changing times saw her star waning and income decreasing. By 1803 she was living in poverty. She died at the age of 57 in 1806.
Stella Benson
STELLA BENSON was born at Lutwyche Hall on Wenlock Edge in Shropshire in 1892. Having escaped restrictive family life, she worked in London in the suffrage movement and in social work in the poorest areas. She married Shaemas O’Gorman Anderson in 1921, and travelled the world with him to his many customs posts, mainly in China. She wrote eight witty, highly individual, acclaimed novels, as well as stories, travel essays and poetry. Consumptive for most of her life, she died in Hongay in French Indochina in 1933, at the age of 41. On her death, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary “A curious feeling: when a writer like Stella Benson dies, that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened.”