"There is a world of difference between domesticity and domestication." *

I love getting mail. Birthday, anniversary, and Christmas cards; notes from my elderly aunts; little treat packages from various points on the globe; even the bills give me a weird frisson of pleasure, reveling in orderliness and organization (of course, it's H's problem to pay them and balance the checkbook, so I would bet that he doesn't like them at all). I especially enjoy receiving magazines. I only subscribe to a couple - Newsweek, Brain, Child, the now (sadly) defunct House & Garden (Dominique Browning, this means you can have time to write another book now!), and the also now (sadly) defunct H&G substitute, Domino.

My point about my love of snail mail is twofold.

First, the mail this week brought me an eagerly awaited gift to myself, the new Persephone edition of DE Stevenson's long out-of-print Miss Buncle's Book.

When I was a small-ish girl growing up in NJ, I read all of DE Stevenson's gentle little romances. Every one was set in England, in a cosy world of afternoon tea and housekeepers and vicar's wives, and all of them end happily. They are the perfect comfort reading - like A Secret Garden or A Little Princess for adults. Miss Buncle's Book was the first half of a two-book omnibus (the second half was the sequel, Miss Buncle Married) that I checked out of my local library probably every few months. I read it over and over again, and I couldn't have been the only one because the library copy slowly grew more dilapidated until it finally fell apart and was removed from circulation.

Miss Buncle, a spinster living in the small rural village of Silverstream, writes a novel about her village and its inhabitants. The book, written under a pseudonym, is an unexpectedly runaway bestseller. When the citizens of Silverstream begin to recognize themselves in the book, the fun truly begins. (The only thing that could have made this book even more perfect would have been if Stevenson had seen fit to pen Barbara Buncle's actual novel for us, too.)

I searched for a copy of my own for years and years. It's been out of print for so long that any copy that turned up on Amazon or half.com was exorbitantly expensive. But recently, the wonderful Persephone Books republished it, and I now own my very own beautiful copy of Miss Buncle's Book.

Which brings me to my second point: I couldn't remember where I'd discovered Persephone Books. I thought I'd seen them in an issue of Domino, because I often see lovely things in that magazine that I then long to own. Persephone's elegant editions would fit into its stylish pages quite nicely.

But some casual conversation with Suse, and some research consisting of wandering through the pages of another book I quite like, and I realized I had run across them in Jane Brocket's also-cosy The Gentle Art of Domesticity. She has more than one photo of Persephone novels, their dignified yet charming dove-grey covers making them stand out from their more gaudily colored bookshelf companions. In one photo, if I recall correctly, she even has a stack of the beauties, on an end table or nightstand, and I instantly coveted that sedate pile of books.

Their fronts are quiet, but their endpapers are gorgeously vintage.

The typeface is simple and elegant.


I even love the numbers on the back, which at the same time press home the point that I own ONE of these, and - groan - there are at least EIGHTY MORE I need.
I want.
I covet.

Persephone Books detail, in novel, poetry, and biography, the everyday lives of women. From the Persephone website: "Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women." The books are "readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget." (There is a neat little piece on how Persephone finds and/or picks its books here.)

They are pretty, oh so pretty.
And they play well with others.


My one little grey book makes me feel, just for a moment, that I too could pull off the gracious living depicted in the pages of the style and decor magazines that will no longer liven up my mail delivery once a month.

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*Jane Brocket in her lovely The Gentle Art of Domesticity