Sunday 28 June 2009

Spines on a Cover, and a Query

It's a book I'm unlikely to read because of various literary and political prejudices, but the cover of Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is appealing. (Though I think actual little plastic soldiers, rather than digitally added little real soldiers, would have looked a bit better.)



As a book from Penguin/Allen Lane, they've slipped in quite a few Penguin spines in that lot.

On another note, does anyone in Britain know whether the publisher Hesperus Press still exists? Their website is "being updated", their blog hasn't been touched since April, their various social network sites are gathering dust, and all of the books they were going to publish over the last few months, including this one discussed earlier, remain unavailable.



This, by the way, is obviously not one of those promised "more substantial posts" I was on about last time.

3 comments:

Levi Stahl said...

Good god, I hope Hesperus is still with us. I, too, have been wondering about their minimal blog presence, but I had chalked that up to staff busy-ness and priorities malfunction--I hadn't gone on to look into their forthcoming titles. I'll be really depressed if they've gone under.

James said...

The official story I know - as a UK independent publisher - is that Hesperus went bust. The editors involved went on to found Alma Books (http://www.almabooks.co.uk/), partnered with OneWorld Classics and bought up the Calder Press. They haven't mentioned Hesperus in years, so I can only assume it's been reborn (but not really) under different management...

JRSM said...

I'd heard about there being some Hesperus-OneWorld connection, but that make things a bit clearer. But Hesperus had been going on apparently happily until earlier this year, so not sure what's happening now. Hmm. Like Levi, I will miss them--and they had/have some great-looking stuff scheduled.