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Recession-busting nostalgia is in vogue with publishers as Bloomsbury launches a feelgood "lost classics" list and Vintage continues to build its "cosy crime".
Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle has put together a collection of brightly packaged, mostly comic novels from the first half of the 20th century and called it The Bloomsbury Group. All have been out of print but are being referenced with nostalgic affection on the blogosphere.
The list will launch in August with six paperbacks, including Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves, an "endlessly surprising fairytale from the 1930s", Rachel Ferguson's "charming" The Brontës Went to Woolworths, and Joyce Dennys' Henrietta's War, "a hilarious, wry, but moving social sketch of life in rural wartime Britain".
Pringle said that she was struck by how many books being discussed on literary blogs were out-of-print period pieces. "Reading exchanges on the blogs set me thinking about what it is we like to read and how we find those books we know we will enjoy and treasure," she said. "While the publishing industry chases the new, the young, the instantly commercial, readers are often looking for something else—for a kind of enduring quality."
After conversations with bloggers such as dovegreyreader, randomjottings and others, Pringle and paperback editor Tram-Anh Doan turned to the London Library, Amazon and secondhand bookshops to locate copies of the books involved. Further recommendations followed from Bloomsbury executive director Richard Charkin, who suggested Wolf Mankowitz's 1950s East End tale A Kid for Two Farthings, and from entertainer Barry Humphries, who rang Bloomsbury to recommend Ada Leverson's comedy of married life, Love's Shadow.
Bloomsbury will launch a website intended to become a home for more reader recommendations, and will promote with bookmarks, showcards, greetings card sets and seaside rock.
Meanwhile, Vintage is swelling the ranks of its retro-styled classic crime list this month, adding Gladys Mitchell to its roster of authors. When Last I Died, Tom Brown's Body and The Saltmarsh Murders, all starring psychoanalyst detective Mrs Bradley and released this month, will be joined by more of Mitchell's 67 crime novels in due course. Three more Edmund Crispin books are also scheduled for release later in 2009. The paperback of A A Milne's The Red House Mystery, a Vintage Christmas gift title, is set for August.