Paul Cohen-Portheim

I haven’t made much noise about the Recovered Books series I’m editing for Boiler House Press, but as we will soon release our sixth title, Gertrude Trevelyan’s Two Thousand Million Man-Power, I thought it was worth sharing a look back at our first year and a look at where we’re headed for 2023 and 2024.

After I finished my dissertation (thesis in the U.S.) on Virginia Faulkner for the MA Biography/Creative Non-fiction program at the University of East Anglia and while my wife and I were awaiting the end of COVID lockdowns to make our move back to the U.S., I approached Nathan Hamilton, the publisher at Boiler House Press and director of the University Publishing Project at UEA, and offered to help with any publication chores he had. As an ‘in at the deep-end’ training exercise, he asked me to usher the first four titles in its Beyond Criticism series to publication and I was able to see them through to release in May 2021.

While working on this project, I asked Nathan if he would be interested in publishing one of my favorites of the hundreds of books I’ve featured on this site: Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I had already confirmed with Lewis’s son Michael that the book was in the public domain and I felt it could fine a small but receptive readership based on the success of its Spanish edition from La Bestia Equilatera in Buenos Aires. “Why not do a whole series?” he responded. He invited me to put together a proposal and with him to form an editorial board.

Luckily, Nathan had done some groundwork already with two UEA professors, Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett. Working with Tom and Hilary, he’d devised a project whereby, through an undergraduate module led by Thomas and Hilary studying 19th century American children’s literature, they were preparing to publish Susan Coolidge’s novel What Katy Did. Although well-known in the U.S., the book hadn’t been available in the U.K. for some years.

So, we agreed to join forces and establish Recovered Books as a series covering both adult and children’s book. As announced in The Bookseller in July 2021, the aim of the series is to bring “unfairly forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of today’s engaged readers.” We set to work on getting What Katy Did and Gentleman Overboard ready for printing and distribution, but also on a production plan for further titles in 2022 and beyond.

We were fortunate to be able to work with some of UPP’s network of terrific book designers. Nathan arranged for two designers who’d worked on other UEA Publishing Project publications. Emily Benton worked with Thomas and Hilary’s students to design What Katy Did for maximum accessibility by a variety of readers, including those with reading challenges such as dyslexia, and Louise Aspinall worked with me to adapt the Boiler House Press fiction design and come up with the logo for Recovered Books.

Even though no joke is improved by an explanation, I will point out that the logo has a couple of them. It shows a book with the letters RE on the cover (RE-covered, see?) and the lower right edge (the pages) incorporates the “smokestacks” logo of Boiler House Press. The smokestacks commemorate the first building erected on the UEA campus: the heating plant (boiler house).

Building further on elements of Boiler House Press’ branding, Louise helped us establish a template for the series that maintains a consistent look and feel while including a variety of elements unique to each title. The cover design is the most obvious variable, of course. Louise created a modern adaptation of the original U.S. dust jacket for Gentleman Overboard that conveys in simple, powerful terms the predicament of the novel’s forlorn hero, Henry Preston Standish. It’s a design, I’m happy to announce, is being used for the German edition of the book, Gentleman über Bord, due out from Mare Books in March 2023.

Other design elements that vary with each title include a full-page photo of the author opposite the title page and a glyph (the life preserver on the title page) used throughout the book as a divider.

We also included two-page images for the endpapers at the start and end of each book, images that convey a sense of the narrative or the spirit of the book. In this case, an advertisement for a cruise of the type Standish takes from Honolulu before his unfortunate accident and a barren moonlight seascape — the emptiness left after he goes under for the last time.

For me, the biggest challenge was laying out the plan for 2022 and beyond. Or rather, carrying out the plan. For each title, unless it’s in the public domain — and most of our Recovered Books titles are not — three contracts have to be established: one for the legacy permissions, one for the book’s introduction, and one for its afterword. With the legacy permissions, the primary obstacle is often the difficulty in locating who has the legal authority to sign such an agreement. I have been lucky in most cases so far, but a number of the books I’d most like to reissue are still on hold as we continue our hunt for the responsible legatees.

One of our aims for the Recovered Books series is to help current readers discover these wonderful books, and a short introduction by a contemporary writer with some name recognition is part of how we do that. We’ve been lucky in attracting the support of writers such as George Szirtes, Vivian Gornick, Julia Blackburn, and Rachel Hore to this end. But another aim is to encourage further study and research, to help enrich the understanding of the canon by bringing these neglected books and writers back into English departments. And for that, we’re recruiting scholars such as Dr. Paula Rabinowitz, professor emerita of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Nicola Darwood of the University of Bedfordshire, to write afterwords placing each book in its historical and literary context.

This May, we released two titles in the series. Stella Benson’s Pull Devil, Pull Baker is a book that’s fascinated me ever since I stumbled across it a Missoula bookstore back in 2007 and wrote about it here. It’s easily one of the least classifiable books I’ve ever come across: part memoir, part fantasy, part criticism, part melodrama, part revisionism — really a book that anticipates by decades the sort of fiction/nonfiction hybrids that are regarded as uniquely 21st century inventions. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is so odd that after Julia Blackburn, who generously agreed to consider writing the introduction, first read it, she wrote me asking if I would release her from the commitment. Fortunately, I convinced her to take another look and she reached a perhaps grudging truce with Stella Benson’s mercurial creation.

Our second May release proved unexpectedly satisfying. I had been in contact with the journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Davis after writing about Life Signs, a novel written by his first wife Johanna Davis. Peter is the son of the film producer Frank Davis, one of Irving Thalberg’s right-hand men, and Tess Slesinger, who wrote several works of fiction before moving to Hollywood, becoming a screenwriter, and marrying Davis, and he confirmed that his mother’s short stories, which had been collected several times, were out of print. Peter was delighted to work with us to publish a new collection and suggested that we look into Slesinger’s uncollected work as well. With help from UEA’s library, I was able to obtain copies of all Slesinger’s uncollected stories and sketches, which appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to small magazines such as Pagany and This Quarter. He also agreed that we would use the title of Slesinger’s first collection, Time: The Present, instead of that of the 1971 collection he helped edit (On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories). I think it’s safe to say that the result is the single best introduction to Tess Slesinger’s short fiction and a collection that merits a place in the American literature section of any college library.

We had a bit of a puzzle over the cover for Pull Devil, Pull Baker. The title comes from an expression connoting a contest between two opposing forces, but in this case, the opposing forces are Stella Benson’s sense of truth and the significantly more fantastic sense of her devil, the down-and-out Russian nobleman Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine. Louise Aspinall came up with a simple, striking image of a knotted rope caught midway between unseen hands pulling against each other. I found the photo we used for Slesinger’s Time: The Present as an illustration for “For Better, For Worse,” a story that appeared in a long-defunct women’s magazine called The Delineator, but it was Louise who had the brilliant idea to tint it a deep, dramatic purple. I fell in love with it the moment I first saw it attached to her email.

This month, we have two more books coming out. From Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett we have Five Little Peppers & How They Grew by Margaret Sidney, again with design and editorial approach led by their undergraduate students. And we are bringing out what I hope will be the first of three or four titles by Gertrude (G. E.) Trevelyan, a writer I’ve been championing since learning of her work back in 2018. Despite its awkward title, Two Thousand Million Man-Power, which I wrote about here, is probably Trevelyan’s most accessible title, a realistic account of the lives of a couple, Katharine and Robert, from New Year’s Eve 1919 to the funeral of King George V in 1936. Trevelyan was influenced by John Dos Passos’s U. S. A.trilogy and incorporates snippets of newspaper headlines and radio reports into her text, creating a vivid picture of English life during this period. At the same time, it’s a caustic view of life in a capitalist society, one as radical in its outlook as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope that Two Thousand Million Man-Power will build upon the interest in Trevelyan’s work that started with the Abandoned Bookshop’s reissue of Appius and Virginia two years ago.

Looking ahead, we have a full plate of reissues lined up for 2023. In May, we will release two books:

• Quarry, by Jane White

I wrote about this, White’s first novel, published in 1967, a year ago. Having read the book again several times in the course of preparing the text, I can say that this is among the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. White manages to combine a story full of evil and violence with a tone that’s almost eerily normal and dispassionate. It will not be a book people like. I do think, though, it will be a book that gets under the skin — and a book that revives interest in one of the more challenging English novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a writer long overdue for recognition. Anne Billson is writing the introduction and Dr. Helen Hughes of the University of Sussex (and White’s daughter-in-law) the afterword.

• The Sanity Inspectors, by Friedrich Deich

This black comedy about the moral and intellectural difficulty of trying to remain good in an evil system was brought to us by Dr. Chris Maloney, a member of our editorial board and a psychotherapist with deep experience in social causes. The book was first published in 1955 and translated soon after into English. We were honored that the Hoffnung Partnership agreed to let us reuse Gerard Hoffnung’s original dust jacket illustration for our own cover. Chris Maloney wrote the afterword and the historian and novelist Sinclair McKay contributed the introduction.

In September 2023, we’re publishing two books:

• William’s Wife, by Gertrude Trevelyan

I will be eager to see how this book is received. Trevelyan’s story of how Jane Chirp goes from being a lady’s companion to scavenging for discarded produce in the gutters and dustbins of London’s markets is unlike anything I know of in English fiction of the 1930s. It’s one of the most powerful accounts of psychological breakdown I know of, and all the more so because so much of the damage is self-inflicted. Pritchett and PEN/Ackerley prize winning author Alice Jolly will provide the introduction and Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith is writing the afterword.

• Selected Poetry and Prose, by Genevieve Taggard

I discovered Genevieve Taggard’s work back in 2015 and wrote a long piece about it here. Taggard is certainly the most neglected of the major American modernist poets. Her work is full of powerful images and rooted in both a love of nature and a passion for social justice. In addition, she wrote a number of autobiographical and critical essays that are just too strong and good not to be in print. And yet, since her death in 1948, there has been no comprehensive collection of her work. I’m pleased to be working with Dr. Anne Hammond, who’s editing and providing critical commentary for the collection and the poet and biographer Terese Svoboda, who’s providing the introduction.

In November 2023, we’re bringing out three books:

• Stories by Lydia Maria Child

This collection of children’s stories by an American abolitionist and activist for the rights of woman and indigenous people will be produced by Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett’s undergraduate programme.

• No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles

I’m really excited about this title. A story about a young woman growing up on a rance in remote northern Nevada belongs on the shelf beside Joan Didion’s early novels of California — yet it’s never been published in the United States. As I wrote here in 2021, No More Giants was published in England as part of the Hutchinson New Authors series in 1966 and quickly forgotten. The subject probably held little interest for English readers, and so the book vanished. I hope that Howles, who is in her nineties and living in London now, will be able to see her book reach U. S. readers for the first time. Judy Blunt, who directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana is writing the introduction and Dr. Nancy Cook, an expert in literature of the American West, is writing the afterword.

• Time Stood Still, by Paul Cohen-Portheim

This account of Cohen-Portheim’s confinement in England as an enemy alien during World War One is, in my opinion, one of the truly great works of humanism. A man who worked as a theatrical designer, Cohen-Portheim was not physically abused or singled out for mistreatment. Yet as he shows in moving terms, the fact of being imprisoned for no crime other than having been born in the wrong country was a punshment of a thousand little cuts: “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated.” We are fortunate to have this little classic introduced by Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and other books, and an afterward written by Dr. Panikos Panayi of DeMontfort University, author of Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees During the First World War.

We’re still working on the details of our plan for 2024, but I can announce at least the following titles:

• Mortal Leap, by MacDonald Harris

I first discovered this book back in 1980 and as I wrote here, Mortal Leap was one of the works that convinced me that there were riches to be found in unknown and long-forgotten books. Mortal Leap has a small but passionate following on Goodreads and used copies have become almost impossible to locate.

• A new translation of Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus

After I wrote about the first English translaton of this book as The Red House, I was contacted by Dr. Stephanie Ortega of the University of Texas, who is currently finishing a new translation. This version will, for the first time, make the complete text of Jerusalem’s novel about a house of prostitution in Vienna available to English readers.

• Broken Images, by John Guest

Over the years, I’ve had several friends pull out of copy of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and read from it in a fever of excitement over the power and beauty of its prose. I’ve had that same feeling about Broken Images since I first read it in 2014. As I wrote in my essay about it, Broken Images shares with its reader “a sensibility to life that never, despite all the drudgery and monotony of Army life and all the strains and fatigue of combat, seems anything less than fresh and alert.” I like to call it the most beautiful book written about World War Two, despite that seeming an oxymoron. I’m delighted to be able to bring this back to readers.

• Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan

This was Trevelyan’s last novel. Looking back at what I first wrote about this book in 2019, I can see how much has changed. “I’m not sure what the point of this post is,” I wrote then, gloomy about the prospect of ever seeing Trevelyan’s amazing books back in print — or even noticed. Now, I can say that it looks like six out of Trevelyan’s eight novels should be back in print by the end of 2024, just five years later. I am eager to see if other readers find her work as stunning as I did when I first encountered it.

We have yet more candidates in development, but it looks like Recovered Books is slowly becoming what I hoped it could be when Nathan Hamilton invited me to put the series together: a small but significant project in bringing lesser-known books and writers back to the attention of both readers and scholars.