Handheld Press was set up by Kate Macdonald — a literary historian, editor, reviewer, and lecturer in British literature and cultural history. She has published over fifty books, chapters and articles of her own research on twentieth-century British book history and publishing culture. As an editor she helped other writers tell their stories, in archaeology, history, clinical practice and building conservation. Anything to do with words, project management, multitasking and communication are her business.
David Marsh is in charge of Handheld’s backroom numbers. Forecasts, spreadsheet wrangling, costings, logic patrol, reining in unwarranted enthusiasms and playing devil’s advocate are his responsibilities. He is a mathematician and statistician, and takes a great many photographs. He writes occasionally about Bridget Riley and fractals on Tumblr.
Handheld Press books are designed by Nadja Guggi of Messrs Dash + Dare.
Kate handles our Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest accounts. Kath Marsh is our social media content manager for Instagram and YouTube.
Our publicity is handled by Judith Wise, and our books are represented in the UK by Signature Books UK. Combined Book Services distribute our books in the UK and the rest of the world excluding North America; Two Rivers / Ingram handle all our North American sales and distribution.
Sustainability
We work hard to minimize the environmental impact of our business.
Our daily commute is done by foot (down a flight of stairs to the office at the front of our house). When we travel on business it’s most often by bicycle, then by train. We use the car to drive to book fairs three or four times a year. We fly once a year on business, at most. We use Skype and Teams, emails and the phone to work together.
Our books are printed in short runs in the neighbouring county using Forest Stewardship Council paper. We ship our stock to North America by sea, but single orders go by air. Sometimes we drive boxes of books to the post office for bulk posting, but most often they’re taken to the post office by bicycle.
Our printers use recyclable cartons and paper packaging. We have always posted our direct sales orders and review copies in 100% recycled and recyclable packaging #nojiffybags
All our titles are available as ebooks in Kindle and epub formats, and are distributed worldwide to all standard retail and library platforms.
