Handheld Press was set up by Kate Macdonald — a literary historian, editor, reviewer, and lecturer in British literature and cultural history.
She spent many years in her research and teaching career looking for marvellous stories, teaching them and writing about them. 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. With Handheld Press she’s still selling stories: commissioning, nurturing, curating, editing and publishing stories by other people (and one or two that she herself may have been involved with), turning them into wonderful books. Anything to do with words, project management, multitasking and communication are her business.
She knits like a demon in the winter and embroiders in the summer. Her favourite pudding is moelleux chocolat (or perhaps a really good lemon meringue pie) and she goes up hills too fast, due to having grown up walking in the Cairngorms.
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.
