Handheld Press was set up by Kate Macdonald — a literary historian, editor, book reviewer, and university lecturer in British literature and cultural history, here profiled by Shiny New Books.
In her research and teaching career she spent many years looking for marvellous stories, teaching them and writing about them. As an editor she spent fifteen years helping other writers tell their stories, from 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.
Her degrees are from Aberdeen and University College London, and she has published over fifty books, chapters and articles from her own research on twentieth-century British book history and publishing culture. 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 (Bristol and Sheffield Hallam), 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.
