The Guardian featured both Women’s Weird 2 and Women’s Weird in October 2020, showcasing the work Melissa Edmundson has done to recover lost authors.
‘The handsome volumes of Handheld Press have provided some of the few rays of light in this latest of a succession of depressing years. Their eclectic selection of reprints has created arresting temporal conjunctions that have made me think about the present differently. Rose Macaulay’s speculative satire, What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, originally published in 1918, extrapolates from the British State’s unprecedented intrusion into private life during the First World War to imagine a Ministry of Brains committed to raising public intelligence through various measures such as the “Mental Progress Act.” … Written in the very different context of 1970s America, the late Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting is predicated on values of individual agency, responsibility,and consent that speak directly to the intersectional politics of the twenty-first century. What the publication of both of these novels in 2019 illustrates is that the various historical backlashes against feminism have not punctured a deeper movement of ideas across the last hundred years. Fortunately, we only have to wait until January 20, for Handheld’s next offering: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies, a companion to her exquisitely sharp-edged Kingdoms of Elfin, which they published in 2018.’ Nick Hubble in Strange Horizons
‘Handheld Press books are beautifully produced and arrive like an old-fashioned book parcel might have done in 1920; a layer of tissue paper around the book and all wrapped in brown paper sealed with paper tape. ‘ – Dove Grey Reader (See our packing video!)
Word about us has crept out of the Anglosphere and into other cultures: nous sommes une ‘maison spécialisée dans la redécouverte de pépites oubliées’!
We’re in a podcast episode of Words to That Effect, all about lost books and forgotten stories.
We were interviewed by the Book Club Review podcast, about recovering forgotten stories.
Read an article about us in The Bath Magazine.
D-W Withers, in her study of Virago Books, gave us a kind mention: ‘reprint publishing thrives in feminist publishing today … the meticulously researched publications of academic / trade crossover publisher Handheld Press.’
The Lost Ladies of Lit did a podcast with Kate about Rose Macaulay’s What Not.
