Branching Out

In keeping with its name, Pimpernel Press has put down its roots in an unassuming Victorian house hidden at the end of a pleasant street off West London’s Harrow Road. The only hint that a publisher is in residence is the pile of tempting-looking books glimpsed from the front doorstep through the ground-floor bay window. Pimpernel’s publisher, Jo Christian, squeezes past me in the narrow hall to usher me into her combined office and living-room, where a long table is covered with a comfortable clutter of laptop, proofs, interesting objects and framed photographs. Beneath a wall thick with prints and paintings a pair of life-sized Coade stone greyhounds – refugees perhaps from some great house or garden – stand next to a large old sofa covered in piles of books. We’re clearly a long way here from the world of corporate publishing.

That was the world Jo and her business partner, Gail Lynch, were escaping when they set up Pimpernel Press in 2013, following the sale to a conglomerate of the independent publisher where they both worked. During her thirty years as a commissioning editor, one of Jo’s special interests had been books on gardens and gardening, and a number of her authors who fancied dealing with this new corporate world as little as she did had come to her with their projects. The decisive moment arrived when Fergus Garrett, Head Gardener at Great Dixter, the late Christopher Lloyd’s famous garden, remarked that he was ready to produce the book Jo had been asking him to write for years. ‘I said to Gail, what am I going to do with this?’ says Jo, ‘and she said, “Well, the old-fashioned thing to do would be to publish it.”’ So, with some initial financial backing from friends they struck out on their own and signed Fergus up. (He hasn’t written his book yet, Jo confides – high-profile head gardeners are busy people these days, travelling the world lecturing and consulting and trying to write their books on planes.) But in 2015 they published their first gardening title, Paradise and Plenty, a gorgeously illustrated portrait by its designer Mary Keen of Lord Rothschild’s private garden. It’s a window into a dream, the kind of garden most of us will only ever set foot in as visitors. Soon after came Landscape of Dreams, a sumptuously produced gardening autobiography by Isabel and Julian Bannerman, garden designers known for what Prince Charles in his foreword calls their ‘visionary creativity’. When the book was published a complimentary copy was dispatched to Birkhall, where HRH was on holiday. Jo tells me that soon after, she received a call from the courier saying he couldn’t find Birkhall. ‘I checked he’d got the postcode right, thinking, how many royal residences can there be in Aberdeenshire,’ she says. ‘In the end I phoned Clarence House, where someone suggested, “If all else fails, do you think they could find Balmoral? I’m sure the Queen would pass it on.”’ But the list isn’t all about posh gardeners and armchair gardening. There are plenty of books to assist and amuse the humbler gardener – what garden designer Mary Keen calls the ‘How’ as well as the ‘Wow’ – among them Griselda Kerr’s The Apprehensive Gardener, a down-to-earth hand-holding practical beginner’s guide; Clare Hastings’s Gardening Notes from a Late Bloomer, a handbook on how to look after her beloved cottage garden when she’s gone, addressed to her daughter Calypso; and Tim Richardson’s no-nonsense You Should Have Been Here Last Week: Sharp Cuttings from a Garden Writer. For the rest, the list is an eclectic mix of illustrated books on buildings and interiors, art and artists (Rex Whistler, Cedric Morris, Thomas Hennell), craft, cookery and design, veering off occasionally into byways such as 2017’s bestselling Posh Dogs (melting photographs taken from the pages of Country Life). Most are originals, but some are rescued classics, including the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster’s deliciously witty and satirical takes on the history of architecture, Pillar to Post, Home Sweet Homes and Drayneflete Revealed, which come as a set in an elegant slipcase under the title Columns and Curlicues. On the face of it, it does seem miraculous that so many delectable looking titles can issue from this one crowded room. But, as with many small independent businesses who can’t afford to pay for workspace, Pimpernel is like an iceberg, with nine-tenths of it unseen. Working with Jo are Gail, Pimpernel’s MD, who manages the business side (‘and everything, really,’ says Jo, fervently); Emma, who organizes publicity; Anna, who works with Jo on commissioning; Becky, their art director; Gill, the production manager, plus a network of freelance editors and designers, all of them beavering away at home. As I’m sitting on the sofa, leafing through another of the firm’s bestsellers, Seeking New York, a journey through Manhattan’s historic buildings and the sometimes gruesome stories attached to them, written by an Inspector in the auxiliary NYPD, one of the freelance editors drops in on her way back from seeing an author who’s failing to deliver. ‘I think the problem is he’s a perfectionist and it’s paralysing him. He needs a lot of support,’ she observes sympathetically. These are words to warm a writer’s heart, and not so often heard these days in the offices of big publishers. As a result Pimpernel attracts books and authors who might easily have gone elsewhere. One such was Catherine Horwood with her recent biography of the legendary plantswoman Beth Chatto, eagerly awaited but revealing unknown aspects of its subject’s life that kept it under wraps until after her death. The attractively quirky nature of the Pimpernel list certainly tells you that it’s based on personal taste and enthusiasm rather than decisions made round a boardroom table. Typical is the story of twin books by our own contributor, the distinguished biographer Michael Holroyd – My Great Grandmother’s Book of Ferns and My Aunt’s Book of Silent Actors – in which he traces the history of his family through a couple of serendipitous finds in the family attic. One was a collection, beautifully reproduced here, of pictures composed from exotic pressed ferns, of the kind often created by nineteenth-century colonial wives during their husbands’ postings in India and other parts of the Empire. Jo found the idea irresistible, but labelling the ferns was a problem. After some difficulty they tracked down the world’s greatest expert on Indian ferns, Christopher Fraser-Jenkins, who was found in a remote part of Nepal. He identified every frond, and was so fascinated by the project that he added his own anecdotes. Though Pimpernel is unquestionably well connected, being a small publisher dealing in illustrated books that cost a lot to produce is a nail-biting business. A common publishing problem is overprinting, but misjudging a print run in the other direction is also a pitfall. One sumptuous book on a stately home which was predicted to have a relatively small sale, to everyone’s surprise sold out before publication, with Amazon hoovering up the entire stock. Having no books to sell when the reviews come out can be very costly. Yet, despite all the worries, and even if, as Jo laughingly puts it, Gail is checking the cash flow ‘hourly’, there’s a fizz in the air at Pimpernel that is catching. This upbeat feeling apparently extends to both the authors and the reps, a notably cautious and sometimes world-weary group of people, who have to persuade bookshops to stock the books. ‘My experience of sales conferences was that the reps were usually depressed,’ says Jo, ‘but ours are very jolly. They seem to really like the books.’ Even the seasoned Michael Holroyd is on record as saying that Pimpernel is ‘the best publisher in London – probably in the world’. As I waited for a bus in the Harrow Road, a phrase used by Rebecca West in a long-ago review came into my head – ‘life’s golden overflow’. It could, I felt, be applied to the mission of Pimpernel, a small press celebrating those great civilizing elements – gardens, crafts, food, art, architecture, wit and humour – which help to make life worth living.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Hazel Wood 2020