Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca inspired the naming of Manderley Press, started four years ago by Rebeka Russell. “I’d had the idea for quite a while. I’d been bothering everyone, going ’What should I call this press?’ Everything I came up with had already been taken. Then, one day, I realised, it has to be Manderley,” she says.
Manderley, of course, is the impressive house in Cornwall in which du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter lives – along with two wives, the unnamed narrator and the late Rebecca. Manderley features in the novel’s famous opening line. The name is highly appropriate, because “[Manderley] only publishes books inspired by a particular building or place. It’s the theme that runs through all the publications.”
The formula is simple: Russell finds a work by a late author which is either out of copyright, or gets permission from the author’s estate to republish it. She then commissions an introduction by a well-known author who has some association with the place or building in the work, and commissions a beautiful illustration for the cover. “The person who writes introduction, and the illustrator who designs the cover, have to be linked to the place in the book in some way,” she says.
Manderley titles include Henry James’ Washington Square, featuring an introduction by Colm Tóibín; The House in Cornwall by Noel Streatfeild, with an introduction by Guardian journalist Lucy Mangan; and a new collection of stories by Joan Aiken, featuring an introduction by novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
Having worked in-house at Thames & Hudson, Russell went freelance after having children, mostly working within arts and heritage publishing, before setting up Manderley in 2020. “I’d had the idea for Manderley for a long while, so it’s slightly embarrassing that it took the global pandemic for me to do it. I found myself three months into the pandemic in 2020 with no work, because museums and galleries had closed,” she said.
“I had a moment where I thought, ‘I can either completely retrain or just bring all the strands of my career together so far’. I’ve worked in heritage publishing. I’ve worked in arts publishing with museums. I’ve been a bookseller, mostly at Daunt Books, while I was a student. It seemed like an opportunity to bring it all together. When I set up Manderley, it was literally at my kitchen table, while everyone else in my family was in their rooms on their computers. But it started coming together,” she says.
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