Dame Carmen Callil died on Oct. 17, 2022. She was born in Australia, but she was an exceedingly British kind of feminist businesswoman. She was the publicist of landmark British magazine Spare Rib, but her main claim to fame was launching Virago Books in 1973.
As the Guardian’s obit of Callil noted, Virago was undoubtedly a feminist press.
Each dark green volume carried on its second page the declaration that “Virago is a feminist publishing company”, followed by a quotation from Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution: “It is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society.”
Still, I’ve always been struck by the contrast between British feminist presses and their American sistren. As a matter of trivia, the British presses were often run by immigrants—Callil at Virago, the Women’s Press’ Ros de Lanerolle was South African (after she died, I learned that she had been an anti-apartheid activist who was on the regime’s ban list—she had seemed such a bossy, posh English lady; I was absolutely horrified when I realized how much I’d misjudged her!), and Onlywomen’s Lilian Mohin was (practically if not technically) American. (I believe all the Sheba team were British-born, though they were diasporic.) A more significant difference was that the the “big” houses—Virago and the Women’s Press—were run by women but financed/ultimately owned by men.
But that’s not the topic of this newsletter. Instead, it’s something that struck me while reading the slightly small-C conservative culture magazine The Critic. The Secret Author (sigh!) said that there’ll be no more Carmen Callils because “the part of publishing in which she made her name has become so well-tilled that there are very few crops left to be harvested from it.” The anonymous author was referring to the “lost classics,” books by writers like Willa Cather, Mrs. Oliphant, and Rosamund Lehman that had fallen out of fashion and print or had otherwise been forgotten and were snapped up in large numbers when they were re-released by Virago. I have no statistics, but judging from my recollection of friends’ bookshelves, with their rows and rows of green covers with the apple colophon, they were nice little movers.
The truth is, however, that every project is of its time. The rise of the feminist bookstore coincided with increasing access to computers, which helped give the stores more insight into their inventory, orders, and returns. (I acknowledge, though, that computers were SO EXPENSIVE and the software so rudimentary in the 1980s that it was probably a wash. Most smaller stores managed just fine with a handwritten inventory system. When I re-read old issues of Feminist Bookstore News, I couldn’t believe how much the machines and programs endorsed by editor Carol Seajay, a great proselytizer for store computerization, cost.)
In America, it was feminist bookstores rather than publishers who benefitted from the increased interest in women’s writing, and feminist booksellers were constantly on the case of the big New York publishers, pushing them to reissue or reprint books. When publishers’ sales reps visited their stores or when the feminist bookwomen met with publishers at the ABA (the old name for the annual gathering of booksellers now known as Book Expo), they would advocate for titles they felt were being mistreated. “It took only two trips to the new merged Fawcett/Ballentine booth at ABA and three follow-up calls from a committed sales rep to find out what happened to that best-selling lesbian classic Patience and Sarah,” reported Carol Seajay in the September 1983 issue of Feminist Bookstore News. The book was back in stock within months.
Of course, the feminist bookstores also benefitted from the fact that, back then, a lot of “straight” booksellers were sexist dinosaurs with bad attitudes. When I worked at Lammas, I believe the top-selling categories were lesbian fiction (women would come in a buy a stack of Naiad romances every Friday evening), fiction by women of color—and, needless to say, those two categories often overlapped—AA/NA/recovery titles, and books on women’s spirituality. To the extent that those books were available elsewhere, customers preferred buying books on those topics from booksellers who seemed like friends and/or family rather than judgmental jerks.
History changes what’s possible. World War II often gets credit for the rise of the lesbian bar—or the relaxation of mores that allowed (semi)respectable women to go to bars at all. Women had jobs, and money; they weren’t as tied to the family home and family control. Well, those things were at least starting to be true.
As I mentioned in an early newsletter, the crazy winds of the 1970s were so disruptive that they made a lot of the places I’m writing about possible. Women—like men, but separately—went back to the land. White flight meant that family homes became available for rent in urban neighborhoods, so women could live and plot together. Gas was cheaper back then, which made it possible for women to travel to conferences. There were so many grass-roots conferences, where women would pick a city and organize a lesbian conference, a women-in-print gathering, or a music festival. New projects—and relationships—always emerge when women get together.
In the pre-Reagan era, rent was considerably cheaper. Part-time “straight jobs” allowed women to live decently and still do their movement work. This week, I read a fascinating oral history interview with Marilyn Picariello and Kathryn Hunt, two of the founders of Mother Kali’s Books, which opened in Eugene, Oregon, in 1976. Obviously, movement women were living far from the lap of luxury back then, but they sure seemed to be having fun. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination or knowledge on my part, but I really don’t think the kind of life they describe below is possible anymore in most U.S. cities.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece piece about Mick Herron got me to finally check out the Slow Horses series of thrillers. I inhaled all eight of them in two weeks. They’re SO GOOD! I listened to the audiobooks, and there are two narrators: One guy reads six of them, and another guy reads the other two. The narrator who did two has the central character, Jackson Lamb, be a posh guy (a rude, flatulent, HR nightmare, but a posh one), and the other does him common. They’re both great, but honestly, posh Jackson Lamb sounds right to me. (I haven't watched the TV version yet, but I know Gary Oldman plays him common.)
LISTEN TO ME: Apparently, it has been a while, so warm up the podcast app! On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I talked to Vanessa Zoltan about why she advocates writing a bad novel during NaNoWriMo and then we shared our flops and talked about how you can learn from failed projects. On Working proper, I spoke with the amazing Taffy Brodesser-Akner about how she adapted Fleishman Is in Trouble for television, and then Isaac, Karen, and I shared our creative New Year resolutions.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.