Manderley Press, the publishing house with its own beguiling story (2024)

When you’re an independent book publisher on a mission toreprint old titles featuring distinctive houses and places and you happen to be called Rebeka, there is only one possible name for your press. “Daphne du Maurier ismy favourite author and Rebecca is my favourite book – it was too good not to,”says Rebeka Russell, who started Manderley Press in 2021. “So many people remember that first line: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The house itself is like acharacter in the book.”

It is fitting, too, that Manderley Press operates from a distinctive and historic location – Russell’s home. The charming yellow-brick gabled house was built in south London in 1868 for the Victorian writer William Hale White – with a little interiors help from William Morris, the 19th century’s most celebrated designer and founder of the influential Kelmscott Press.

I’m obsessed with houses where people have written things

Russell moved to the house with her husband Mark and their family 10 years ago, and was wellsettled in the idiosyncratic property – its garden flourishing around a giant ginkgo tree said tohave been donated by Morris – when she launched Manderley Press from a cosy, quarry-tiled room off the kitchen. Russell, aformer bookseller and editor for Thames & Hudson and museums including the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, had long wanted to create a publishing house reprinting forgotten books that spoke of memorable landmarks and locations. She spent her formative years growing up in the windswept seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire, which inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic masterpiece Dracula. “It’s one of those places that makes people want to paint and write. I just got thebug,” she says. “I became obsessed with houses where peoplehave written things.”

Although the novels of Hale White are not Russell’s cup of tea (“They’re quite moral in that Victorian way,” she says), the house’s literary connection wasa major attraction and discovering more about White and his circle informed its restoration. White hadthe house built (on the advice of the philosopher, writer and art critic John Ruskin) by the practice of Philip Webb, thearchitect of Morris’s arts and craftshome The Red House.

White became a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings set up by Webb and Morris, which is still in existence today. “Knowing that, we felt we had a duty to keep things close to the original,” says Russell. The couple consulted the architect Elspeth Beard and, for the interiors, was advised by Ben Pentreath, both experts on the period. “All the wallpaper in the house apart from a small bathroom, which is Voysey, is from Morris &Co, from around the time the house was built,” Russell points out. “I don’t know for sure they would have been used, but they were certainly in existence in 1868.” Morris designed Trellis, used on the wardrobes in the master bedroom, in 1862. The design was inspired by the garden at The Red House andincludes bird drawings by Webb.

“I like to think something of the house itself seeped into White’s writing,” says Russell. Certainly, it has seeped into her own work, creating an atmospheric setting for her beautifully considered press. The small cloth-bound hardbacks, printed on high-quality, uncoated paper and featuring vibrant cover art, are produced for the bibliophile who loves to judge abook by its cover. “Nobody’s going tobuy an £18.99 hardback of a rediscovered book unless it’s beautiful as well as being a good read,” Russell explains. “I knew all of my books needed tobe jewel-like, inside and out.” The studioThis Side designs the titles, and theartwork that appears on them is available aslimited-edition prints, greetingcards andbookmarks.

Manderley released its first book in 2021: Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, the 1878humorous armchair guide to the city by Robert Louis Stevenson. With an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith and evocative cover art by Iain McIntosh, both Edinburgh residents, it was an unexpected hit. “I didn’t know at the time that the book had a winning formula,” Russell says. “It was short, so it wouldn’t cost as much to print. Ithad Edinburgh in the title, which was a perfect selling point for booksellers, and it’s by someone really well-known, but no one’s heard of this particular work.”

In June, Manderley will release its seventh title, The House in Cornwall, a children’s adventure by Noel Streatfeild; followed by Tales of London Town, a collection by Joan Aiken set in a magical “other London”. And the books are coming thick and fast – in the autumn, Florence: Ordeal by Water, a new edition of Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s diary account of the 1966 flood of the Arno, will be given the Manderley treatment.

Each cover artist and introduction writer has their own connection to the location featured in the book. Waterford-born novelist Megan Nolan introduced The Fly on the Wheel by Katherine Cecil Thurston, a book set in the Irish seaport. The New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan sketched the black-and-white cover for Letter from New York, a collection written in the 1980s by Helene Hanff, the author of 84, Charing Cross Road. “He doesn’t work electronically. He did this little sketch on a piece of paper and sent it over,” Russell says of their collaboration. “His drawing arrived with a bit of cornflake stuck to it, which we took off for the scan.” Another Hanff book in the works will pleaseManderley’s North American customer base, who account for a third of itsreadership. Manderley also has an Etsy shop to handle European purchases.

Next year there will be six more new-old titles, including Manderley’s first translated book. “I’ve done diaries, novels… some Irish, some English. I’d love to do something on cookery or gardening,” Russell says. “I’m not really constrained by anything – other than the books have to have a link to a place.” The world, then, isManderley’s oyster.