The Autumn Catalogue: Titles, Formats, Prices

Here is everything we have in print, as of the last Monday in September. Prices are in dollars. All titles can be ordered from us direct or through any bookshop that will have us.

Read the numbers. Then read the warnings, which are the useful part.

The titles

Novels

• The Salt Ledger. Paperback, 224 pages, $18. A bookkeeper in a harbour town finds that the books are lying and decides to lie better. Warning: the last chapter is very short and you will read it twice.

• Harbour Without Water. Paperback, 288 pages, $19. A drought novel set in a city on a river. Warning: contains an extended scene about a lift engineer that will be quoted at parties.

• The Brass Orchard. Hardback, 192 pages, $26. A fable about a family that sells fruit and a family that sells the land under it. Warning: it looks like a gift book, and it is not.

Essays

• Forty Ways to Leave a Meeting. Paperback, 144 pages, $14. Short, savage and practical. Warning: may be read aloud at the wrong time.

• Concrete Weather. Paperback, 208 pages, $17. Writers on the city in the rain. Warning: the photographs are small and the type is not.

Poetry

• Overnight Parcels. Saddle-stitched pamphlet, 32 pages, $8. Twenty-three poems about the night shift in a sorting office. Warning: best read in one sitting, at about three in the morning.

What the formats mean

We are not precious about the physical thing, but we are careful. The paperbacks are sewn rather than glued, which costs more and lasts longer. The hardback is cased in cloth and has a ribbon. The pamphlet is stapled with two steel staples, each placed by hand.

Every cover uses the same strip of black at the foot, the same title face and a single spot colour. It is a house style that we can afford. It is also how you can spot one of our books on a table from the other side of a room.

How to order

Send us a note with the title and your address and we will reply with a total. We do not have a shopping basket, and we are not ashamed of it. We pack on Fridays. Dov will put a bookmark in anything you ask for, and a second bookmark in anything you don't.

If you run a bookshop, ask for the trade terms. If you run a library, ask for the library edition, which has a stiffer spine. If you run nothing at all, pick the book that sounds most like a bad idea and begin there.

The honest bit

Three of the six books are losing us money. We know which three and we will not say. One of them is the next title to sell out. That is what a catalogue is for: a list of bets, with the odds written in small type.

If you want to understand how we pay for them, start with the print run ledger.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.