Shamless Hussy Press

Miss Edith has always been the kind of gal who trawled bookstores looking for trouble, and it comes, of course, in various forms.

One pocket-sized piece o' trouble has long been AWOL from Edie's collection -- and it's a crying shame -- but she thinks of it often and has decided to pay tribute to it here.

The novelist George Sand once wrote a little story entitled "Lavinia." Shortly after Edie began to read Sand (this was in 1990), she was in a bookstore in Washington DC (KramerBooks) and, at the counter, noticed a little display of the most adorable little paperbacks, including one which was "Lavinia," Just one short story, bound in an inexpensive yet incredibly charming way -- a little nothing, if you will, but pocket-sized. The publisher was called Shameless Hussy.

As you can imagine, Miss Edith reached for her wallet immediately.

I read "Lavinia" several times, and it came with me pretty much everywhere I went, at the time. What's funny is, I can no longer remember a word of the story, but I know it was Significant to me in the early '90s... and sadly, I cannot revisit its significance to me without making real effort, because my cherished copy of "Lavinia" has been missing since sometime in the mid-1990s. I think it was about 1995 that I lost it. I'm not sure, but I moved around a lot in those days, and pretty much anything is possible. I know that I had tucked into my copy a little drawing that a friend had given to me. So if you're cruising a used bookstore and you find "Lavinia" and it's got this little drawing in it, that's my copy, and please, return it to me...

But my real point here is that I knew nothing, at the time, about Shameless Hussy Press. I assumed it was some kind of vaguely punk-cum-grad studenty enterprise someone had come up with. I turned out to be very wrong: it was an early feminist imprint borne out of the women's movement in California in the 1960s, and about as uncool (by Miss Edith's twenty-year-old lights) as could be. I mean, these people were earnest.But you know what? Edie's aged, she's mellowed, and she wants to say, she's all for Shameless Hussy Press, whatever they printed, whenever they did it... My hat is off to you, Alta. Better late than never?