Doors open on Thursday evenings.
Thursday Evening Press is a small imprint with its roots in Bloomsbury, in the London streets where people have been arguing happily about books for a very long time. We publish what we would want to read on a Thursday after work, with the lamp on and the kettle going.
Our history
In March 1905 the Stephen siblings began leaving their front door at 46 Gordon Square open on Thursday evenings. Friends came after dinner, sat wherever there was room, and talked until the cocoa was gone and then talked some more. Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were among the hosts. Nobody was keeping minutes, which is part of why the evenings became famous.
Those Thursdays are the best-known origin of what people later called the Bloomsbury Group, and they are where our name comes from. We never met any of them. We just liked the arrangement: a fixed night, a warm room, and an understanding that a half-formed idea was welcome as long as you said it out loud.
The house story, as we tell it: the press began the way most good projects do, with somebody saying "we ought to put that in print" at about eleven at night. It was a Thursday, and the idea survived the walk home.
That is still the method. A manuscript reaches us, or a poem, or a recipe in a stranger's handwriting, and it goes on the table at the next Thursday evening. If it is still being talked about the following week, we start thinking about paper.
A short map of the neighbourhood
Free to enter, and for generations afterwards the reading room under its dome was where half of London's writers did their homework.
Great Russell StreetThe Stephen siblings start receiving friends at Gordon Square. The talk is about painting, philosophy, and who said what at dinner.
46 Gordon SquareLeonard and Virginia Woolf buy a small printing press and teach themselves to set type, founding the Hogarth Press. It moves to Bloomsbury in 1924, and the type is still being set by hand for a while after that.
Richmond, then Tavistock SquareThe squares are quieter and the secondhand shops on Museum Street are fewer, but the neighbourhood still smells of paper on a wet evening. We kept the day of the week.
Wherever the kettle isRoots
Start at Russell Square, where the plane trees drop their leaves on the benches. Go down towards the Museum and you pass the bookshops, and somewhere behind you are the squares where publishers once kept their offices over the shoe shops. Turn up through Gordon Square and you are standing outside the house where it all got going.
We think of that loop as our editorial office. It has the usual features: bad weather, strong opinions, and a place to sit down at the end.
House rules
We have written these down because otherwise we would argue about them every week.
The shelf
Coming soon
Coming soon
by Swede Hastings
More titles will go up here as they survive the tea going cold.
Submissions
Bring it to the table. Tell us what it is, who wrote it, and where we can read it. We read what comes in on Thursday evenings, and if a book is a fit we will write to the email address you give us.
Most presses ask for the same things: a short synopsis, a word count, a bit about you, and a sample or the full manuscript. Share the manuscript as a link (Google Docs, Dropbox or similar) with viewing turned on, rather than an attachment.
Thursday Evening Press