Handheld Press (2017-2024)

The Fantasy Hive was saddened to hear that the UK is losing another one of its great indie publishers. Handheld Press will be publishing their last books in July 2024, and cease trading in June 2025. Handheld Press was founded by Kate Macdonald in 2017, specifically with the aim of bringing brilliant but overlooked works by women writers back into print. With their striking cover art and gorgeous design, Handheld Press titles were immediately recognizable on sight. And the reader could rest assured that the contents would match the packaging – Handheld had a knack for choosing exciting and surprising novels and collections and matching them with introductory essays by experts and comprehensive notes on the text. As such their releases were essential to both fans and scholars of the early days of the Weird and the fantastic. And as Handheld Modern they published a small but brilliant selection of modern titles. Their closure leaves a massive hole in the landscape of UK indie publishing.

One only had to look at the sections of descriptors on Handheld’s website to get a firm idea of their priorities – Women’s Lives, LGBT+ and Disability rub shoulders with Fantasy and Science Fiction, Crime/Thriller and Biography. Macdonald’s mission, which she has pursued with vigour and enthusiasm over the past eight years, has been to recover lost voices from the past, perspectives that are in danger of being forgotten by the largely white, straight and male traditional writers of literary history. The work that Handheld uncovered and brought to light was always striking and frequently revelatory. They brought back into print Rose Macaulay’s brilliant, hilarious and chilling post-World War I dystopia What Not (1919), a work whose concerns about social engineering and media manipulation caused it to be censored on its original release and echo uncannily with the concerns of our present. They also published Sylvia Townsend Warner’s unique and brilliant fairy stories Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), a masterpiece of fantasy that has languished out of print for decades, and Vonda N. McIntyre’s long-neglected debut novel The Exile Waiting (1975). These key works made them one of the most important publishers of neglected genre fiction.

Handheld would also marvellously delve into the history of the Weird. Their anthologies uncovered forgotten works of pioneering Weird fiction that rival in quality those of their better-remembered counterparts. Particularly crucial is the brilliant two volumes of  Women’s Weird, edited by Weird fiction scholar Melissa Edmundson, which together shine a light on the incredible work that women writers were doing in the early days of the Weird, both within the pulps and in literary publications. Both volumes are packed full of disorienting and strange stories that have lost none of their bite, many of which have aged far more gracefully than the work of lauded pioneers such as H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. These led to other excellent anthologies such as The Living Stone and Strange Relics, as well as anthologies that resurrect the works of brilliant individual authors, from E. Nesbit to D K Broster and Helen de Guerry Simpson. 

Handheld also delved into biography, again highlighting lives that might otherwise be overlooked. Frances Bingham’s Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life (2021) shines a light on the poet and lover of  Sylvia Townsend Warner, a pioneering figure in queer poetry and lesbian history. And Sylvia Townsend Warner’s own biography of fantasy writer T H White, an essential meeting of two queer minds and two masters of the fantastic, was brought back into print by Handheld in 2023. And while the titles published by Handheld Modern were few, they included Nicola Griffith’s essential and pioneering work of disability fiction So Lucky (2018), a work that draws on Griffith’s own experience of living with MS.

This just gives some indication of the brilliant work that Handheld Press did over the course of their short but busy existence. Macdonald is a fiercely intelligent and enthusiastic champion of literature, and she always made Handheld book launches at conventions, book shops and online welcoming and informative events where serious intellectual discussions could happen. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the last that we see of her in genre and genre-adjacent publishing. Handheld Press leave behind them a remarkable and important legacy, and I will always be grateful to them for the extent to which they have broadened my horizons and challenged my preconceptions about literary history. I can only hope that someone will pick up the gauntlet and continue the incredible work they have done.