Elisabeth Rowden Rodger
Who am I?
Who are any of us? This knowledge can only come from within, don’t be looking elsewhere.
I have spent the best years of my life in the book trade. I began, a mere wisp of an adolescent, selling books to the literary-minded of a small Wessex market town. After a spell at art college, along with the customary existential crisis, I completed a job application, solely to silence my nagging parents, that opened the door to the world of book production. In this dark and dusty world of paper, presses and Pantones, glues hot and cold, ribbons, foils, dramas and deadlines, I witnessed alchemy, day after day, hour after hour. Not only the creation of beautiful books – priceless treasures themselves – but dreams, ideas, imagination and talent made manifest.
I salute the courageous, heroic individuals who have no choice but to write, for the words must come out. I’ve met them and read what they write. For over twenty-five years I worked with the fearless independent publishers and authors of the United Kingdom. I have made enemies, I have made life-long friends, I have been threatened with defenestration (I had to look it up). I have read the good, the bad, and the criminally insane. I once read a manuscript so incredible, I will, if I play my cards right, marry the author *.
A short and painful attempt to become a publisher followed – it would have been easier and less upsetting for me to simply wheel a barrow full of cash into the nearest bookshop and set fire to it – but this necessarily catastrophic experience revealed an important truth: that my talent is, and has always been, recognising talent.
Now it is my privilege and my greatest joy to represent remarkable talent. Talent that the world needs, that is beautiful, that is original, and that brings us closer to the light.
* To be clear, to be my client you don’t have to marry me.