HvS | "The Borrowed House" – "Stunning" New Edition!

Books Ready to Be Shipped for Oct. 3, 2016.

The third English-language edition of The Borrowed House by Hilda van Stockum has just appeared.

A friend who has been in the publishing business for decades just wrote to me to say that  it is a "stunning" edition. (I haven't seen the book yet because I am in the UK, but I have a photograph of the books getting ready for shipment, at left.)

Once and future cover.

The first edition of the book appeared in 1975, published by Farrar Straus. My mother always considered it her best book. It went out of print in the 1990s and Bethlehem Books picked it up with a different cover. Then the Bethlehem Books edition went out of print and the price of the book on Amazon went up to above $200 a copy.

The new (Oct. 3 pub date) $13.95 edition by the Purple House Press in Cynthiana, Kentucky brings back the original cover, with a better-then-ever-quality scan of the painting on which it was based.

Meanwhile, a Dutch translation of the book has appeared recently, the second book of HvS to have been translated into her native Dutch.

My sister Brigid worked with my mother HvS on The Borrowed House, and I have just received two letters that HvS wrote to Brigid about the book that I will hasten to type up and post here. They are deeply philosophical and I am eager to share them with you. Be back in touch!

Meanwhile, get the book! Here is a link to Amazon.

WW2 | 55K Sales of "Winged Watchman" in Reprint

Hilda van Stockum's book about a Dutch miller's family in wartime Holland was originally published by Farrar Straus & Cudahy (later Farrar Straus & Giroux).

It passed 55,000 in sales in the first quarter of 2016. It is sold by Bethlehem Books.

This is a very high sales figure for a book that was allowed to go out of print. At $15 per book, that amounts to $825,000 in revenue. The book generates about $40,000 in sales per year. 

So by 2020 it will have generated about $1 million in reprint.

A companion book that van Stockum wrote to The Winged Watchman is about a Nazi-occupied house in Amsterdam. It is called The Borrowed House. 

A new edition is about to be released by Purple House Press in Cynthiana, Kentucky, which was founded by Jill Morgan.

The new edition will have a foreword about HvS's life by me and an endnote by Christine Schintgen with information about HvS's writing.