A new heritage publishing house is aiming to get books written by American women from around a century ago back into readers’ hands.
Quite Literally Books was started in 2022 by a pair of lifelong friends and voracious readers. Lisa Cooper and Bremond MacDougall have so far reprinted three books, all novels, but say they’re also open to non-fiction, as well.
Cooper and MacDougall joined The Show to talk more about these books that spoke to them.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Bremond, let me start with you. What is it about these books that spoke to you?
BREMOND MACDOUGALL: Well, part of it is that these books, I mean we’ve read a lot of books for this project, a lot of books. And the ones that we’ve come upon that really spoke to us and that we wanted to do in the first group, they sort of stand up as almost modern novels.
They were written a hundred years ago, but they still have themes and writing that sounds current and that is food for thought. The issues and things that these books address, we’re still talking about them, and we’re still having them and, and people are still writing books.
BRODIE: So you mentioned that there’s some parallels between these books that are a century or maybe more old and what’s happening today. What does that say to you? What does that tell you?
MACDOUGALL: Well, some of it’s kind of troubling, I guess. “The Homemaker” is one of our books, which is about a, a woman who, because of circumstances beyond her control, she is a homemaker, and her husband has an accident, and she ends up going out into the workforce, and her husband ends up staying at home and taking care of the home and the children.
And society doesn’t know what to make of them. And they don’t they don’t quite know what to make of their situation. The wife is very happy in her job. She loves her job, and she leaves her house in the morning, and she goes and has a very civilized cup of coffee and breakfast before she goes to work. And her husband loves being at home. He loves being at home with the kids and taking care of the house in his own way, which is not the sort of obsessive way that his wife had taken care of the house.
And that’s still an unusual arrangement. That’s still something that women have all kinds of guilt wrapped up in leaving their homes and their children and going out to work. And it’s very unusual still for a man to stay home with the kids and take care of the home and the kids, and for society to not kind of raise an eyebrow at that. That’s still happening.
BRODIE: Yeah. Lisa, where do you find these books?
LISA COOPER: Well, we have a super scientific method that involves going to — so one of the places that we’ve found quite a few books is the New York Society Library, which has been a library here in the city since 1754, I believe. And we believe that they haven’t thrown anything away. That’s probably not true, but it seems that way.
And we actually do some research online. We’ll look at, for example, the New York Times Time Machine, and find book reviews from — we’ll pick a year, say 1925, and we’ll start looking to see books that were reviewed that year with female authors. And we’ll go look, those up at the library.
Or sometimes we just do this thing where we sort of let the books choose us. We’ll walk down these dusty aisles, trying to find a recognizably female name and, and pull it and hope that she’s American and that she is relatively unknown.
MACDOUGALL: And sometimes it works. Yeah.
COOPER: And believe it or not, it actually works sometimes. I mean, that sounds crazy, but it actually does work.
BRODIE: Wow. Bremond, what is the process? Because obviously these books were published at some point in the past. What is the process for, I guess, getting the rights to be able to to reprint them?
MACDOUGALL: Well, if books are in the public domain, which is anything before 1929 — is that right, Lisa?
COOPER: I think that’s right for this year.
MACDOUGALL: Then you just have to get your hands on an original copy. And so that’s easy. Books that are still in copyright, we go try to find the heirs. We try to find who owns the copyright. And then you have to get their permission.
And sometimes that’s a complete dead end. We can’t figure out who to talk to, or we talk to them for a while and then they decide that they don’t want their grandmother’s work published. So there’s a lot of detective work in that aspect of it, I think more than we were anticipating.
BRODIE: Bremond, I want to ask you about the language that was used in some of these books, because obviously writing styles evolved, and how people wrote in the early part of the 20th century is not necessarily how people write or speak today. But also I would imagine that some of the books you come across have particular language that just isn’t used today for whatever reason, be it that it’s not considered politically correct or it’s insensitive, or a slur, or just words that aren’t used anymore. How do you handle that?
MACDOUGALL: Well, we’ve done a lot of thinking and, working on just that question, because when you’re looking at older books — even books from the 50s and 60s — there are racial slurs, there are epithets, there are pejoratives of all kinds of groups and things.
What we’ve come to at least with this round — for instance, “Plum Bun” in this one does use a racial slur that we don’t use now and people shouldn’t have used 100 years ago. But the author is Black, and she used that word. She put that word in there, and in leaving that in there — which is what we’ve decided to do — we can understand a little bit better what it felt like to be the recipient of that.
COOPER: So with any given book, we have to make the determination whether we feel like it’s something that needs to be back out in the world. And if we determined that it needs to be back out in the world, but it has, as you mentioned, troubling language or abhorrent language or abhorrent concepts, we have to make the determination, “OK, does the world need this again?”
And in a lot of cases, the answer is no. We have bypassed many books that we thought, “Wow, this is a fabulous read,” and then all of a sudden something …
MACDOUGALL: Something gets dropped, a word gets dropped in, or a phrase and and it’s just …
COOPER: Something that is so jarring as a modern reader that we have trouble continuing with it. And so some of it is sort of like that personal test, like, “Do I want to stick with this or not?” But we also think that we’re not doing anyone a service if we pretend like this isn’t a part of our past and that it is actually, in fact, something we have managed to carry forward into our present.
And I think sometimes a book is a really good way to enter into a conversation that a lot of us are afraid to have. And I think that these older books allow for that. And I think that’s really important today.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of MacDougall’s name.
