Afternoon Tea With Silver Moon, and Jane Cholmeley

If the pioneers of feminist publishing have been deservedly celebrated, don’t those who pioneered feminist bookselling also deserve their plaudits? Yet the booksellers who championed women’s writing in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have been largely unsung: according to Jane Cholmeley, co-founder of the famous Charing Cross Road bookshop Silver Moon, that’s probably because they were “so busy running around trying to make a living, adding up the figures, trying to open on time, and making sure there were enough staff” that they didn’t have time to keep an archive or think about their legacy.

Some of that is set to change with publication of A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a Group of Women set out to Change the World.

This illustrated talk covers the highs and lows of those years – gossip about the big names, pictures of women with interesting styles of clothes, booktrade politics, feminist politics, local authority politics, campaigns, argument…

Silver Moon was founded against a backdrop of homophobia and misogyny, by three lesbians (one of whom was Jane Anger, retiring this month from Five Leaves!). Silver Moon became Europe’s biggest women’s bookshop, hosting a constellation of stars from Margaret Atwood to Maya Angelou, PD James to Angela Carter.

Tea and cake is complimentary. Please let us know if you have any special diets.