In the cosy attic flat of a Dickensian terraced house in London’s Exmouth Market, an amiable, middle-aged couple called Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring are doing something slightly daft and rather splendid.
They’re running a publishing house called Eland Books, which champions the golden age of travel-writing.
Modern publishing is a numbers game: pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. The big firms gobble up the smaller ones, and the marketing men decide what sells.
Subject matter? Something topical or sensational (ideally a bit of both). Authors? The younger, the better, preferably already famous for something apart from writing, with a large following on television or (even better) social media.
Eland does none of these things. Compared with most
