Paravion Press was born in a bookshop on the cliffs of an island in the south of Greece. The shop swarms with people who love stories and who are far away from loved ones. And it occurred to us that by sending a story in the mail there might, as John Donne put it, be a moment to “mingle souls: for thus, friends absent speak.”
So in the back room of the shop we started printing and stitching editi
ons of our favourite short works, and tailored them to be sent by mail. At the beginning of each title we’ve left a page ‘for your correspondence,’ in case you want to add a few words of your own, and every book is packaged with its own envelope, so it’s ready to mail onward. In 2010 we launched our first series: stories by Katherine Mansfield, Saki, Sherwood Anderson and Anton Chekhov, and an essay by Mark Twain. A few months later, we were commissioned to produce a New York series: we chose texts by O. Since then, we’ve published titles by Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, a special Christmas edition of James Joyce’s classic story ‘The Dead’, and a new translation of Walter Benjamin’s essay on the art of book collecting, ‘Unpacking My Library’. Editions of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau will follow in 2014.
