The latest addition to my website is Eric Lane‘s Dante Alighieri’s Publishing Company. This book is a witty and colourful account of how Eric Lane, publisher of Dedalus Books, founded and ran Dedalus Books with the help of a few friends and his wife. He had been attending a novel-writing evening class and considered what he and his classmates were writing books was as good if not better than those that were being published so he set out to run his own publishing company, instead of being a lawyer as his family expected. Of course, the whole enterprise is full of pitfalls and these are wittily described, particularly getting the books into bookshops, but also financial issues, publicity and, indeed, marital stress. The conceit is that the Eric Lane character in this book is called Dante Alighieri and his book The Comedy, his wife is called Beatrice Portinari ( the real Dante’s muse but definitely not his wife) and his fellow authors Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Anthony Trollope and so on. Moreover as we learn early on, our fictitious Dante is killed while crossing Charing Cross Road (Italians and traffic, his wife comments) while the real Eric Lane is still very much alive at the time of writing. It is a very enjoyable book and interesting to see the struggles of a fledgling publisher though, as he himself comments, he may be a better publisher than author.