Newsletter August 2026: The Fall

The Fall by Penelope Curtis is the last book – following Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking and Mike Bradwell’s Axholme – from CBe this year. Publication date is in September but copies ordered from the website now will be sent out this month. It’s short novel that takes in Isaac Newton as a child, a Victorian vicar who attempted to climb the Matterhorn, and the actor David Niven: it travels far, you could say, except that it never leaves (except for a very few pages) a small village (the last census recorded its population as 314) in Lincolnshire.

The cover is matte, as with most CBe books (Axholme is an exception), but the photograph is shiny (spot varnish). The photograph claims to be first of the Matterhorn; it was taken on August 8, 1849 by, according to the official credit line, John Ruskin (John Hobbs). Ruskin set it up, his manservant Hobbs clicked the shutter. It was found by Ken and Jenny Jacobson, collectors of 19th-century photographs, in a ‘cursorily described’ wooden box at a country auction in 2006. The box contained 188 daguerreotypes taken or commissioned by Ruskin, previously unknown.

Earlier this year CBe printed (not published: it’s not for sale, it has no ISBN) a limited edition (150 copies) of a full-colour booklet of postcards-plus-text. For a while, Vedute a colori will be sent free to anyone who takes up either of the Season Ticket options on the website home page: 6 books of your own choice, including any of the new ones, for £50, or ten for £75. No add-on postage and I won’t capture your bank details, I won’t send you emails asking for feedback, I won’t try to sell you a tote bag.

There’s no poetry, you may have noticed, among this year’s titles. Next year, quite early, there will be Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976), the first UK publication of one of the major books of the last century, poetry or otherwise. Kathryn Scanlan, winner of the Gordon Burn Prize for fiction and non-fiction: ‘A staggering work of meaning and feeling: an important book, at times an almost unbearable book, and a holy book in my personal canon.’