The picture is a compressed panorama. Standing in the doorway of the Eland office I could see Barnaby on the left, or Rose on the right, but not both without turning a full half-circle. I took reference photographs across the sweep and stitched them into a deliberately imperfect collage, so that it might fit into an A2 shape.
Barnaby features twice – once on the left as an iPad drawing, once in the centre as a pencil sketch scanned in and coloured around digitally. If you look closely you can see the difference.
The office is on the top floor of a building on Exmouth Market, close to the old Guardian building where I first did shifts as a national newspaper journalist – now home to LinkedIn, I noticed.
Across the landing from Eland, Rose keeps a separate practice as a psychotherapist – two doors on the same top floor, two working lives running in parallel.
In the far corner behind Rose in the picture: the kitchen area. On the left, by the arched window: a set of scales for weighing books to post out. Tucked behind the scales: shelves packed with Eland titles, some of the red-jacketed ones just visible on the shelf behind the middle Barnaby.
I was at Eland as an artist in residence in March 2024. Barnaby and Rose run the press together. In an old interview Rose said: “I married a bookaholic, and books took over our lives.”
The catalogue is described as modern travel classics – a phrase which does a very tidy job of hiding how complex the work can be. As Barnaby told me:
How do you find the legal owner of a neglected work by a long-dead writer? How do you tell them you want to publish it, without allowing them to run away with the idea that it will bring in a vast fortune – when in reality it may sell only a small number of copies?
How do you resolve at the start of the year to publish just four books, and end up publishing eight, exhausted?
Two of my all-time favourite books are on the Eland list. Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44, and Jonathan Raban’s Coasting. Buy either from Eland and you have your next holiday reading and a small part of the answer to the four-books-or-eight question at the same time.
Barnaby twice, Rose once, the room bent open around them. Three people in the picture, and only two of them are separate.
This is one of the portraits in Contain Multitudes, my show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026.