Tomorrow Elizabeth Jenkins, author of the amazing The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), one of the fifty books we wish we had published, celebrates her 104th birthday.

Young Man at His Window, 1875 by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Here Caillebotte's brother Rene stands in his family's apartment at 77 rue de Miromesnil which overlooked Haussmann's new (but oddly empty-looking) residential quarter.

Charles Marville (1816-1879) was a French photographer who is now best known for recording the buildings destroyed by Baron Haussmann's nineteenth century modernisation of Paris. The Bievre River, c.1865.

The clocks have turned back and so autumn has arrived, but here is a reminder of spring's sun-lit rooms full of yellow flowers (the window is even open!). Painting by Childe Hassam (1859-1935), The Room of Flowers, 1894. Private Collection.

Penn Station again. At least books can be reprinted (today is the eightieth anniversary of the first appearance of A Room of One's Own, scanned in here, apparently quite legally although in fact still in copyright in  the UK) but buildings disappear with tragic ease. Cf. Britains's Lost Cities, the theme of which is 'What the Luftwaffe began, arrogant, philistine town planners finished off'. Even without the Luftwaffe, Penn Station went.

The old Penn Station in New York (seen here in 1910) was demolished in October 1963. It was New York's Euston Arch in that its demolition  'left a deep and lasting wound in the architectural consciousness of the city' and marked a turning point in attitudes to conservation. 'Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced...that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism' wrote the New York Times.

This was Virginia Woolf's bedroom at Rodmell. The electric fire is so ecologically incorrect nowadays but so cosy...

Tomorrow is Apple Day in the UK. Cézanne's Still Life with Apples was painted between 1890 and 1894. Private Collection, USA.

Designed in 1930 by the appropriately-named Robert Dudley Best, this light (available in cream or black) is still the best nearly eighty years on, well worth saving up for. 

Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of Romney ('The Tryst'), 1860. Painting by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) based on a scene from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1856 poem about the development of a female poet, written at Casa Guidi.

Salon at Casa Guidi, the house in Florence where Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived with her husband Robert Browning and their beloved spaniel Flush. Cf. Persephone book no. 55 Flush by Virginia Woolf. Painted by Geroge Mignaty after Elizabeth's death in 1861.

To think that a filling station is nowadays simply a blot on the landscape  but once we associated petrol with this astonishing series of posters...

Photograph of Duncan Grant by Alvin Langdon Coburn ©  George Eastman House; it is undated but is probably c. 1910 when Duncan Grant was 25.

Bowl of Fruit on a Painted Chair Duncan Grant: chairs are an important part of the Persephone Post, as are lamps, bowls of fruit, cups of coffee... Duncan Grant is another hero, there'll be a photo of him on Monday for us all to swoon over. 

Rosalind Franklin's desk at Birkbeck College the year she died, 1958. Her workroom was on the fifth floor of a bomb-damaged eighteenth-century house in Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, since demolished.

Men at work day two: a 1936 London Transport poster by Barnett Freedman.

This painting by the inimitable Carl Larsson is called Carpenter and Painter; although it is the stove which catches our eye nowadays, and the clothes - so practical, yet so elegant.

Fortunino Matania (1881-1963) Piccadilly Circus. Matania was an Italian WWI artist working in Britain; this painting was probably from his series celebrating the Armistice in 1918. In a Private Collection.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950). The film was based on the novel by Dorothy B Hughes, author of Persephone book no.68 The Expendable Man.

Paris again: Île de la Cité, 1609, with Notre Dame at the eastern tip.