She looks as though she could do with a nice lie-down and some cucumber slices. One could write a whole book about the details in this picture ( a novel, at least) and. in particular, its title, which is 'Dreading the Dishes'. Was the artist, Stevan Dohanos, making a pre-feminist statement? Or were Saturday Evening Post readers meant simply to smile empathetically and hitch up their aprons, ignoring the expression in the young woman's eyes and her husband's complacent pipe-smoking in the armchair? Surely not. Fifteen years before Betty Friedan's  The Feminine Mystique the woman seems to be looking at us and asking – 'Is this all'? 

Another wonderful bedroom (cf. Virginia Woolf's on 21st October), this time Ellen Terry's at Smallhythe Place, Kent, the house she lived in from 1900-28. It would be a good place to recover from Christmas with a good (Persephone) book, a cup of peppermint tea  and a mince pie; and a nice little lie down, perhaps with a cucumber slice on each eye (we've never actually done this but can't think why not). Photograph © National Trust Photo Library.

A picture for Christmas Eve: The Christmas Stocking, a watercolour by Rex Whistler c.1921 © Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

Something festive from 1913: Norman Rockwell's painting for the magazine that he was editing at the time, aged just nineteen. © Rockwell Estate.

From the follwing year: this is the suffragette Emily Davidson in the May of 1913, one month before she ran out in front of the king's horse at the Epsom Derby. She died from her injuries on 8 June that year.

Charles Ginner, Piccadilly Circus, 1912. The bus in the background is the number 19 which still follows the route up to the Theobald's Road end of Lamb's Conduit Street. © Tate Collection.

More people at work, this time they are putting messages into little steel containers which will then hurtle along the pneumatic tube system and deliver a message in a few seconds or minutes. This picture has no date but must be pre-1930s as the LS logo in the right hand corner looks creepily like the decoration often used by the Nazis. Someone has written about pneumatic tubes here; they continued to exist in department stories in London (the invoice was sent with the money tucked inside down to the accounts department) well into the 1960s. 

Still with the 1950s, and libraries again: these are the librarians at Boots Subscription Library in Uttoxeter, in a photograph taken some time between 1950 and 1956. At the Christmas quiz at our local library last night one of the questions was, what year was the first UK public library established? Answer: 1847.

In 2011 Persephone Books will publish a selection of short stories by Diana Athill. Last weekend she moved out of the flat in Primrose Hill where she lived for so many years and into sheltered housing – and she sent us a piece of the beautiful curtain fabric from the flat she was leaving. She thinks it is thirty or forty years old, but now some energetic dating will have to take place: the original stories  were published in 1962, could the material possibly be early '60s? This fabric is Lucienne Day's 'Rig' 1953 for Heal's © the Victoria & Albert Museum. We have so far used two 1950s fabrics by Lucienne Day, one for Lettice Delmer and one for A Woman's Place.  

This is Matisse's 1924 Pianist. Things are a bit hectic in the office at the moment and we sometimes imagine ourselves playing Schubert in a light-filled room; or listen to Standchen.

UK libraries are, unfortunately, very much under threat. Here is the latest piece by Rachel Cooke about what has been happening in the fight to save and improve them.

Frontispiece from the first edition of The Good Soldier; its alternative title, hand-written at the top of this page, is from the novel's amazing opening sentence: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.'

The cover of the first edition of the Vorticist magazine Blast, 1914. A huge influence on artists such as Paul Nash, it was founded by Wyndham Lewis. This edition inlcuded an essay by Rebecca West and an extract from what became Ford Maddox Ford's 1915 novel The Good Soldier. © Tate Collection.

A design, used for the 1982 British Textiles Series of stamps, by Paul Nash (1889-1946).

More font, as promised. Some Persephone Books are facsimiles (such as Miss Pettigrew and The Runaway), but most are re-set in Baskerville.

Cineraria and Cyclamen, 1927 by Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981). A beautiful painting for a damp Monday morning © Artist's Estate.

This woman looks as though she needed a tea-time break from Christmas shopping and the cold. Edward Le Bas (1904-1966) Cafe Scene 1939. © Tate Collection

A favourite 4 o'clock treat at Persephone Books: Tunnocks tea cakes, made in Scotland since 1890.

Jane Baillie Welsh (1801-1866) by Kenneth MacLeay, in 1826, just before her marriage to the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle. Her incredible letters have been catalogued and are available to read online. © National Galleries of Scotland.

The lighthouse at the Isle of May in Scotland: one of the many built by the Lighthouse Stevensons who were the ancestors of DE Stevenson, author of Miss Buncle's Book.