Posy Simmonds (who lives not far from the shop) very kindly allowed us to use this in a Persephone Quarterly a few years ago (it first appeared in the Guardian in 1979). If you click, it will enlarge – and is guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of any harassed mother. Here are some more cartoons to make you laugh.

We are open today and tomorrow! Miki is in Japan so only two of us will be: sending out orders; packing up books for bookshops; starting the royalty statements; and serving customers – it would be great to see anyone who happens to be in Bloomsbury.

London in the snow – an English Heritage photograph, on a card sent to us by Winifred Watson's family. Happy Christmas to everyone! (PS: the Post will follow shop hours this year ie. will appear on Thursday 29th and Friday 30th and then be back to 'normal' on January 3rd.)

We may have had this on the Post before but it is so apt for this time of year – an undergraduate in 'a room of one's own' at Newnham. We are thinking of having a Dorothy Whipple day there next September. (And do look at Charles Lock's talk about the blessed Dorothy in the latest Fortnightly Letter.)

This is how most of us would like to be over Christmas – like Marion Rutherford in the 1950s, painted by Harry Rutherford © Thameside Museums and Galleries Service/Public Catalogue Foundation. Harry Rutherford is our new favourite painter, more about him on the Post in January.

John Nash Interior 1925: an image of domestic contentment that we all need to bear in mind during the next few days of chaos.

Oddments this week, all slightly Christmas-y. This is A Boy Bringing Bread by Pieter de Hooch at the Wallace Collection, Greenbanks a few centuries early.

This 1921 painting is at the National Portrait Gallery. We used it in the 2011-12 Persephone catalogue to illustrate Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (the catalogue is sent free of charge, or you can pick it up in the shop, or you'll find the pdf on our home page, the link at the bottom of the page on the left). It's the singer Winifred Radford and she looks like Diana Athill, we thought. Here is a photograph of Meredith Frampton in 1982, surely the woman on the left is Winifred Radford, in which case the comment yesterday that Marguerite Kelsey was the only living sitter was wrong. Or is it Mrs Frampton? (Megan Wilson used the painting for the cover of The Painted Veil here, scroll down the second page).

Marguerite Kelsey 1928, painted in the artist's studio in St John's Wood. The magnolias had to be painted extremely fast as they did not long retain their form. At the Tate Gallery retrospective Marguerite was the only still-living sitter represented in the exhibition who had not been traced. On seeing reviews she contacted the Gallery and Meredith Frampton. More (very interesting) detail about the painting here.

Dr Clive Forster-Cooper FRS 1945: an eminent palaeontologist, he lived at the Natural History Museum during the war in order to look after the collections. This is believed to be Meredith Frampton's last painting. It was sold at Bonham's in January 2010. (And cf. the 1943 portrait of Sir Ernest Gowers which appeared on the Post on 20th September last year.)

Still Life 1927. 'Meredith Frampton developed a fondness for "dressing" his pictures with disparate objects – telephones, test-tubes, spent matches, tape measures, screeds of paper, single stem flowers, pieces of fruit, ears of corn – that he would then spend weeks rendering with a photographic and, at the same time, rather eery realism' (Sunday Times article). (Irrelevant but interesting note: Persephone Books has two friends called Meredith: Meredith Hooper has a programme on BBC Radio 3 tonight at 10.45. It is about the plight of penguins in the Antarctic. Meredith Ramsbotham is also a painter; we have the trompe-l'oeil she did for Dimanche and Other Stories on display in the shop – just ask to see it.)

George Vernon Meredith Frampton (1894-1984), known as Meredith Frampton, was the son of the sculptor Sir George Frampton and the painter Christabel Cockerell. Only a handful of his paintings exist, fewer than by Vermeer: one reason was that his subjects 'had to be prepared to to sit for twelve sessions of a least two hours and to give him about a year to complete the picture' (Sunday Times article 1982), another was that he gave up painting in 1945 because of failing eyesight. He was then completely forgotten and was rediscovered by Richard Morphet of the Tate, who had long been fascinated by Portrait of a Young Woman 1935 (on display at Tate Modern) but knew nothing about the artist until he set about trying to organise a retrospective exhibition.

So we have paid tribute to the people who died in the Bath Blitz, and tribute to the buildings that were destroyed. But this does not in any way excuse the depredations of the 1960s and 1970s, which is what Adam's book is all about. Nor was the 1960s destruction, and the terrible buildings that followed, at all necessary: in Warsaw, Cracow or Leipzig they build in replica and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no reason why (but we are being idealistic here) the worst of Bath's '60s buildings could not be demolished and replaced by the buildings that Adam is mourning in his book. The picture today shows preparations on the site of the Beaufort Hotel, now the Hilton, and shows that 'they' could just as easily have built terrace housing or in any case something more sympathetic than what they got: here.

And there is another website about the Bath Blitz which is sobering to explore, it has all the statistics about what happened during the two nights of bombing, lists the people who died, and leads one to other sites, for example to Coleshill House (destroyed by fire in 1952) which was the headquarters for CART, the British Resistance. The photograph above is the Spetisbury Auxiliary Unit Patrol based in Blandford Forum. We may giggle a bit nowadays because of Dad's Army. But the bravery of the men in the photograph is inestimable. Does anyone know if there a novel about the men of CART?

The photographs this week have been taken from Martin Wainwright's book The Bath Blitz, which he sent us as a friendly corrective to The Sack of Bath (we now have a few copies for sale in the shop). The picture today comes from his website.

On those two nights 417 people were killed and 200 buildings of architectural or historical interest destroyed. This is Lansdown Place East. The photograph is on page 22 of The Bath Blitz by Martin Wainwright, more about this tomorrow.

We try to make each week of the Persephone Post in some way relevant to our 96 books, thus last week's focus on studio potters was not only a small tribute to the four potters themselves but also an unspoken tribute to the Persephone mugs which are made especially for us by Annabel Munn (here is a picture of some of the mugs she sells to Primavera in Cambridge, the only other place in the UK where you can reliably buy them). This week it's back to 'lest we forget': sometimes we feel we need to ignore the domestic arts, romantic love, the art of fiction, writer's houses, grandmothers and remind ourselves of the worst that can happen. Adam Fergusson's The Sack of Bath is a crucial book in our list in that the destruction of buildings is even worse that forgetting women writers: once demolished a building has gone for ever, at least a book survives somewhere, even if inaccessibly. But did you realise how badly Bath was damaged in the blitz, on April 25th and 26th 1942? The photograph above shows Kingsmead Street the day after. It is now the site of Rosewell Court flats, which in years to come may itself be demolished and built more appropriately if the students at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture have their way.

Since the publication of his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes in 2010, Edmund de Waal has become a well known author, as well as being a celebrated ceramicist. The eponymous hare is one of a collection of netsuke, Japanese figurines that had been passed down through De Waal's family since the 1870s, and whose journey is described in the book. De Waal grew up in Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting. He later studied English at Cambridge and spent a year in Japan on a Daiwa Scholarship. See more of De Waal's most recent ceramics here and read more about how he came to write the memoir here.

This is Lucie Rie (1902-1995) at work in Vienna around 1935, three years before she emigrated to London aged thirty six. In London she lived at 18 Albion Mews, where she converted the old stables into a pottery studio, later working closely with Hans Coper. She also taught at Camberwell School of Arts and was made a Dame in 1991. See more of Lucie Rie's delicate, Modern pottery here. Listen to critics on Lucie Rie's pottery here. Read Lucie Rie's obituary here.