ABOUT US
We Won’t Let Them Be Forgotten….
Quite Literally Books is a small, woman-owned heritage press on a mission to bring forgotten bestsellers by American women authors back to life.
Once upon a time, writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were household names. Their books—Herland, The Home-Maker, and countless other stories from countless other female authors—were national phenomena. But while their male contemporaries stayed on syllabi and in print, these women’s works quietly disappeared from the shelves. We think that’s a crime (literary and otherwise). So we’re fixing it.
Because just because a book was written before social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold up today. The themes in these novels are strikingly relevant—identity, motherhood, ambition, colorism, the expectations placed on women, and even the performance of domesticity that now plays out online. Ironically, if these authors had received the recognition they deserved, their work might be on banned book lists today—a fact that’s both sobering and a little bit funny.
Why bring back a forgotten book when there are so many good ones out there and so little time to read them all? Well, for starters, we don’t believe you can ever have too many books, just too few bookshelves. And while we hope all of our books are a good read, plain and simple, we also believe that there’s much to learn from our collective literary past and from each other as thoughtful readers. In short, a good book from yesterday is a great place to start a conversation today.
Read the full manifesto from our founders here.
Books Worth Reading, Worth Holding, and Swoon-Worthy on the Shelf
Our editions are designed to be read, cherished, and passed down. Each title features a cover with original, hand-done illustrations by iconic artists, printed on luxurious Munken paper with French flaps and lay-flat spines. They’re books that feel as good in your hands as they do in your mind.
How It All Began
Founded in 2022 by lifelong best friends Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper, Quite Literally Books grew out of decades of shared reading—from dog-eared Judy Blume paperbacks to the very forgotten classics now on this very site.
Over the years, they noticed two things:
1. There are shockingly few American classics by women still in print.
2. That’s not because they don’t exist.
So they decided to do something about it.
Quite Literally Books is more than a press, it’s a love letter to the women who wrote us here, and to the readers who refuse to let them be forgotten.
