BOOKEXPO | Pen & Sword

Charles Hewitt, Pen & Sword

June 3, 2018 – On Friday I visited the Pen & Sword booth at BookExpo2018 and met Charles Hewitt, the Managing Director. The symbol of the publishing house is a pen crossed with a sword. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the sword is a good thing to read and write about...

The company is based in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, midway between Leeds and Sheffield. I spent three years about 20 miles northeast of Barnsley, at Ampleforth College. I've also visited Selby and the RAF Melbourne base that was used by 10 Squadron in World War II. My uncle piloted a Halifax bomber the week of D-Day and was shot down over Laval, where he and his crew are buried.

Pen & Sword is a distinguished military history publishing company with a big and actively used backlist. It is part of Westholme Publishing.

What caught my eye was a book by Jos Scharrer that has just been released called The Dutch Resistance Revealed. She is the daughter-in-law of a member of the Resistance. The note on the book correctly reports that the Dutch Underground movement has been largely overlooked by historians in the English language. The official Dutch historian, Loe de Jong, wrote 24 volumes about World War II in Holland and much of his writing is about Resistance efforts. While de Jong says he like his history like his sherry, dry, he has nothing but admiration for the work of Walraven van Hall, about whom a movie in Dutch has just been released.