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'Snake River Press books are dear to us not just because they are especially lovely examples of the species commonly known as "Local Book" (which aren't usually so nicely designed!); and not just because they're well-researched and written; and not just because customers like them. Any one of those reasons would suffice, of course, but we especially appreciate Snake River Press books because they reflect many of the reasons we moved from America: Sussex's people, landscape and history. We established a bookshop in a rural medieval village not because we thought it a business-like proposition, but because we loved the area. Being named Independent Bookshop of the Year 2007 within four years of opening was a tremendous honour for us, and perhaps reflects our shop's charms, our customer service, and our sometimes idiosyncratic choice of books. We love working with books and helping people find authors they might not know. Doing what we love in one of the most beautiful parts of England is a fantastic bonus for us. Spring is almost upon us, and our garden patio with its outdoor shelves of books for browsers will be open again; the shop will be rich with recently-acquired books, both old and new. And pride of place will be given to Snake River Press' new titles, because they reflect the many pleasures of our chosen home.'

The five-metre-square edifice, which seats 14 and is known affectionately as 'the Cathedral on the Downs', achieved further international renown through the writings of Dirk Bogarde, who himself features in our Sussex Writers & Artists. He described the church's charms in his first book, A Postillion Struck by Lightning (1977), which with the later volume, Great Meadow (1992), memorably recorded the childhood holidays he spent in Lullington and Alfriston with his sister Elizabeth and their nanny, 'Lally'. To complete a neat circle, the first correct entry in our competition arrived from John Coldstream, whose Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography appeared in 2004 and who is putting the finishing touches to a selection of Bogarde's letters for publication by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in August under the title Ever, Dirk. Bogarde's drawing of the church for Postillion is reproduced here.

'There is a new series of guidebooks to Sussex (new to me anyway) – appealingly slim volumes, well-written and elegantly produced, with charming black-and-white illustrations. I bought two of them: An Eccentric Tour of Sussex by Peter Bridgewater and Sussex Writers & Artists by Edward Lucie-Smith, at the museum in Ditchling. Ditchling is that sort of place. The sculptor Eric Gill came to live in the village in 1907, later transferring to Ditchling Common. Intensely religious, he founded the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, an Arts-&-Crafts community living in what Bridgewater describes as 'a fully integrated artistic life'. Integration was carried to extremes by the highly erotic Gill, for whom sex was an expression of the Creator's love. Wife, lovers, sisters, daughters, the family dog... oh, dear, the things that go on in the countryside.'

So wrote Clive Aslet in his regular Village Voice slot for the Sunday Telegraph. Clive was editor of Country Life for 13 years and now combines his role as 'Editor at Large' for Country Life with writing for newspapers and journals.

Snake River Press has been well reviewed by the press, our product is universally praised and sales are growing nicely. We were featured in January's Bookseller as one of the most promising new publishers to watch out for in 2008. As the Bookseller is the trade magazine for publishers and booksellers and a national litmus test for what's happening in the industry, being one of ten debutants to catch their eye after only a year in business is an affirmation of just how good our books are.

Strap on your backstays and plunge into the Reverend Parish's Sussex word-hoard and never be lost for words in Sussex again!

A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect & Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex was written and compiled in 1875 by The Reverend W.D. Parish, vicar of Selmeston, which is a tiny village between Lewes and Alfriston. It is a fascinating way of hearing how we might have sounded nearly 150 years ago. We know little of Parish except he seemed more interested in lexicography than soul-saving. And while we can only guess at his evangelical qualities in the pulpit, if Parish was preaching words like aumry, bozzler, rave-cart and yoyster, his sermons must have been heavenly.

Snake River Press is now offering an exciting new facsimile version of The Reverend's original, unexpurgated work, with an extended introduction by Lynne Truss. With the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves and scourge of the misplaced apostrophe as our lexicographical guide, we had better mind our Ps and Qs. And who knows, we might even be able to revive a few choice Sussexisms along the way!

Lynne's pithy introduction to the book chronicles the changing sound of Sussex by eavesdropping on some of the county's best writing.

'I must confess that, for me, the idea of any rural dialect has always been somewhat contaminated by Stella Gibbons and Rambling Sid Rumpo, so it may be best to get those obstacles to seriousness out of the way here and now. Like many people of my generation (and older) I grew up cheering for Rambling Sid on the BBC's Round the Horne ("Hello, me dearios!"), especially when he went a-rummaging in his ganderbag for a gladsome ditty to bend our ear-os with. Sung with the proper folk-revivalist's nasal twang by Kenneth Williams, most of his songs went to the tune of "Oh My Darling Clementine".

Thirty years before Round the Horne, however, Stella Gibbons had paved the way for Rambling Sid's vernacular nonsense with her brilliant comic novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), a book that just gets more and more remarkable the more one knows about it. Gibbons' clever device was to insert Flora Poste – a modern young woman with fixed views about happiness and common sense – into the kind of doomy Sussex fictional milieu made popular by writers such as Sheila Kaye-Smith. Kaye-Smith's novels, which included Sussex Gorse (1916) and The Tramping Methodist (1922), were part of a somewhat turgid literary movement that exasperated the young Gibbons, not least for what she saw as its reliance on dialect to confer specious gravitas on quite ordinary stories. For Cold Comfort Farm, therefore, Gibbons invented such a perfectly satiric substitute Sussex idiom ("The cows be as barren as come-ask-it") that it was my first instinct, on seeing Parish's Dictionary, to check whether '"sukebind", "middock", "cowdle", "mommet", "capsy", "a-mollocking" and "scranlet" were historically authentic after all. "I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down in the bute," one of the farmers says to Flora, leaving her clueless how to respond. Should she say, "Oh, how too sickening for you?" or respond with a congratulatory "Atta boy"? In the end she manages to say, "Did you?" in "a bright, interested voice", and seems to get away with it.'

Parish is not the only hero in the recording of Sussex dialect. The work is not over yet, either. On a BBC website, I recently found a lovely audio clip of the much-loved Brighton-based folk singer Shirley Collins talking about one of her favourite songs, “The Outlandish Knight”. An elderly Sussex woman had once told her she had rejected the advances of a young man on account of him being “outlandish”, and what this meant, apparently, was that he came from a village three miles away. But what all historians of Sussex speech since the 19th century have in common is an immense debt to W.D. Parish for the monumental work he did single-handedly 130 years ago.'

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