Oldspeak, newspeak, nospeak |
Oldspeak Books opened in a converted chapel in the pretty Suffolk village of Long Melford in June 2025. Its founder, Joanne May, saw that her England and the wider West are beset from without and within, and she wanted to do something about it.
Like George Orwell, who took his pseudonymous surname from a local river, Jo lives in a censorious age in which institutions falsify language and enforce a kind of historical and cultural amnesia. Oldspeak sells old books and good books, including imports, foreign translations, and high-quality editions from small presses. Jo calls it a “counter-narrative” of “the tried and true”: Oldspeak against Newspeak, the deceitful jargon of Orwell’s 1984.
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I met Joanne a few months later. I was speaking at the Battle of Ideas, a free speech conference in London, and she was running the Oldspeak stall. Joanne’s books mixed fiction with the reading list for a college course on classical liberalism and Scrutonian conservatism, and included highbrow books from mainstream publishers and small presses. One of our daughters is studying Latin, so my........