The summer solstice has always done something particular to writers. It's the longest day, the year at its peak, and there's a quality to it that resists plain description - too much light, evenings that go on past all reason, the strange ache that beauty at full intensity tends to produce. Poets come at it sideways: through longing, through freedom, through the knowledge that the moment of fullness already contains the turning.
These are the lines we keep coming back to every June.
"The Sun, as common, went abroad, / The flowers, accustomed, blew, / As if no soul the solstice passed / That maketh all things new." Emily Dickinson
Dickinson is one of the very few poets who wrote directly about the summer solstice, and characteristically she finds the irony in it: the sun rises, the flowers open, everything carries on as normal - and yet the solstice has passed, the thing that maketh all things new. The world doesn't mark its own turning. Only the poet notices.
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway arrives in New York in June, and Fitzgerald gives him this. It's not optimism exactly but it's the feeling the solstice produces: the sense of a door opening, a chapter starting, the year at its highest point and the future still unwritten. Every summer carries this feeling.
"I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night." Sylvia Plath, Journals
What Plath is describing is the particular freedom the solstice seems to offer - the night so brief and so warm it barely counts as night at all, the world available in a way it isn't in other seasons. Summer, she understood, is about movement and space and the temporary lifting of the usual constraints.
The solstice only happens once a year. It is, technically, the moment after which the days begin to shorten - the apex of the light before the slow turn back toward winter. That's why it's always carried this double quality in literature: radiance and melancholy together, the world at its best and the knowledge that it won't stay.
If you need something to mark your place in a holiday read, our brass bookmarks are made to last longer than a summer. If you want to wear your literary loyalties somewhere sunny, our t-shirts and caps are the kind of thing you'll want on a beach or a long train journey with a good book. And if you're buying for someone who spends the longest days with their nose in a novel, our literary gift sets are a good place to start.
Everything is designed by us in Somerset - which, on a clear June evening, is not a bad place to be.