Alan Wherry, the publisher and editor, spent 25 years in Trade Publishing with companies such as Bantam, Viking Penguin and latterly, as a founding director of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. His career embraced Sales, Marketing and Editorial and having started Bloomsbury in 1986 with three esteemed and much loved colleagues, and later, Bloomsbury in New York with two, his publishing experience embraces the very small to the very large.

Lioudmila Wherry is a chemist by profession, who in the years before she married Alan and came to live in the West, worked in Togliatti, Russia, as the archivist in a Hydroelectric station. Her unflappability and supreme organizational skills will be hugely valuable to this fledgling house.

Why the name daisyamerica? Well, we like daisies and we like America, and it seemed a good idea to combine the two. Daisies are common, found everywhere, are extraordinarily beautiful and elegant flowers and at the same time are tough and hardy. Common, also means sharing, and that informs what we'll be trying to do with the work of our authors, to share it as widely as we can. When Alan was a small boy, he would be taken in summer to visit his great aunt at Islandmagee in the north of Ireland. He used to make daisy chains in the fields surrounding her cottage. Often, the daisies were edged in pink, painted on by the fairies according to his aunt. There is magic about the daisy and Daisy is one of the first names of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the founder of Sahaja Yoga.

The daisy used in our colophon was photographed in the Fall of 2002, in the woods alongside the Hudson river near our home.