A wealthy count on his deathbed, his libertine nephew, an upstanding young clerk, and a scheming notary who stops at nothing to protect his daughter make The Notary an iconic tale of suspense and intrigue, love and murder. The classic work of Alexandros Rangavis, The Notary, a mystery set on the island of Cephalonia on the eve of the Greek Revolution of 1821, is Modern Greek literature's contribution to the tradition of early crime fiction, alongside E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins.

Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (1809–1892) was a Greek man of letters, poet and statesman. Born in Constantinople in 1809 to a Greek Phanariot family, he was raised in Bucharest and Odessa, and attended military school in Munich. Following his return to Greece, Rangavis served at the Ministry of Education, helped organize the founding of the first university of modern Greece in 1834 and was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1856. Rangavis is the author of the first History of Modern Greek Literature (1877). He also wrote numerous plays and novels, and translated Dante, Schiller, Lessing, Goethe and Shakespeare into Greek.

Simon Darragh was a poet and translator. He translated works by several Greek poets and authors, including Nikos Kavvadias, and Kostas Karyotakis, Antonis Samarakis, Alexandros Rangavis and Andreas Laskaratos published by Aiora Press. Foreign Correspondence (Peterloo, 2000) is a volume of Darragh’s own poetry. Darragh was a Hawthornden Fellow, and a Translator in Residence at the University of East Anglia. He lived in the Northern Sporades for 25 years. He died in 2023.

Panagiotis Stavropoulos (b. 1962) is a painter and iconographer. He studied painting and engraving at the Gerrit Rietvelt Academy in Amsterdam, and has painted icons and frescoes in churches around Greece. From 1996 to 2014 he lived on the island of Tinos, where he focused mainly on sculpture. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Athens and Tinos. Panagiotis has also participated in several group exhibitions, and his artwork features on numerous covers of the Modern Greek Classics series of Aiora Press.