Ian McMillan (of the Times Online) enters the world of the fringe publishers – who survive with only ingenuity and innovative writing to help:

It's hard to find appropriate language to describe those who run literary small presses, but they are the true heroes of literature, sailing into stormy seas when others prefer the flat, flat calm; they are the grassroots football of literature, playing on muddy pitches in front of small but enthusiastic knots of people, as opposed to the prawn sandwich, big-money Premiership of the mainstream publishers. Maybe neither of these hits the exact spot, but you get the drift.

Mark Hodkinson, who runs Pomona Books from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, describes the best thing about running a small press as “having an idea for a book and seeing it through from getting an e-mail from the author to the book appearing a year later, and then seeing it in the shops”. Hodkinson is ambitious, too: “I don’t want to sell 500 copies of a book, I want to sell 20,000.” Every small press publisher wants to see their books in people’s hands. They are no good in boxes in the shed.

Pomona books are gorgeous, and that’s part of Mark’s mission, too: “I don’t want them on cheap paper, and I don’t want them overdesigned. I used to love buying Penguin Books – you built up a kind of loyalty to the Penguin, and I want people to build up a similar kind of loyalty to the ‘P’ on the spine of every Pomona book.”

Pomona’s eclecticism helps it to survive: it has reissued lost classic works such as Barry Hines’s Looks and Smiles and The Price of Coal, as well as the American Clancy Sigal’s hazy, drug-fuelled Sixties classic Zone of the Interior and Hunter Davies’s football writing. Planned titles (he hopes this year, or maybe next; small presses have to wait for money from arts associations, presubscriptions, donations or bits of change that they find on the street) include one by Tom Palmer titled Long Overdue that I predict could be a bestseller. It’s a journey through the libraries of Great Britain, from North to South, and could do for libraries what Fever Pitch did for football.

Small presses take chances with new and uncommercial writing: two of the most hyperactive, Salt Publications and Shearsman Press, produce volume after volume of challenging work. Shearsman has just published Printed on Water, the new and selected poems of the unjustly neglected (how many times could have I written that in this piece?) Scottish poet Gerry Loose, who writes marvellously about the open air.

To read the of the McMillan's article, click here.

Source: The Times Online

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Recommend this article...