Rummaging through my book shelves recently I came across a once-treasured tome. Published just 20 years ago, it’s now so outdated it could have come from another era. It was the book that in my early youth inspired me to become a publisher and an author.

Back then in the mid-1980s few of the marvels of present-day technology were available. I remember having a vast IBM PC with Wordstar wordprocessing software and an irritating dot-matrix printer. Although I had a Canon fax machine, very few others did, so I could only fax the big telecom companies, like BT. How depressing is that?

The book is called, Publishing & Printing at Home by Roy Lewis and John B. Easson, and was published by David & Charles in 1984. I contacted the publisher to see if it was still in print and was told sniffily, “We don’t publish that sort of book now”.

The authors both ran small presses in their spare time and were clearly enthusiasts for the cause. Nowadays we’d call them niche evangelists, personal media types, or some such fancy phrase. Lewis was a journalist on The Times and the The Economist, no less, and ran Keepsake Press as a sideline. Easson ran Quarto Press and was a physicist and lecturer on Printing Science. Their views on the blogosphere would be worth hearing!

Leaving aside the half-tones of ancient letterpress printing presses operated by bearded engineering types, the best bits are about ordinary people who ran small presses in the days before samizdats and quality photocopiers. One woman had a small press in her bedsit up in Scotland. Others were equally inventive and determined not to allow lack of resources stop them broadcasting to the world.

I knew a man in deepest mid-Wales, whose name I forget, who had won a bardic chair from an Eisteddford. He wrote poems in Welsh and printed them exquisitely in book form on an old Adana printing machine. All this was done painstakingly by hand, and took many weeks to complete.

Just twenty years ago it was so much trouble publishing anything on your own that writers had to be sure everything they published was of a high standard. Is there a lesson there for us in these times of free publishing for all?