The industrialization of printing and publishing, once thought a craft — even an art — has had a knock-on effect on the quality of literature. Whether you regard books as content or as product, something magical has undoubtedly gone from the process of making them.

For many small publishers, the holy grail is the total control over all aspects of design and production. Real enthusiasts, who are prepared to lower their financial aspirations, have taken up the small press as the realization of their dreams.

In the last two or three decades, most of the independent publishers in England have been swallowed up by vast portmanteaux communications giants, whose twin mantras are profit and market share. There are one or two notable mainstream survivors: Ernest Hecht at Souvenir Press, David & Charles — now a management buy-back from Readers’ Digest — and a few stragglers and niche operators. But by and large the big boys have taken over.

When Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, was on his deathbed, some of his editors urged him to turn the publishing house into a public trust to maintain its independence and dedication to quality. In the event, in 1970, Lane — a canny entrepreneur in life — sold Penguin to Pearson, a transnational conglomerate. While the Allen Lane/Penguin Press imprint is now a producer of excellent biographies and histories, it would be interesting to speculate on the future of British publishing had Penguin retained its autonomy in the marketplace.

All the more reason then to welcome the regrowth of a new and rapidly expanding private press sector as desk-top publishing and digital printing breath new life into this ancient profession.

The new technology has worked both ways, however. While encouraging Holding Company Inc and Shell Company Plc to devour many of the independent publishers, it has also opened up the field to even smaller gentry who now have the means to take on the surplus writing — some of it excellent — which the rush to bottom-line decision-making has effectively abandoned.

Modern editorial procedures have removed authority from editors, replacing them with “publishing boards” dominated by accountants and the marketing department. The outcome has been a dramatic raising of the sales threshold criteria for books, in some cases to as much as 20,000 sales per title. This has been called market censorship by some because it effectively eliminates most new works.

In the private press sector, profits are not nearly as important as the satisfaction gained from the finished product and its contents. Every true publisher is a pamphleter at heart, a campaigner for personal beliefs. Otherwise they might just as well print bus timetables … and make some money.

New technology, as always, is a two-edged sword. It liberates the lowly but cuts the mighty down to size. Whether we regard this as part of a general dumbing-down process, or as a refreshing breeze of change, remains an imponderable for history alone to arbitrate.

Klaus Wagenbach, a German publisher, has written: “… new, strange, crazy, intellectually innovative, or experimental books are published in small to medium-sized print runs. That is the task of the smaller houses. … Let’s make this as explicit as possible: if books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka’s first book was published with a printing of 800 copies. Brecht’s first work merited 600. What would have happened if someone had decided that it was not worth it?”