By John M Evans

It was the Chiswick Press which reinvented the book as a work of art in itself. The Private Press Movement, as it was called, was taken up by such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, whose contributions to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the 19th century remain a wonder to this day. Others followed: the Dove and and Ashendene Presses were most notable, while the Nonesuch and Golden Cockerel Presses specialized in high-qualty limited editions.

The true heart of the movement, however, has always been the small trade press, producing less than comercial books — more often booklets, or chapbooks — from spare rooms, sheds, barns, and even bedsits. Here surely is the Western equivalent of the Soviet samizdats (the subversive fax publishers of pre–perestroika Russia). They come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny poetry presses using photocopiers, to political pamphleteers — mostly left-wing — some with their own bookshops.

Small they may be, but condescend sniffily at your peril, for their numbers include some of the great names of literature. William Blake, for example, unable to find a publisher who would meet his precise standards, and suffering from a chronic lack of funds, developed his own process for printing his extraordinary illustrations and text.

He went on to hand-produce his great works, helped only by his wife. Bypassing the typesetting and printing trades completely, both for economy and artistic freedom, he developed a method of relief etching — as opposed to the intaglio, or scratching, treatment of the printing plate — which allowed him to etch text as well as illustrations onto a single plate.

The copper plate was painted with a stopping liquid, probably pitch and turpentine, and nitric acid poured over it to eat away the remainder of the surface. He, and his wife Catherine, then arduously printed the individual sheets and bound them, often in elaborate covers. Very few were sold, the best to a handful of wealthy collectors.

Blake’s first book, a visionary expression of his spiritual communion, failed ignominously. His persistence, however, ensured that the next, Songs of Innocence, a small volume of poetry, measuring some 4¾“ x 3”, was published in 1789 with his own hand-made engavings. It did little to improve his financial situation, which was always dire. Far from put him off, though, adversity seemed to energize rather than defeat him.

Blake was the ultimate self-publisher, handling every aspect of the process, from concept to finished book, himself. He even made his own inks, grinding and mixing in a fury of apocalyptic impatiance. It’s a surprise that he didn’t make his own paper as some small presses have done.

Not unnaturally, modern collectors will pay fortunes for rare copies of these strange little books, and bibliophiles handle them with awe.

A more recent example of the little presses of England is The Quince Tree Press, run by the late J.L. Carr from a modest house in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Carr began as a self-publisher after becoming increasingly alienated from the big boys of the book world. His own works included the very individal A Month in the Country — often regarded as his best novel and recently brought out in a handsome edition by The Folio Society.

Later, he took to publishing scores of pocket-sized volumes that readers could easily carry with them to a cricket match (a passion of his). or read on a train journey. His favourites were Extraordinary English Cricketers, printed in two volumes. Carr’s most successful title, however, was a reprint of Jane Austen’s History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian, which she wrote when just 16 years of age.

J.L. Carr was a precise, school-masterly figure, and a reading of his books reveals an extensive, even fastidious knowledge of architecture, as well as cricket. He proved that self-publishing at it’s best is indistinguishable from trade publishing.

In Part 2, we’ll look at Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, John Ruskin and Alfred Wainwright, the Grand Old Man of the Cumbrian Fells.

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?”

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?

Dial Publishing is a relaunch of a publishing house I set up a few years ago to publish educational courses. It’s now being “reawakened” to serve a more general purpose as the publishing arm of Syntagma Media.

The aim is to develop our book publishing facilities for launch in the second half of the year. This will make use of new technologies in printing and distribution. Quality on-demand printing is beginning to emerge now and will become mainstream for anything but blockbuster novels by the end of this decade. We intend to make full use of the technology, where appropriate.

Electronic publishing is also struggling out of its shell at last, especially for tech and topical subjects. 37signals has just self-published its own PDF ebook and collected a whopping $33,000 of sales on the first day.

Dial Publishing is a separate business entity from Syntagma Media which operates the blog network and what’s often described as New Media.

This blog will fill in the details of our development and occasionally address the issues of book publishing in an electronic age. We will also comment on new technologies, personal publishing, and all the topics of the moment.

Information on forthcoming titles will be posted as they become available.

This website is under construction. It will be the site and blog of Dial Publishing, a new publisher of books and ebooks, associated with Syntagma Media.

The blog should be available soon. In the meantime, you may like to look at out hub website, Syntagma, or our book site, Naked Tales, or even the blog of our writing community, Writers Blog Alliance.

Stay tuned.