Six of the subjects in Contain Multitudes are independent publishers. Two of them work at kitchen tables. One works in a garden shed. Two share a house in Norwich. Nine women share a large office in central London. One is a group of colleagues around four rows of desks.
Between them they have published a huge number of books I love.
Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham run Sort Of Books from their house in Hampstead. One of their authors, Shehan Karunatilaka, won the Booker Prize in 2022 for Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Mark has also, at Profile Books – his other job – published one of mine, called Sew Your Own.
Julian Rothenstein runs Redstone Press from the ground floor of a stucco house in North Kensington. He edits, designs, oversees the print, promotes, packs, and posts the books himself. His whole career, he told me, has been about staying small. And he likes it that way.
Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring run Eland Books – modern travel classics – on the top floor of a building on Exmouth Market. Some of my absolute favourites include Norman Lewis and Jonathan Raban, but there are so many more.
Sam Jordison and Elly Millar run Galley Beggar Press from a house in Norwich. Sam works in a garden shed lined with books, and a phrenology head on the desk beside his Mac. Elly works in a first-floor office above the living room, with a poster for To The Lighthouse on the wall behind the door. On the carpet of the living room in between, they pack books for their subscribers. A substantial proportion of the books they publish get shortlisted for major prizes. Some of them win.
Slightly Foxed is a quarterly literary magazine that just happens also to produce exquisitely made editions of modern classics. Everything they produce feels like being handed a book by a favourite friend.
Pushkin Press is four rows of desks in an office by the Thames, publishing (not only) translated fiction from around the world with covers you can spot at fifty paces.
Charles Boyle runs CB Editions from his home. His example was not the first but was probably the one that gave me the nerve to think about publishing my own book without going through a publisher. He also writes, under his own name and under the pseudonym Jack Robinson.
Six small presses, almost defiantly making the object of a book at a time when the object of a book has never been more optional.
Watching how they work gave me the nerve – the appetite! – to publish A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown myself, as a limited edition without an ISBN.
The publisher portraits hang together at Burgh House as a small room-within-a-room. They read as a set – a modest portrait of independent publishing.