The Times’ Ian McMillan reaches beyond the typical UK small presses to find the really fringe efforts, “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.” Mark Hodkinson, who runs Pomona Books from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, describes to McMillan 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.”
McMillan sets forth the advantages of very small presses: short lead times, more creativity, and the ability to publish work that mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch. But his piece doesn’t talk much about distribution and whether books by publishers such as Pomona can be available widely – or even if they should be. Still, it’s hard not to empathize with Hodkinson’s dearest wish: “I’ve never seen anybody reading a Pomona book on a train, but that’s my ambition.”