Publishing

By: Kadija Sesay

Source:

 Oxford Companion to Black British History

Publishing

Black book publishing includes books produced by black‐owned companies and black‐led organizations for black authors, books produced by black‐owned companies for culturally diverse authors, and books produced by companies predominantly by and about black people.

Black publishing companies in Britain often have a dual purpose; to serve as a focal point in the black community for social gatherings and information centres, as well as publishing material of specific interest to their target audience.

The earliest book publishing company of note were New Beacon Books, established in 1966 by John La Rose and Sarah White . They published the former's poetry collection Foundations: A Book of Poems, under the name Anthony La Rose , in the same year, and started a specialist bookselling operation in 1967 , opening a bookshop in north London in 1973 . It remains the primary bookshop in the United Kingdom selling books written by and about people of African and Asian descent. They also house the George Padmore Institute, which holds in its archives New Beacon titles and other significant reports and pamphlets about the black British community.

Eric and Jessica Huntley established Bogle L'Ouverture Publications in 1969 with their first book, The Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney . Bogle L'Ouverture went on to publish Rodney's seminal title How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. They collaborated with New Beacon and Race Today Publications in setting up the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in 1982 , and they too opened a bookstore in their local community of west London, the Walter Rodney Bookshop, but ceased business in 1991 . They continue a limited publishing operation with their history being recorded in the Eric and Jessica Huntley Collections, housed at the London Metropolitan Archives in 2006 .

Britain's youngest and first black woman publisher, Margaret Busby , met Clive Allison at Cambridge University in 1965 . Their company, Allison and Busby , published authors including C. L. R. James , Buchi Emecheta , Roy Heath , and Rosa Guy . Busby and Huntley joined forces in the 1980s with white women publishers who published selected titles by black women, to campaign for more black personnel in the UK publishing workforce. Through an Arts Council initiative, their Greater Access to Publishing campaign successfully placed a handful of black and Asian female interns in mainstream publishing houses.

Publishing in racially tense Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s meant that bookstores, as the public face of black publishing houses, were attractive targets for racially directed attacks, especially as they were also meeting places for campaign organization.

Bogle L'Ouverture arose from this discontent, as did other publishers such as Blackbird Books recorded as publishing as early as 1968 , and other black bookshops cum advice centres in the early 1970s that produced pamphlets, newsletters, and literary magazines that can be seen as forerunners of the poetry and novels published later. Portrait of a People, for example, published by the Free University for Black Studies in 1973 , includes a foreword by the publisher Arif Ali , who started Hansib Publications in 1970 .

Ali started out with the monthly magazine West Indian Digest. Although he went on to publish a suite of newspapers and periodicals, he sold them to focus on book publishing, starting with the yearbook West Indians in Britain in 1973 , and then what he termed ‘conscious books’ in the 1980s. He has since published over 100 titles specializing in books covering African, Afro‐Caribbean, Indo‐Caribbean, Asian, and other ethnic‐minority issues and subjects. Although Ali had no shopfront, his activism in the black community is well documented.

In Naseem Khan's study commissioned by the Arts Council The Arts Britain Ignores, published by the Commission for Racial Equality in 1976 , New Beacon and Bogle L'Ouverture were recognized as publishers cum bookshops that filled a gap in the black community, producing booklets on black issues and children's books that featured black children. She advised that they and similar firms to emerge should be given funding for their research and publication undertakings.

Black publishing companies multiplied in the 1980s, many financially aided by the Greater London Council. These included Black Star Publications and First Class Publications. Others that continue limited production are Akira Press, founded in 1983 , which published predominantly poetry by Caribbean writers who had moved to the United Kingdom. A ten‐book poetry series was launched in 1985 with names recognizable in various black art spheres today, such as Martin Glynn , J. D. Douglas , Frederick Williams , and Maud Sulter . Their next series encompassed nine titles in various genres including books by the playwright Michael McMillan and the novelist Mike Phillips. There was a nineteen‐year gap and then they published PUCKO [ Peoples United Cause for Knowledge and Overstanding ] Poetry by Desmond Johnson , who founded the press in 2003 . Similar to Akira, Karia Press was established by Buzz Johnson in 1985 and continues to publish sporadically. It described itself as an information agency, with Karia as the general publishers and One Caribbean Publishers as the specialist in booklets on Caribbean literature. The Intef Institute was formed as a cultural organization in 1975 by African‐Caribbean artists. From this evolved Karnak House, founded by Saba Sakaana in 1985 , specializing in the publication of books on global African philosophies and civilizations.

1. Community publishing

Community publishing initiatives focus on local or regional publishing, with the emphasis on writing by the working class, and a management infrastructure usually based on a not‐for‐profit status.

A wealth of community and self‐publishing emerged in the mid‐1970s. A leading entity was Centreprise Publications, established by the African‐American Glen Thomson in 1975 . It documented the lives and history of Hackney's East End community, including individual biographies, sometimes in poetic form. The first book, a poetry collection by 12‐year‐old Vivian Usherwood, is still commented on today.

Such initiatives came together under the membership of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, which started in February 1976 , when representatives of eight groups engaged in local publishing met at Centreprise. These founding members recognized the need for a national organization to encourage and support local working‐class writing groups and publishers. The Federation continues to operate with an international membership.

Glen Thompson eventually went on to establish the commercially viable Writers and Readers in the early 1980s, with London and New York offices. It included three imprints: the Beginner's Series, Harlem River Press, and Black Butterfly.

Yet the community publishing that Thompson had played such a major role in faced major difficulties once the net book agreement was abolished in 1997 . It meant that booksellers could heavily discount books, devastating for a publisher already selling books a little above the unit cost.

Centreprise Publications ceased in the early 1990s after publishing Word Up! from the Women's Café. Significantly, it featured the black women poets Patience Agbabi and Valerie Mason John , who moved on to have their own books published, as did the co‐editor Dorothea Smartt .

In the early 1980s the Peckham Publishing Project, based at the Bookplace bookshop, captured the lives of West Indian migrants in books such as Captain Blackbeard's Beef Creole, and the Trinity Arts Association in Birmingham published a mixture of poetry, autobiography, and a novel, Bad Friday by Norman Smith , set in Birmingham, one of the earliest novels termed as black British literature.

Commonword was started in Manchester in 1977 , and established in 1986 a centre for Asian, African, Caribbean, and Chinese creative writing in the north‐west of England. Under these auspices, they started to publish. Black and Priceless came out in 1988 under Crocus Books, but Crocus's published programme only had room for an anthology by writers of African and Asian descent every other year. Peter Kalu , Cultureword's literature development worker, decided to address this by forming Mongrel Press in 1996 to publish and promote UK black writing. He and his co‐founders, John Siddique and Tang Lin, published their own poetry collections, and then, in 1998 , a series of poetry CDs featuring black poets based in the North‐West. But once Lin and Siddique had moved out of the region, the press ceased. In 2004 Kalu secured a funding partnership to set up the publishing arm of the novelists' biennial competition Shorelines, which focuses on anthologies for writers in the North‐West.

Kadija Sesay ( Kadija George ) set up the Black Literature Development Project at Centreprise in 1995 . In 1996 she launched SAKS Publications with Saffiatu George and Stella Oni, and published two anthologies by writers of African descent, Burning Words, Flaming Images, then Playing Sidney Poitier and Other Stories in 1998 . In 2000 they published the first issue of Sable, an international magazine publishing new work by writers of colour and promoting books published by independent black publishers.

Despite difficulties such as distribution and discounting, black publishing companies continue to be started up, particularly by women. The aim of the Black Inc. project, launched by Brent Library Service in 2000 and coordinated by Andrea Enisuoh , was to develop new black writers and readers. It has published two anthologies of short fiction, Ridin and Risin in 2001 and Turf in 2004 . In 2005 Monsoon Press was set up by two young Asian women aiming to give a voice to black, Asian, and white working‐class writers.

2. Women publishers

In 2003 a symposium entitled ‘Black Women Publishers: Writing and Publishing Our Future’ was organized by the African Writers Abroad (PEN) Centre, to highlight the fact that the history of black publishing in Britain has been fortified by the presence of women publishers.

Tamarind, a multicultural children's book publisher, was set up in 1987 by Verna Annette Wilkins . She is the author of 30 picture books and biographies, which aim to offer children a positive profile of black people. An award‐winning publisher, Tamarind has expanded its remit to produce a series of books for BBC Television's Science Challenge series.

Mango Publishing was established in 1995 by Joan Anim‐Addo , the director of the Caribbean Centre at Goldsmiths College, London, where it is based. Its remit is to focus on publishing and promoting literary works by writers from British, Caribbean, and Latin American literary traditions, including translations. It started by publishing the journal Mango Season in collaboration with the Caribbean Women Writers' Alliance, but now concentrates on books.

Angela Royal set up ARP in 1994 . She had previously been an editor with Penguin for fifteen years, so her entry into this market was heralded as a major input into black publishing. Her intention was to ‘publish writers and books from around the world which challenge the cultural climate’. ARP joined forces with the literature promoters the Write Thing, but the partnership folded within six months with a backlist that included two, now acclaimed, black British women writers, Bernardine Evaristo and Leone Ross .

Rosemarie Hudson's Black Amber launched its first title early in 1998 with the aim of adding ‘another dimension in different accents to the recorded British experience’. Initially she published writers of African and Asian descent, which she expanded to include new second‐ and third‐generation black British and European writers in all genres apart from poetry.

Vastiana Belfon , who worked as an editor for Writers and Readers, established Brown Skin Books in 1992 to publish erotic fiction by women of colour, and Becky Clarke , who worked for Heinemann's African Writers Series for twelve years, set up in 2003 the Ayebia Clarke Literary Agency and Publishing to publish works by writers of African descent.

3. Other black publishers

The journalists Steve Pope and Dotun Adebayo left The Voice newspaper in 1991 to establish X Press in 1992 , scoring an instant success with their first publication, Yardie by Victor Headley . Since then, they have achieved further success by selling broadcast rights for some of their popular titles, such as Baby Father. They diversified into other imprints, Black Classics, 20/20, and Nia, as the X Press name became synonymous with populism. Although much criticized for this, X Press remains a ground‐breaking imprint for new authors who would not traditionally have considered themselves writers.

Canongate Books created the imprint Payback Press, dedicated to black literature and culture, leading with the classic Blues People by Amiri Baraka in 1995 , but incorporated the books into their main list in 2001 . They published The Fire People in 1998 , the last collection of contemporary black British poets to have been published.

Flipped Eye Publishing was formed in Ghana by a group of friends in a bid to start a literature revival in the country. The first book published in 1999 was eyes of a boy, lips of a man by Nii Ayikwei Parkes , also one of the shareholders. Six months later Parkes bought out his partners, and set up the company in the United Kingdom in 2001 with the aim of publishing all genres with a focus on poetry and a mission to raise the profile of performance and oral literature via live and printed means.

Independent publishers with strong backlists have been bought out or brought in by larger publishers. In 2005 BlackAmber was sold to Arcadia Books. Hudson maintains the list as commissioning editor. Although independents, particularly poetry publishers, secured regular funding through the Arts Council, the only publisher of black books to have been granted this has been Peepal Tree Press (who also print their own books). Established in 1985 , they have become one of the largest publishers of Caribbean literature. They began to publish an increasing number of black British writers, starting with Bernardine Evaristo's Island of Abraham ( 1995 ).

A meeting of black publishers took place in 2005 , attended by Tamarind, X Press, and Ayebia Publishing, and the Independent Black Publishers' Association was set up. Its objectives include collaborating on initiatives and planning ways of advancing black publishing.

As producing books has become easier with technological advances, independent publishers have taken advantage of this to promote and produce works via the Web, or in CD form. The new technologies have increased the number of self‐published books and CDs with black performance poets at the forefront of this development.

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