Fifty Fifty
Carcanet's Jubilee in Letters
Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of lettersbetween an author and the editor. The aim is to reveal a half century'shistory of publishing and one small, ambitious press's contribution, thenature of editing, the author/editor relationship, the conflicts, friendshipsand vicissitudes that occur at the nexus between the work, its creator,publisher and readers. Beginning in 1969 with the answer to a request tobecome a subscriber to the Press for ?2, the book traces the developmentof the press as well as individual author/editor relationships. It movesfrom Pin Farm in Oxfordshire to a house in Cheadle Hulme to an officein the Corn Exchange, central Manchester; from the struggle to surviveas an independent to benevolent acquisition by Robert Gavron, the printmagnate; surviving the Manchester bombing in 1996 and the vicissitudesof the book trade in lean years. At its heart is the personal relationshipof author and editor/publisher, often beginning with contributions toPN Review. Poets are central, but fiction writers, translators, biographersand critics also contribute to the Carcanet ferment and firmament. Famous writers are not necessarily the best letter-writers, as editor RobynMarsack discovered in trawling through the Carcanet Archive in theRylands Library. The letters here are amusing, surprising, contentious,challenging. They were handwritten, typed, and now emailed – thechanging pattern is fascinating to see. This is a rare glimpse into the innerworkings of a small, ambitious press. The book celebrates the writer's,editor's and reader's risks, passions and pleasures.
About the Author
Robyn Marsack began her long association with Carcanet Press by editing the first edition of Edmund Blunden's Selected Poems in 1982, and worked as a publishers' editor until she became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000-2016. She was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016-2018. She has co-edited several poetry anthologies, including OxfordPoets 2013 with Iain Galbraith, and edited Blunden's Fall In, Ghosts: selected war prose, published by Carcanet in 2014.
