History of the UCL Small Press Collections

The Small Press Collections at UCL are an amalgamation of the Little Magazines, Poetry Store, and Alternative Press collections.

The Little Magazines, Poetry Store, and Alternative Press collections were established and developed by UCL English Librarian Geoffrey Soar, with support from Deputy Librarian, Ian Angus, in recognition of an international culture of self-publishing that was evolving as a result of multiple mid-century trends. Not least of these was increasingly easy access to affordable print technologies; while commercial offset printing became viable for those on a tight budget, many artists, writers, and activists needed nothing more than access to a stencil duplicator or photocopier. This technological advance coincided with the rise of a counterculture that celebrated experimentation and the unprecedented freedom of a new liberal society. Writers not represented by the mainstream press could produce and distribute their own publications without editorial restraint. In an art historical shift, visual artists rejected commercialism and traditional "high art" forms to embrace the everyday and the ephemeral, focusing on transient ideas and performance. Conceptual and Fluxus artists used text as a medium and fully exploited the potential of distributed print material as a way of working independently of a commercial gallery system.

The beginnings 

There was growing recognition that no institutions were collecting the material being produced as part of this so-called "mimeograph revolution". Articles and correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) throughout 1964 bemoaned the fact that no libraries were collecting little magazines and that it was their "cultural responsibility" (Dunn, 1964, p511) to do so. The conversation culminated in two special editions of the TLS later that same year that aimed to give an "up to date picture of the avant-garde" (Willett, 1964), the first (06 August) focusing on writing in the English-speaking world while the second (03 September) spread the enquiry to other countries and languages. They included original works and "special statements" by artists and writers alongside poems and other writings, reviews, articles relating to the self-publishing process, and a survey of magazines, anthologies and presses that epitomized the ethos of the emerging Mimeograph Revolution. These publications cemented Angus and Soar’s impression that "few libraries had even reasonably good holdings in this field" (Soar, 1978, p106) and provided the impetus for their own mammoth task: to build a collection "aimed at total coverage of UK Little Magazines and small-press publications, along with some coverage of the Commonwealth and US material, and some related material from other countries" (Soar, 1983). Funding for the collection of little magazines was approved by The Library Committee in December 1964 and the first titles were acquired in January 1965 (Soar, 1994, p21). The collection was global in scope from the outset and UCL can boast holdings of rarities from, amongst others, India, Japan, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Barbados, Jamaica, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brazil. While the bulk of correspondence in the archive is with publishers in the UK and the US, a significant proportion (possibly as much as 25%) indicates purchases being made across Europe and the Commonwealth from 1965 onwards.

Soar initially also secured Arts Council funding for this endeavour. When this was discontinued, he successfully appealed to the University of London Library Resources Coordinating Committee and participated in a collaborative project to acquire around 100 American magazines: the University Library would concentrate on those produced by universities, King’s College on those of a more ‘established’ character, and UCL would focus on the more experimental, avant-garde titles (Soar, 1967). By the early 1980s UCL could cite a collection extending to over 3,000 magazine titles, making it "probably the leading UK one, equalled only by a few in N. America" (Soar, 1983). Soar constantly fought for continued funding for the collection even though the project was relatively easily accommodated, financially: little magazines were inexpensive compared to most scholarly journals. While it was possible to balance the mass of material against the cheapness of acquisition, a predicted initial budget of £20 for the first batch of subscriptions was still exceeded by £17.

What Soar had not fully appreciated was that a "period of quite exceptional little magazine and small press activity was getting underway" (Soar, 1978, p106). His task snowballed, and he collected publications from all over the world by writing and receiving copious quantities of letters, themselves a fascinating snapshot of mid 1960s letterhead design by artists and poets running their own small presses. The limited print run of many short lived, ephemeral, independently published magazines was challenging – to have acquired so many titles of unpredictable frequency and with only 50 or 100 copies per issue that were in the main privately distributed (mostly to contributors) and where standard subscription models were not available, was a monumental feat. 

Detailed acquisition records indicate where a publisher was approached directly or if a distributor was employed (Better Books, Compendium, etc.), with variable levels of success. The difficulties in acquiring such erratic titles, with none of the consistency of mainstream periodical publishing, from far flung locations did not dampen Soar’s ambition. Correspondence in the UCL archives records the laborious back and forth conversations that were necessary to acquire a single title, and it was common for more than one item of international correspondence to be required, accompanied by various mimeographed stock lists, simply to negotiate postage rates. As Soar’s reputation as a collector grew, titles were frequently donated, such as those of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Bombay based Ezra-Fakir Press, and Morris Edelson’s mimeographed classic, Quixote.

Developing the collections

Soar and subsequent custodians (including poet and scholar David Miller and UCL English Librarian John Allen) used a variety of bibliographic tools to develop the collections, notably the small press directories of magazines and other publications edited and published by Len Fulton via his California based Dustbooks imprint, the catalogues of the UK Association of Little Presses, the directories of the New York-based Small Press Centre, the catalogues of the San Francisco Committee of Small Magazine Editors & Publishers (COSMEP), as well a multitude of other more obscure, self-published listings, publishers’ flyers and catalogues, and by scouring the small ads in the magazines themselves. Now, these reference works have themselves become integral to the UCL collection, illustrating the mechanics of discovering and acquiring non-standard material, and serving as primary sources for scholars studying the history of radical, independent publishing and distribution. 

Correspondence in the archive reveals that Soar and his assistants networked with various individuals to facilitate acquisitions, including Cavan McCarthy and Bob Cobbing. In 1966 Cobbing was also Manager of Better Books, an independent bookshop and performance space at the epicentre of countercultural London, and thus perfectly placed to facilitate Soar’s early acquisition of small press materials for UCL until the shop’s closure in 1967. These relationships that developed over many years illustrate the multitude of personal networks required to amass the body of material that has become the Small Press Collections - all played an integral role in the survival of little magazines and their associated presses, acting as conduits for sales and distribution.

The Poetry Store

Soar did not limit the collections at UCL to Little Magazines. Soon after establishing the Little Magazines collection, he branched out into the related activity of book and pamphlet publishing, amassing small print run, non-serial literary publications to form The Poetry Store. If little magazines can be defined as publications that contain or concern themselves with poetry, which may also mean "an absence of poetry itself, if the prose or artwork has a strong connection to poetry" (Miller and Price, 2006, p4), the development of The Poetry Store expanded the scope of the collections to encompass a broad spectrum of experimental text, especially in relation to visual elements, and to actively explore the intersection of art and literature. The natural result of this was the incorporation of editioned artist’s books featuring a hybrid of text and visual forms, produced by artists looking to circumvent gallery and market conventions via distributed print material. Soar’s enthusiasm for concrete and visual poetry has resulted in exceptional holdings in this area – one that continues to be robustly developed today. Much of the international material in the collections results from this interest; the concrete poetry "movement" had a strongly international character so material from Europe and South America was included alongside the output of iconic British small presses such as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press and Simon Cutts’ Coracle Press.

In 1966, Soar insightfully added one more component to the collections: the Alternative Press underground newspapers featuring an amalgam of political commentary and cultural critique, often with strikingly visual elements, were the final cog in the wheel of 1960s radical publishing activity. These titles record the activities of underrepresented groups and focus on topics such as feminism, Black rights, LGBTQ+ equality, the peace movement, and radical ecology.  

As Soar acknowledged, the term "small press" was not as current as "little magazines" in the formative years of the collections, hence the "Poetry Store" was named, despite the "disadvantage of implying that small presses (and, by association, little magazines) publish only poetry" (Soar, 1994, p21). Much of the material suggests otherwise and the collections were given the more representative umbrella "Small Press" title in around 2010. Thanks to a continued programme of collection development, the Small Press Collections now consist of nearly 4,500 little and artists’ magazines, approximately 50 UK and US counter cultural newspapers, and over 20,000 pamphlets, artists’ books, and other textual objects featuring poetry in all its forms (including concrete, visual poetry and sound poetry scores), experimental literature and long-form text. Earlier 20th century material, including avant-garde artists magazines and modernist literary works, has also been retrospectively added.

The collections today

Today, the collections continue to "change and develop and surprise, to converge and diverge, to be deeply serious and to be playful…testing the edges of what is possible" (Soar, 1994, p30). The diverse profile that was core to Soar’s values evolves in response to an independent publishing scene that continues to promote those not always represented by the mainstream. Work by writers and artists of colour is actively sought and recent acquisitions from LGBTQIA+ presses feature trans and non-binary authors. It is now more than 60 years since the first little magazines arrived at UCL and the collections continue to thrive in an institution with an appetite for experiment, driven by interdisciplinarity. The Small Press Collections are of ongoing relevance to current teaching across UCL and in a progressive, global, research institution, they play a primary role as the source material of new literary and cultural histories.