Earlier this year, Inpress Ltd, which Ian Grant chairs, rescued the Poetry Book Society from extinction. There was acute danger that the 63-year old society would disappear. This caused anguish among the membership, poets and the literary world. The PBS forms a significant layer in the ecosystem of poetry. A new start for the PBS promotes new voices in poetry to its members and to the wider public. It helps to maintain the reputation and output of established poets. It adds to the royalties poets receive by purchasing print runs of new books of poetry that its Selectors choose as the Poetry Book Society Choice. Each quarter the PBS also promotes four recommended titles to its members. This results in additional sales for the publishers and royalties for the poets. Helping poetry publishers to become and remain profitable is a significant effect of the PBS’s position in the market.
The Inpress mission
This is also the mission of Inpress Ltd. The Arts Council of England, which helped to establish Inpress 15 years ago, significantly supported the rescue of the PBS. The Arts Council’s relationship with the PBS dates back to its foundation in 1953 when T.S. Eliot, Sir Basil Blackwell and others founded the PBS ‘to propagate the art of poetry’. Eric Walter White, a distinguished writer, musicologist and Arts Council administrator, was Secretary and subsequently Chairman of the Poetry Book Society. He was followed as Chairman by Philip Larkin, Blake Morrison, Michael Goff and other outstanding figures in the world of poetry and literature. As a result of the rescue, Ian Grant is now Chairman of the PBS.
Inpress and the PBS subscribe to the key objectives of Arts Council England – excellence, innovation, diversity and reach. The PBS aims to serve its members with fresh vigour and sophistication, offering stimulating choices of new work, news and insights from the poetry world; to engage new members and new contributors through new means of communication; to broaden its appeal to a much more diverse audience than the founders could ever have imagined; and to reach writers, readers and publishers throughout the world with the message and the substance that poetry, a most ancient art, is at the heart of humane communication in our complex, messy and fractious world.
Visit the Poetry Book Society at https://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/.
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