Private presses world-wide

rivate press publications offer an eclectic mix of style and content. A favourite theme, perhaps unsurprisingly, is book production and its history: also frequently encountered is the printing or reprinting of poetry both familiar and new, in a format designed to enhance or comment upon the chosen text.

Private press printing seems to flourish particularly in the Anglophone world. Over the last forty years the Library, greatly assisted by donations by the Friends of the Library, has built a representative collection of North American and Australasian presses. This has revealed some regional predilections: United States presses tend to favour the printing of contemporary texts, contrasting with British and Canadian presses which give equal weight to the canon of established poetry from earlier centuries. Of perhaps greater importance from a textual viewpoint are the Australasian presses, which frequently publish historical texts, otherwise generally unavailable, relating to European involvement in those regions.