Tangerine Press seeks to sow seeds for six-strong annual list

London-based press and book binder Tangerine Press is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, with founder and sole member of staff Michael Curran still committed to producing unique, limited edition books with writers he admires.

Describing the decision to found the press, Curran says: “I didn’t want Tangerine to be just another independent press, in the sense that it would churn out paperbacks or e-books. I was a self-employed carpenter for 16 years immediately prior to going full-time with the press in 2013, so I was used to making things from scratch. Likewise, I was an avid reader, a consumer of books. One day I thought, why not combine these two passions—actually bind the books myself and present the work in the best way possible?”

Curran says the impetus to start the press, back in 2006, came from a “desire to publish new, neglected and innovative writing” by authors he was interested in and felt “were not getting the exposure they deserved”.

One such writer is Booker prizewinner James Kelman, whom Curran describes as his “favourite living writer”. He adds: “I published a book with him [A Lean Third], which is a miracle. I’m his only English publisher now, because he has moved everything to [Scottish indie] Canongate. No one knows what to do with him, really, because they don’t understand him.

“I wrote to him, then two weeks later I got a letter back and we were sort of toing and froing for ages. He said that his books had been out of print for years and he wanted them back in print, so we did it and edited them together, which was great fun.”

Curran finds writers through reading and researching. “Hardly anything is [acquired through] people coming to me, I’m always reading, researching, digging around and contacting people,” he says.

Boldness and originality of style is the “strongest pull” in deciding who to publish, with the rich texture and “maverick elements” of his authors’ writing reflected in the hand-bound limited editions that Curran produces himself.

This ranges from the press’ next release (The Glue Ponys, by author/painter Chris Wilson, which is a short-story collection about homelessness, addiction and prison), through to reissues of “lost classics”, such as A Cage of Shadows by Archie Hill, which will be published next year.

Until 2013, Curran ran the press while continuing to work as a carpenter, but when an injury forced him to stop woodworking, he decided to go full-time. “It’s all this madness of getting money from different sources, but essentially it’s doing incredibly well—by some miracle! Well, it’s not a miracle because I publish amazing writers and I make beautiful books.”

The press produces fairly small print runs of limited editions and usually releases around 1,000 paperbacks. The vast majority of its sales come though the Tangerine website. Among the site’s regular customers are individual collectors of signed, limited editions, university libraries, rare-book dealers and, more generally, people who follow “the counterculture or underground scene”.

Curran’s goal is to “do justice to his writers”, and says the biggest difference between the larger publishers and independents is that indies “publish books they believe in”. As he says: “The general pattern seems to be that the bigger publishers see a writer who has done well and offer them a huge advance—in effect using indie publishers as research stations.”

“You can’t blame the writers, because it’s money, exposure and publicity [for them], but the big publishers were much more innovative in the 1960s and ‘70s—even into the ‘90s. But I wouldn’t be here if they were taking risks, I suppose, so that’s the other way of looking at it—that indie publishers have filled a gap,” Curran adds.

Going forward, he intends to keep the press small, tight and independent. Curran says: “I don’t want to be bought out by a larger publishing house or anything like that, but I would like to publish a few more main titles. I do lots of chapbooks and funny little quirky things and broadsides, stuff like that... But in terms of main publications, I’m probably doing four this year. I would like to do six properly viable titles, [texts] that I can do paperbacks for and limited editions of.”