The house
A small press
with long
memory.
We are an independent publisher of literary fiction, founded in 2009 and run, still, from a single floor above a bookshop in Bloomsbury.
Origins
The Calthorpe Press takes its name from Calthorpe Street, where its founders first shared an office, a kettle and a conviction: that the consolidation of publishing into a handful of enormous houses had left a great deal of remarkable writing with nowhere to go. The novels that did not fit a category. The translations no committee would approve. The debut that was too quiet to win an auction.
We started with one such book. It had been turned down by three of the largest houses in London, but we watched it find readers in eleven languages. That was the whole education. We have been publishing on the same principle ever since: that the market is not the same thing as the readership, and that the gap between them is exactly where a small house should stand.
Today we publish around eight titles a year. We are deliberately not larger. Everyone here reads, everyone here edits, and the person who answers an enquiry is the same person who will tell you, honestly, what we thought of your manuscript.
What we hold to
We publish slowly
A short list, read closely. We would rather do eight books a year well than forty badly. Every title gets an editor who has read it more times than the author has.
We keep books in print
Nothing we publish goes out of print while the press exists. A backlist is a library, not inventory to be written down at the end of a quarter.
We pay translators properly
Translation is authorship. Our translators are named on the cover, paid a real fee, and given a royalty. A third of our list arrives in English for the first time through us.
We read without an agent
You do not need representation to reach us. The slush pile is where we found three of our best-selling novelists, so a person reads every page that arrives.
In the world
Being small in London does not mean being small in the world.
Our rights team sells and shares editions with literary houses across Europe, the Americas and East Asia; our books are distributed to the trade worldwide; and our translation programme moves writing both into and out of English. A novel acquired above a Bloomsbury bookshop can, and regularly does, end up on a table in Tokyo, Buenos Aires or New York.
See what we publish →