RW: You’ve been running Shoestring Press since 1994. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in poetry publishing over the past three decades, and how have they affected the press?

JL: I need to go back to my student years at Reading university in the late 1950s, when I became friendly with John Wain. He had given up his lectureship and begun life as a freelance writer, but retained an interest in Reading University Press, which he’d helped to start. The Press concentrated on slim volumes of poetry, in editions of 150 copies, using good-quality paper. I started the Byron Press in 1965, soon after arriving in Nottingham, and made a point of seeking out Michael Kane, who taught typography at the city’s art college, and Albert Haynes, an expert on matters typographic. So when I set up Shoestring, I thought I knew how to do it. But then came computers.

It seems to me that the big changes in the world of poetry publishing all occurred in the latter half of the 1990s, especially with the withdrawal of some larger presses from their earlier commitment to publish work by living poets, and the enlargement of the world of micro presses, whose work is often pretty shoddy. Moreover, in 1994, poets who submitted to the press had for the most part spent time – not infrequently long years – sending out work to magazines before putting together a book-length collection. But the proliferation of university Creative Writing courses meant that quite suddenly I was being inundated, or ...