My very first story was published in The Literary Review in 1989, accepted by Auberon Waugh, and I still have his acceptance letter, handwritten with fountain pen. Waugh had been appointed editor by its new owner, ‘flamboyant’ (i.e. rich) Naim Atallah, who had previously bought the publishing house Quartet in 1976, four years after its founding; which means last year was their fortieth anniversary (my God I feel old).

Some years later, in the Nineties, I had a story in the anthology NeonLit: The Time Out Book Of New Writing, edited — as you would expect — by Nicholas Royle (Manchester Royle). It was Quartet who published it in partnership with Time Out.

So I feel a personal connexion with Quartet, a connexion strengthened by getting to know Gavin James Bower, who works for them, when he interviewed me for 3:AM, and later reviewed, rather glowingly, my novel on the website Fiction Uncovered.

My connexion rests on more than loyalty, however; it’s based also on interest in their list, which I had long found rewarding. One of Quartet’s early fields of interest was jazz biography, and their life of Charlie Parker sat on my shelf for years. Another was foreign fiction in translation, primarily in their Encounter series of European writers; I still have the Pirandello short stories published in this series in 1987. Translated fiction was difficult to come by in those days (Arabic literature is another field of interest with Quartet, and they were the first to publish the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.)

It’s very heartening to see that internationalism still reflected in their current list, which has writers as diverse as Gary Indiana, Pico Iyer and Andrei Codrescu alongside British writers such as David Pownall, Allan Massie, and, er… Gavin James Bower — his second novel, Made In Britain. I loved this; a witty, gritty and authentic depiction of adolescence in the grimy North, cleverly structured and compassionate, and very different from Bower’s first, Dazed And Aroused, a glossier grittiness, equally authentic in its setting — the fashion world. Bower was, in fact, a male model, for Hermes amongst others, for some years after university (if you have ever hankered after a modelling life, this would disabuse you).

One of the first novelists Quartet published was Colin Spencer, whose early novels of the 60s and 70s were an important series of portrayals of British society from the immediate post-War onwards. Spencer has since had a hugely prolific career as not just novelist but playwright, illustrator, artist, portrait painter, historian and, according to Germaine Greer, the world’s best cookery writer. And I had never heard of him! As part of their anniversary, Quartet are publishing Spencer’s memoirs in April so I will be very intrigued to read of the ramifications of his career through English society.

Another lacuna in my cultural knowledge is Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer. Maybe I’m not alone in that, but film buffs will know her name, due to the cult film of last year, The Wall, based on her first novel Die Wand, translated as The Wall.

Haushofer died in 1970, aged fifty, and suffered the usual descent into obscurity, to be rescued first by feminists, now by the film. Wikipedia says only her first novel has been translated into English. I’m happy to say that’s wrong: Quartet published an English version of her last novel, as The Loft, in 2011, and will soon add a new edition of The Wall (they published one in 1991), and Nowhere Ending Sky, its first appearance in English.

Amazon tells me that ‘customers who bought The Wall also bought Hans Keilson’s The Death Of The Adversary. Well, I have previously bought Death Of The Adversary, but haven’t bought The Wall, an omission I must now remedy.

So, Salt, Unthank, Honest, Two Ravens, Negative Press, Comma, Quartet — and the list could go on: the year-old Galley Beggar Press in Norwich… I have restricted myself to those presses I am well-acquainted with, and in the fiction field. There is of course a plethora of poetry publishers, which are outside my remit, except for those which also have a significant fiction list. Of those I will just mention two: Charles Boyles’ CB editions, which, alongside a strong poetry list (it includes the Brooklyn poet Dennis Nurkse) offers the British edition of David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel; and Welsh-based Cinnamon Press, who publish, among a number of interesting novels, that of the art writer and poet Sue Hubbard — Girl In White. I have read this; it is very enlightening — a fictional account of the life of Paula Becker, an early Expressionist painter still not well-enough known. She crops up frequently as a peripheral figure in the life of Rilke (I am right now reading William Gass’ Reading Rilke — there she is again) but was an artist of great talent in her own right, who died young, just as she was beginning to realize her vision. Hubbard beautifully brings her to fictional life.

What I have attempted is to demonstrate is that Britain has a healthy independent publishing sphere offering strongly individual work by challenging writers. I hope I have succeeded, because you wouldn’t realize that from the blandness of the best-seller lists or the broadsheet review pages.

And the latter are essential; we need a responsible, responsive reviewing industry, one not content to be spoonfed by the publicists of Random House/Faber. Publishers need to feel that there is a reasonable chance of their commitment to new writing paying off in terms of review coverage.

Perhaps what we most need is an equivalent of the American Book Review a wide-ranging, serious reviewing journal dedicated principally — though not exclusively — to the output of the independent presses of all sizes. This is, after all, the life-blood of literature; we need to remedy the hardening arteries of the mainstream.

Any entrepreneurs reading this?