About The Orwell Press The Orwell Press is an imprint which I set up in 1990 with the specific purpose of publishing my first book, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and 'The Satanic Verses'. The book was highly topical and since the prospects of rapidly finding a publisher who would produce an instant paperback seemed remote, I decided to publish the book myself. I was at that time running The Orwell Bookshop in Southwold, so-called because it was a hundred yards down the road from the house where George Orwell wrote the early drafts of Down and Out in Paris and London and most of A Clergyman's Daughter. It seemed appropriate, in the circumstances, to call the new imprint The Orwell Press. In the event A Brief History of Blasphemy was widely and well reviewed and went on to sell more than 5000 copies in the next two years. The imprint has occasionally been pressed into service to produce or reprint my other books. In 2005 I acquired the rights to my intellectual biography of Freud, Why Freud Was Wrong, (which had originally been published by HarperCollins in the UK and by Basic Books in the United States) and produced a new edition. Most recently The Orwell Press published The Secret of Bryn Estyn. This was done in 2005, at a time when the New Statesman had already been sued for libel for publishing some of the revelations contained in the book and when no commercial publisher could reasonably have been expected to take the risk of republishing them. Richard Webster |
