The Carcanet Press offices on Cross Street in Manchester occupy the fourth floor of an Edwardian commercial building two doors down from a Cornish pasty shop. On a damp Thursday morning in early May, the founding editor Michael Schmidt was working through the third proof of the press's 1,247th title, a selected poems of the Welsh poet Ruth Bidgood, who died in 2022.
Schmidt has run Carcanet, in some form, since 1969. The press began as a student magazine at Wadham College, moved to Manchester in 1972, and incorporated as Carcanet Press Limited in 1976. The fifty-seventh year of continuous publication is 2026.
The Bidgood selected, which runs to 312 pages with a preface by Damian Walford Davies, is one of fourteen titles on the spring 2026 list. Four of the fourteen are reissues. The rest are new collections, three of them translations.
The reissue work is, in some ways, what distinguishes Carcanet from the larger poetry lists at Faber, Bloodaxe, and Cape. Carcanet has been, since at least the mid-1980s, the British press most willing to keep difficult or unfashionable mid-century poets in print past the point of commercial sense.
The spring reissues are typical. There is a reprint of Edgell Rickword's Behind the Eyes, originally published in 1921, last available from Carcanet itself in 2004. There is a new selected of the Northern Irish poet Padraic Fiacc, who died in 2019 and whose 1979 collection The Selected Padraic Fiacc has been out of print since 1988. There is a reprint of the Australian poet Rosemary Dobson's collected, first published by Carcanet in 1991 and out of print since 2007.
And there is, perhaps most consequentially, a reprint of the Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses, which the press first published in 2005 and which has been hard to find new since 2018.
These are not commercial decisions. The Rickword will, on present trends, sell perhaps 600 copies in its first year. The Fiacc may not sell 400. The Dobson, with the small Australian academic market accounted for, might reach 800. None of these print runs will pay for themselves quickly.
What pays for them is the press's translation list, which under the imprint Carcanet Classics has, since 2010, produced a steady stream of more saleable poetry in English translation. The 2026 list includes new translations of poems by the Romanian Marin Sorescu, the Catalan Maria-Mercè Marçal, and the Polish Adam Zagajewski, the last drawn from his uncollected late work.
The Sorescu, translated by Lidia Vianu, is a first major English selected for a poet whose previous English appearance was a slim 1985 Bloodaxe volume now out of print. The Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, draws on the poet's final years before his death in 2021. The Marçal, translated by Mary Ann Newman, is the first substantial English selected for a Catalan poet who has been a major figure in Iberian poetry since the 1980s.
Bouallam, who has translated from both Arabic and French and who edits Threadcount's Translation section from a small office in Marseille, has been following Carcanet's translation work for over a decade. The press has, by her count, published first English selecteds for at least thirty-eight poets in twenty-two source languages since 2010.
This is a remarkable record for a small press. By way of comparison, the Bloodaxe translation list over the same period has produced perhaps fifty first selecteds. Cape's poetry list, which is selective by design, has produced perhaps twelve. Faber, which is institutionally larger but more commercially constrained, has produced perhaps fifteen.
What Carcanet has, that the others do not have to the same degree, is the willingness to publish a first English selected for a poet the English-language reader is unlikely to have any prior context for, and to do so without expecting the title to recoup its costs in the standard publishing timeframe of eighteen months.
The reason this is possible is a combination of public funding, university press partnerships, and Schmidt's personal willingness to operate at margins that would distress a more commercial publisher. Carcanet has, for most of its history, received some support from the Arts Council. The current funding settlement, announced in late 2024, runs through 2028 and supports roughly a quarter of the press's translation activity.
The remaining three quarters of translation costs come from the press's healthier lines: the contemporary British poetry list, which includes well-selling poets like Sinéad Morrissey and Rachael Boast, and the academic-adjacent classics list, which keeps the press supplied with steady backlist income from titles like the complete Hugh MacDiarmid and the standard Charles Olson editions.
This is a balanced business model in the sense that no single line subsidises the others entirely. It is unbalanced in the sense that any sudden change to Arts Council funding or to academic library budgets would put the whole structure under stress.
Schmidt has said, in conversation and in writing, that he expects the press to outlast him. The succession plan, which Carcanet does not discuss in detail, involves an editorial board and a younger generation of editors who have been with the press since the 2010s. Whether the succession will preserve the press's particular willingness to publish unfashionable mid-century reprints is, frankly, an open question.
The mid-century reprint line is the press's quietest and most distinctive contribution to British poetry publishing. It is also the line most dependent on the personal taste and memory of a single editor. A younger editorial team, with different reading histories and different priorities, may keep the line going. Or may not.
For now, the Cross Street offices are still open, the spring catalogue is on the bookshop tables, and the 1,247th title is at the printer. The fiftieth anniversary, which the press marked in 2019, is seven years in the past. The fifty-seventh year is the current one.
Bouallam left the offices with a proof of the Bidgood, a proof of the Marçal, and a copy of the press's 2026 catalogue. The catalogue is forty-eight pages long, printed in two colours on uncoated stock, and lists every Carcanet title currently in print. There are 624 of them. The list will be longer by the autumn.