ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the independent and alternative publishing scenes. Cultural policy interventions work to mitigate the more extreme effects of the market and help carve out space for a fragile, but nevertheless vibrant, independent publishing scene. Free-market economists and philosophical libertarians tend to decry explicit acts of state or religious censorship because they consider them intrusions into the untrammelled play of demand-and-supply forces. Academic and independent publisher Michael Wilding concurs: ‘the West congratulates itself on its free press, on its lack of censorship structures. Independent publishers would likely reject the capitalist assumptions built into the metaphor of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, instead preferring the model of an ecosystem. A brief case-study serves to illustrate how a dynamic independent publisher can catalyse transformative change across the book industry and beyond. The extreme manifestation of this blurring of workplace roles is the collective – a form of publishing organisation popular in the alternative-culture heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
