If artists are enthusiastic to follow this up, once they have heard of all the difficulties they might encounter, they are offered expert advice at every stage to full publication. However the artist is always fully responsible for publication both financially and in other ways. This is necessary because W.P.does not have revenue funding and relies mainly on the voluntary work of its organisers. But it also encourages an autonomy of expression and a diversity which we think is important in publishing working class viewpoints. Once the project has raised funds W.P. and the author enter a new form of relationship. This is a publishing relationship with a formal contract. The book is then promoted on a common list which is regularly updated and distributed to interested parties. The book also has well established, if delicate, lines of distribution down which it can be channelled. This distribution can take the book nationwide, and across the North American continent and to a more limited extent world-wide through our mail order distributor A.K. The other distributors we are currently working with are:
Once published the author becomes a nominal 'director' of wORking Press.The titles are also represented directly at bookfairs and other events whenever possible. A small percentage of sales income is taken by W.P. to pay the expenses of catalogue production etc.W.P. does not take profits or pay wages from its book sales income. Any excess (rare) is put into new publications. The authors own wORking Press. Other activities are research and network building. A survey of UK artist book makers was followed with a conference and report published by estamp. This was funded by the Arts Council of England. and seems to have stimulated an increasing flurry of activity, including an annual fair. The broader wORking Press network has grown to over 100 working class artists who write or produce books. A meeting of 15 people in '93 was followed with an ambitious conference of 30 people in '94 part funded by the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers of which we are a member.
A pilot programme of workshops in North London schools in early '93 was followed with a short report. In August '93 we published a list of Working Class Novelists 1930 - 1950 from the UK and the Republic of Ireland by Howard Slater as a pamphlet. This was followed up in '94 with Towards Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers by Merylyn Cherry, a look at women novelists writing in the first half of this century who were published in Britain. Remarkably this seems to be the first ever published essay on working class women as writers.
Our two most recent titles are both by groups of working class women. One, a history of the Greenham Common Women's Peace camp from 1984 until the present by those women who are at Yellow Gate, the other an international annotated list of contemporary working class women writers by Sarah Richardson with essays including a reprint of the essay by Merylyn Cherry. Both books are more moving than their titles belie!
A full list of currently available wORking Press publications is included on this Website.
Overall our priority is to promote books by working class visual artists to ever wider audiences and to support these artists to print and publish work. It intends to be a visible reminder that working class artists exist and have their own voice.
Our presence on the WWW here is a first small inroad into electronic publishing. If you would like to help us please order our hardcopy books or make a contribution this will help us to extend our publishing on the Internet in the near future.
Offers of help in extending our electronic publishing or with financial aspects would be appreciated. Please contact wORking Press by e-mail with your ideas and suggestions.
As the organiser of Working Press I would like to see a colour visual CV from each of the artists in our network to become a part of these Web pages in the next year or two. I would also like to include a discussion forum for the issues of class identity and cultural production. Hopefully all our future books will be available for down-loading electronically.