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- Waterstones Interview
with
- Ray Russell, Tartarus
Press
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- conducted by Peter
Whitehead
-
 How did Tartarus
Press begin?
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- Like many small presses, with
a desire to see in print a handful of books
that other publishers weren't interested in;
specifically the works of Arthur Machen.
Tartarus Press started off in 1990 as a hobby
and gradually took over more of my time until
I had to give up the day job. Then in the
later 1990s my partner, Rosalie Parker, also
found herself working for Tartarus full-time.
What is gratifying is that over two decades
we have constantly found new books that
excite us and which we want to publish. We
can't think of anything else we'd rather be
doing.
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- Your books have a very
specific look and feel - did this evolve over
time or did you establish this from the
outset?
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- From the start I designed
them to be the kind of books that I would
personally like to own! Tartarus Press books
are meant to resemble the elegant special
editions issued by publishers like Martin
Secker in the 1920s. We've tweaked the design
over the years, but the old-fashioned,
classic look seems to appeal to our
readers.
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- How would you describe the
philosophy behind your publishing
output?
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- We only publish books that we
like. We're not fans of "Horror" as such, but
we do like writing that looks at the world
from a different angle and gives the reader a
sense of unease. We see Tartarus as being on
the edge of the world of Horror and the
Supernatural...
-
 What
are your criteria for selecting
authors?
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- The quality of writing is
fundamental. It helps if the author is
working in the psychological and/or
supernatural genres. We publish classic
authors from the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, but also great writers
whose star has waned, or never shone very
brightly in the first place. Our contemporary
authors tend to be little known, but most of
them are, in our opinion, good enough to
succeed in the mainstream (check out recent
titles by Mark Valentine and John Howard,
Simon Strantzas and Eric Stener
Carlson.)
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- If one of our branches wanted
to begin stocking your titles, which five
would you suggest they begin with and
why?
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- Tales of
Horror and the Supernatural by
Arthur Machen. It's on
Waterstones core stock and consistently,
quietly, sells to those who would like to
read the best of Machen's elegant
fiction.
-
- Strangers
and Pilgrims by Walter de la
Mare. Among his
other achievements de la Mare penned some of
the most subtle and disquieting stories of
the twentieth century.
-
- The
Collected Macabre Stories of L.P.
Hartley. A fine
storyteller who throughout his career
returned again and again to the macabre and
supernatural.
-
- Where
Nothing Sleeps by Denton
Welch. Not at all
supernatural, but a bit strange, and very
expensive in two slipcased volumes. Welch is
the most exquisite and delightful
writer.
-
- Prince
Zaleski by M.P. Shiel. Short stories
of a detective far more decadent than
Sherlock Holmes. At his best Zaleski doesn't
even need to rise from his divan to solve
baffling crimes.
-
 Would you ever
consider moving into paperback editions and
potentially a less exclusive
market?
-
- We have published a few books
as paperbacks to make them more widely
available. Recently we reprinted
The White
Hands by Mark Samuels and
The Collected
Connoisseur by Mark
Valentine and John Howard. It's not where our
heart lies, but when there is a demand we
would be silly not to cater for it.
-
- Do you feel that the British
horror market is healthy?
-
- Yes, but it's always been at
the mercy of fashion in publishing and
marketing. Horror was perceived as having
waned in the late 1980s when all those fat
black books with gold embossed lettering
disappeared from bookshops. But that's just
when the horrific American Psycho
by Brett Easton Ellis was
published to great acclaim. "Horror" had
become devalued as a marketing term but has
always been, and will always be, an element
in general fiction. Cormac Macarthy's
The Road, for
instance, is post-apocalyptic horror, but
marketed as literary fiction. Throughout the
nineties many displaced horror fans turned to
crime fiction as it became darkly
psychological and more and more gory. Horror
is coming out of hiding through "bit-lit"
(vampire stories) and "dark fiction",
although there seems to be a romantic element
to this. Visible genre labels can be helpful
to booksellers and unadventurous readers, but
horror is always out there.
-
- How could a national
bookseller such as Waterstone's best support
the horror genre?
-
- I'm in two minds about Horror
resurfacing as a specific point of sale
opportunity. I think that in the 1980s the
horror element became more important than the
quality of the writing, which is why it
disappeared. In an ideal world what I'd love
to see is contemporary horror writers like
Joe Hill, Thomas Ligotti and Sarah Pinborough
shelved alongside P.D. James, Kazuo Ishiguro
and Nick Hornby in one big general fiction
section in every bookshop. And classic horror
like Frankenstein and
Dracula
alongside The Great Gatsby
and Le Grand
Meaulnes, with no genre
distinctions being made.
-
 Your
own collection of tales, Literary
Remains, is soon to be released by
PS Publishing. What was your experience of
working as a writer rather than a
publisher?
-
- I'm very aware of the uphill
struggle PS will have in getting
Literary
Remains before the
reading public. There's just so much
competition for space in bookshops and PS,
like Tartarus, relies on a few enlightened
souls in individual bookshops promoting small
presses within stores. Waterstones have a
good history of letting staff do this, and
long may it continue. The author has a part
to play in publicity and promotion so I will
do my best to help!
-
- What are your feelings about
ebooks and the future of the
business?
-
- I'm of a generation that
finds the physical aspect of a book to be a
part of the whole reading experience, but I
realise that times are changing. In time,
downloading books to a reading device may
become as natural as downloading music to an
mp3 player. But at Tartarus we try and
publish books as lovely physical objects, as
well as a great reading experience. I'm
pleased to report that there still seems to
be a demand for them.
-
Page
updated 15th April 2010
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