John Sansom has been busy publishing books about bristol for over 30 years. Briohny Keble talked to the man behind Redcliffe Press as it gets ready to celebrate its 200th Bristol book…

Back in 1989 Redcliffe Press celebrated its first big milestone – the publication of 50 books about Bristol – with the claim that no other publisher had produced so many books about one city. Nearly 20 years on, they can repeat that claim, with little fear of contradiction. May 2008 sees publication of the firm’s 200th Bristol title, St Mary Redcliffe: the church and its people. (There’ll be a review next issue).

It all started back in 1976 when John Sansom ( left: as seen by Emma Dibben) responded to his friends’ suggestions there should be a parents’ guide to what Bristol had to offer young families. The resulting book – Children’s Bristol – fast achieved iconic status, and thousands of parents still recall the little red book with great affection. The 75 pence cover price on that first volume is a far cry from the £165 which Art Dictionaries Ltd, a Redcliffe offshoot, charges for Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945, a recently published two-volume, 2¼-million-word dictionary of modern British artists.

But it all nearly ended in disaster, as John explains in his publishing memoir, Written Between the Lines. ‘The first printing of 3,000 copies [of Children’s Bristol] sold out in three weeks, when we immediately ordered a second impression of 3,500. We hadn’t realised that publishing could be so easy… Of
course, it wasn’t, as we found a year later, by when we had rushed out four more family guides – Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton and Manchester, with York following later. They were meant to be the front runners in a nationwide series, but we chose badly. For a start, blinded by the Bristol success, we did no market research. How many children are there in Bournemouth? Certainly not enough to make sense of publishing a full-blown family guide. None of these titles came remotely close to repeating the Bristol success.’

Redcliffe lost money on the putative national series. But fortunately, there was another successful Bristol project round the corner. John Sansom liked the look of artist Frank Shipsides’ drawings (he wasn’t so keen on the paintings), invited Frank to lunch and the outcome was another best-seller: Bristol Impressions,
with pen-and-ink drawings by Frank and text by John. ‘In the five weeks from launch to Christmas, we sold most of the 1,500 hardbacks we had printed. We followed up with a softback edition, which also sold out. We were now firmly hooked, but it would be many years before we could make a go of publishing books full-time.’

Since then, Redcliffe have covered almost every conceivable local angle. ‘One thing we’ve never gone in for is ‘Bristol in Old Photographs’ although we did once publish a rather good book about Victorian photographers in Bristol by James Belsey and David Harrison, two great Evening Post writers, now sadly
both dead.’ Two money-spinning genres, nostalgia and the ‘Bristle’ phenomenon, have passed the Sansom family by. ‘I always felt that Reece Winstone had rather done to death the archive photograph stuff, but look at how they still come pouring off the presses!’ Life would probably have been easier if Redcliffe had gone wholeheartedly for the nostalgia market. Instead, the company’s list has always been eclectic, mixing such popular fare as its books on Bristol in the war with special-interest titles like the history of the Royal West of England Academy and, most recently, a biography of the eighteenth-century publisher, Joseph Cottle.

Unlikely early topics, such as a very successful book about Bristol murders, were later shunned in favour of subjects closer to John Sansom’s heart: art and architecture, Bristol’s streetscapes, the way the city looks today. Hence, a number of good-selling photographic books, several by Stephen Morris, acknowledged as one of the city’s top photographers. And thanks to John a series of elegant books about modern-day Bristol, its buildings, handsome interiors and its public sculpture was published to support Bristol’s bid for
2008 ‘Cultural Capital’ status.

Rather out of character, Redcliffe have recently published a little book on Bristol graffiti, which has sold predictably well. ‘But I feel hypocritical about this. To be honest I’m a bit stuffy about ‘street art’, and we only took this one on to get a bit of street cred and because we think we ought to cover all sorts of Bristol topics.’ He adds that Richard Jones’ Tangent Books can do graffiti better than Redcliffe can, as shown by their brilliant Home Sweet Home book about Banksy.

‘Publishing books about Bristol is much tougher than it was 30 years ago,’ John Sansom muses. When he first set out, there were only two local-interest publishers of note – Reece Winstone, with his eccentrically titled photography books such as Bristol As It Was:187-1866 and Abson Books, who launched a new craze with Derek Robinson’s Krek Waiter’s Peak Bristle. ‘Apart from them, we had the field to ourselves and even quite specialised books got a good showing in the bookshops. Now, the shelves are packed with those “Bristol in Old Photographs” I get so snooty about! But there are also many more good local publishers on the scene, producing some good stuff. And we get on well together in the informal Bristol Publishers Group.’

Some titles can only be published with sponsorship, and the list of local organisations that Redcliffe has worked with is impressive: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol Zoo, Arnolfini, Bristol & West Building Society, the two local daily newspapers, Bristol City and Bristol Rovers, the RWA, BBC Radio Bristol, HTV, Bristol Old Vic, Harveys of Bristol, Bristol Cathedral, Testimony Films, Bristol Cultural Development Partnership… and John Sansom is currently seeking backing for two books Redcliffe are publishing next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the Floating Harbour.

Good relations with the local book trade is essential, of course and John regrets that the W H Smith chain refuses to stock his books – ‘their definition of a local book isn’t one published in Bristol, but by a chain which turns out fairly ordinary stuff in a ‘look-a-like’ series covering the whole country.’ And he regrets the recent loss of Waterstone’s on College Green, the closure of long-established Clifton Bookshop – ‘a really smashing, friendly family outfit’ – and the end of The Book Cupboard, which had served the local Bishopston community for some years.

And what of the future? ‘Well, I suppose it would be good to top 250 Bristol titles – we’re got our next 10 Bristol titles pencilled in already’, says John. Alongside the Bristol books, the firm has long since diversified into books on modern British art (where, as Sansom & Company, it now has a national reputation), and a whole range of topics ranging through sport, poetry, fiction, medicine –including a DIY orthopaedic surgery manual – to religion, cookery, even volumes on the soils, vegetation and traditional agriculture of Zambia. Literally, an A-Z compendium of titles. They relish the challenge of producing and marketing art books nationally and are now concentrating on this area of publishing, but when pressed John, Angela and daughter Clara Sansom admit to being just as proud of their local books. ‘It’s very pleasing to be told, once in a while, that we’re doing a good job for the city.’ .

For more about the trials and triumphs of local publishing, read John Sansom’s biography, Written
Between the Lines, Redcliffe Press, £10 hardback.