the "Outposts" business

Outposts

This is a bit more about vanity presses, specifically about Outposts. The background is that someone called Howard Sergeant had begun in the 1940s and established himself as an editor of poetry, suitable to the bodies or individuals who gave patronage even if he was a bit of a hack. He had a (semi) quarterly magazine, Outposts, which ran for a remarkable number of years – 1943 to 1986 according to Bruce Meyer’s doctoral thesis on Sergeant. From about 1958 he also published poetry pamphlets (sometimes with spines). Gardiner records that the arrangement of Outposts was that aspirant authors had to acquire enough pre-orders to cover the cost of publishing the pamphlet or book. Inevitably this would have been the author paying for many copies themselves, in many cases. Most of the issues I have details of are pamphlets, under 30 pages, with no spine and gripped together by staples- they would have been cheap to produce so it seems that Sergeant was making it easy for his poets and that this was genuinely a low threshold to surmount in order to get into print. It also seems that Sergeant exercised quality control over the poetry. To qualify that, let me say that the 1977 edition of Gardiner’s Poet’s Yearbook lists 90 Outposts pamphlets for that year alone. From Aitken to Zinnemann. You can either see this as having poor quality control or as offering a vital open door by which poets could get inside the sacred precincts. As these are generally debuts, most of the poets would have gone on to improve – so you definitely want to see their later work (and not the debut pamphlet). The open door factor is arguably more important than the average quality – the poets needed a break. And quite a large share of these poets were women.
An outpost protects an army at rest and is the equivalent of an avant garde for an army on the move. An outpost may be what blocks anything new from arriving.

Outposts may have been aesthetically up to date in 1945 but it was definitely conservative by the 1960s. Early issues included “Featuring (amongst many others) Muriel Spark, K. Raine, John Wain, Henry Treece, John Heath-Stubbs, Litvinoff, Robin Atthill, Vernon Watkins, Dannie Abse, Neruda, Vernon Scannell, Ronald Blythe, James Kirkup, etc.” - so 40s poets.

The three Outposts which dealers are asking a lot for are the ones by Gustav Davidson and Harry Guest. These are the same ones I wanted to buy! I think the dealers know as much as I do! Embarrassing. Davidson wrote the classic A Dictionary of Angels, I have a download of this but I haven’t read it yet. Anyway, highly recommended by those interested in non-observable phenomena. Someone offers his Ambushed by Angels, 1965, for $125. And someone offers Guest’s debut pamphlet for $62 – well, it is important, but the text is there in A Puzzling Harvest, his collected poems, at pp. 44-54.

An aside. One of the vanity presses I looked at (name withheld) did a lot of books about spiritualism as well as poetry. There seems to be an analogy – mediums bring home truths about the cosmos which official theology does not validate, vanity poets make claims to poetic authority which official taste does not validate. I would guess neither product got any fact checking. So you know The Truth and it doesn't need fact checking.