Count of titles

The curve

I have just completed a retrieval from library catalogues giving a figure for poetry published in 2015. All the counts exclude anthologies.

2000 1079 titles
2010 1530 titles
2015 1350 titles
2019 1648 titles

I can see we have a dip in 2015. All the same, the figures have grown rather steeply since the 1990s.

We can draw a similar curve for the percentage of women poets in these single-author figures.

2000 38.8%
2010 36.1%
2015 40.3%
2019 45%

For comparison, figures for 1990 are 866 titles and 28.2% of them by women.
I discussed this issue with a group of interested parties, here in Nottingham. One associate was very excited to show us an essay from a poet in Ireland, saying that you could only get published if you knew people, and that it was useless to expect publication, so you should write for yourself. The associate was excited because this was what he already believed. I had done rather tiring catalogue work to recovered that figure of 1648 volumes of poetry by individual authors in one year. It really didn’t seem that they had all chanced to be friends of the editor. It seems, on the contrary, that there is a moment when a script arrives in an email, by someone you have never heard of, you read it and get excited because it is really good, and shows patterns you have never seen before, and you can't get enough of it.

One has to ask if this growth in the number of titles being issued could represent a decline in cultural creativity. This does not seem to be a possible conclusion.

One way of looking at the growth in titles is to consider that the count of books by white males would have gone down if the overall count had remained static. The growth allows for titles by white males to remain at the original level while socially other groups take up other portions of the pie.

There are several thousand people in the country who have published at least one book of poetry. The related number of unpublished poets (and of their unpublished books) has never been counted.
During 2024, the pace-making publisher Broken Sleep Books had a “window” for submitting pamphlets for possible selection by them. They emailed the unsuccessful applicants to say that they had received 880 submissions. (I am not sure if they had one or two windows during 2024.) I saw one of these, a friend in Nottingham received it. Interesting figure! We have to ask, first, were these all new scripts, or was at least one of them ten years old, and enduringly unpublished. Secondly, if you looked back in 2026, how many of them would have found publishers and so moved out of the category of “frustrated”, and so made the original account wrong or misleading. Thirdly, is this one in five of the striving and productive poets, or one in ten or one in twenty. I have no way of knowing.