September 25, 2024, 2:14pm
Attention, bookworms and fellow travelers! Verso, the beloved left wing publishing house and hub for radical thought, is in big financial trouble.
The company’s UK distributor, Marston Book Publishing, filed for bankruptcy this July—and left behind some unsettled debts. Verso explained how those debts have affected operations in a series of tweets yesterday.
That fundraiser is currently live, via Kickstarter.
According to Verso’s appeal page, the bankruptcy announcement has led to major lay-offs within the company, and an effective end to their vital publication pipeline in the UK.
And per their Kickstarter, “Though Verso invested significantly in acquiring, editing, printing, and marketing books it published in the first half of 2024, it has received virtually no revenue for these sales in the UK.”
As an independent house, Verso is almost entirely supported by book sales.
For fifty years, Verso’s published radical work by iconic thinkers like Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Noam Chomsky. They run a blog, a book club, and a podcast, and claim to be “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.”
The funds they’re hoping to raise from Viewers Like You will go to keeping the current print and publication docket on schedule, as well as marketing and inventory maintenance.
Given: Kickstarter is fraught. And we certainly don’t love to see a major publisher having to rely on crowdfunding to keep their lights on. But there are worse places to throw your dollars.