IT’S HARD TO FIND appropriate language to describe those who run literary small presses, but they are the true heroes of literature, sailing into stormy seas when others prefer the flat, flat calm; they are the grassroots football of literature, playing on muddy pitches in front of small but enthusiastic knots of people, as opposed to the prawn sandwich, big-money Premiership of the mainstream publishers. Maybe neither of these hits the exact spot, but you get the drift.

Mark Hodkinson, who runs Pomona Books from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, describes the best thing about running a small press as “having an idea for a book and seeing it through from getting an e-mail from the author to the book appearing a year later, and then seeing it in the shops”. Hodkinson is ambitious, too: “I don’t want to sell 500 copies of a book, I want to sell 20,000.” Every small press publisher wants to see their books in people’s hands. They are no good in boxes in the shed.

Pomona books are gorgeous, and that’s part of Mark’s mission, too: “I don’t want them on cheap paper, and I don’t want them overdesigned. I used to love buying Penguin Books – you built up a kind of loyalty to the Penguin, and I want people to build up a similar kind of loyalty to the ‘P’ on the spine of every Pomona book.”

Pomona’s eclecticism helps it to survive: it has reissued lost classic works such as Barry Hines’s Looks and Smiles and The Price of Coal, as well as the American Clancy Sigal’s hazy, drug-fuelled Sixties classic Zone of the Interior and Hunter Davies’s football writing. Planned titles (he hopes this year, or maybe next; small presses have to wait for money from arts associations, presubscriptions, donations or bits of change that they find on the street) include one by Tom Palmer titled Long Overdue that I predict could be a bestseller. It’s a journey through the libraries of Great Britain, from North to South, and could do for libraries what Fever Pitch did for football.

Small presses take chances with new and uncommercial writing: two of the most hyperactive, Salt Publications and Shearsman Press, produce volume after volume of challenging work. Shearsman has just published Printed on Water, the new and selected poems of the unjustly neglected (how many times could have I written that in this piece?) Scottish poet Gerry Loose, who writes marvellously about the open air.

Shearsman publishes a wide range of work, often with a current of nature writing running through it. If you want a challenging but life-enhancing read, buy Peter Larkin’s collection of poems and prose pieces Leaves of Field. Better than the other P. Larkin, in my humble opinion.

Salt also publishes poetry, prose, translations, new writing from native Americans, neglected Europeans – it’s part of the job of the small presses to spread the map of global literature in front of us. Recent Salt books include an outstanding first collection of poems and prose by Luke Kennard, The Harbour Beyond the Movie. His language is exciting and it feels to me that he’s a truly 21st-century writer, taking inspiration from all over the place, unafraid of barriers and conventions.

Then there are small presses that delight in production values. One of the best is The Caseroom Press, which publishes volumes that tip over from book into art object, such as Feathers and Lime,a collection of German poetry in translation that opens like a concertina, and All Points North, a joint publication with the Scottish Poetry Library that celebrates a collaboration between poets from Shetland, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Norway, with the poems spread across the page in each language so that even if you can’t understand them, you can bathe in the typeface and words.

Let’s leave the last word to Mark Hodkinson: “I’ve never seen anybody reading a Pomona book on a train, but that’s my ambition.” I think we should help that to happen for all the small presses and buy one small press book for every mainstream one that we purchase. Take up the Ian McMillan Small Press Challenge and help exciting writing to thrive!

pomonauk.co.uk; www.shearsman.com; saltpublishing.com; the-case.co.uk

Five to cherish

TRAVELATOR by Stephen Waling, Salt Press Waling was once poet-in-residence in a chip shop and his poetry has a salty quality that makes you want more. Salt churns out quality books like there’s no tomorrow.

THE SEASON SWEETENS edited by Alec Finlay The Caseroom Press Caseroom Press books are almost art objects. This is an English-German collection of tiny football poems that can be written on the back of a shirt: “Tackle with a Cackle/ Angriff Mit Pfiff.”

STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS by Walter de la Mare Tartarus Press Tartarus specialises in limited editions of classic British weird fiction. This is a fantastic (in every sense) book of tales.

LAYING SOMETHING DOWN: Collected Poems by Jim Burns, Shoestring Press Burns is a rare figure in British writing; an English Beat poet.

UPSTATE by Jeremy Hooker Shearsman Press Hooker is one of the great poets of landscape. Upstate is a poetic journal of a year in New York State.

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