Pluto Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Pluto Press opened its doors in London in 1969, founded by Richard Kuper with a purpose that was anything but modest: to support and promote political debate and activism. More than five decades later, it still describes itself as publishing "radical, left-wing non-fiction books", anti-capitalist and internationalist in character. That kind of consistency across half a century raises an obvious question. How does a small independent press stay true to a political mission while navigating university distribution controversies, shifting radical movements, and a publishing industry that often rewards the mainstream? The answer lives in the choices Pluto made about who it published, who it sold to, and who it trusted to carry its books into the world.

• 2. Trotskyist Roots

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  Richard Kuper's original vision for Pluto Press drew directly from the International Socialists, giving the house a distinctly Trotskyist character in its earliest years. That narrower focus broadened in 1972 when Nina Kidron and Michael Kidron joined, pulling the house toward a wider revolutionary left. Anne Benewick and Ric Sissons came aboard soon after, and the team eventually grew to sixteen people. From within that collective, Pluto published extensively in movement history, race politics, Ireland, feminism, and sexual politics. Two early titles stand out as emblematic of that range: Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden from History: 300 years of women's oppression and the fight against it, and Patrick Kinnersley's Hazards of Work. Pluto has since been described as "one of the most influential socialist publishing houses of that time", a phrase that captures just how much cultural weight it carried in that era. Ric Sissons, who helped build the press from the inside, later went on to run Pluto Australia, carrying the house's reach into a new hemisphere.

• 3. Readers Beyond Bookshops

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  Pluto Press understood early that a radical press cannot rely on conventional retail alone. Its target readers were found by selling directly to trade unions, women's organisations and networks, student unions, and theatre audiences, alongside the network of radical bookshops that emerged across the United Kingdom in the 1970s. One of the more inventive distribution experiments came through a partnership with Max Stafford-Clark and the Royal Court Theatre: Pluto printed theatre programmes that included the entire playscript of the work being performed, turning a standard programme into something closer to a published book. Beyond live venues, Pluto set up a trade sales organisation called Volume Sales in partnership with Allison and Busby, run under the direction of Ric Sissons. It also became a distributor and co-publisher for titles from Urizen Books and South End Press in the United States, and Ink Links in the United Kingdom, and handled distribution for Counter-Information Services, History Workshop, and Feminist Review. The State of the World Atlas series, created and produced by Pluto and published by Pan Books, showed what the house could achieve in partnership: visual encapsulations of major social and political trends, authored by Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal, became the most successful series the house produced in those years.

• 4. Ownership and Continuity

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  In 1987, Pluto Press was bought by Roger van Zwanenberg and Norman Drake, a transaction that closed one chapter and opened another. Drake eventually sold his shares to van Zwanenberg, concentrating ownership in a single pair of hands. That consolidation would matter greatly in a controversy that surfaced two decades later. In June 2008, the University of Michigan Press terminated its distribution relationship with Pluto in the United States. The split followed a chain of events tied to a 2007 Pluto title: Overcoming Zionism, written by Joel Kovel, then a professor at Bard College, which argued for a "one state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After briefly resuming distribution, the University of Michigan ended the arrangement for good, citing Pluto's peer review practices as incompatible with university press standards. Van Zwanenberg, by then chairman of Pluto, called that rationale "a facade", stating that the University of Michigan had always known Pluto's peer review process "is not identical to that of a university press." Pluto's distribution in the United States moved to Palgrave Macmillan.

• 5. Authors and Voices

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  The catalogue Pluto has assembled reads like a map of critical and radical thought over six decades. Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, and Edward Said appear alongside figures like Augusto Boal, Vandana Shiva, and Raya Dunayevskaya. The range extends to Ilan Pappé, Susan George, Gabriel Kolko, Hamid Dabashi, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, and Tommy McKearney. Euclid Tsakalotos, who would later serve as Greece's finance minister, published with Pluto. So did Mark "Chopper" Read, the Australian criminal-turned-author whose presence in the list is genuinely unexpected company for theorists and activists. Series launched during the foundational period reflect the ideological architecture of the house: the Workers' Handbooks, the Marxism Series, Ideas in Action, Arguments for Socialism, Liberation Classics, and the Big Red Diaries each named an audience and a stance before a reader opened a single page.

• 6. Pluto Journals

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  Launched in 2009, Pluto Journals extended the house's mission into periodical publishing, with a particular emphasis on open access. As of 2022, the active journals number more than twenty titles. The list includes Arab Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Cuban Studies, the Islamophobia Studies Journal, the Journal of Fair Trade, State Crime Journal, and Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies. Groundings: The Journal of the Walter Rodney Foundation carries the name of the Guyanese historian whose work on working-class politics in the Caribbean became a landmark of postcolonial thought. Decolonial Horizons publishes under a bilingual title, appearing as both Decolonial Horizons and Horizontes Decoloniales, signalling an editorial commitment to non-English-language scholarship. The house's membership in the International Alliance of Independent Publishers places this journals programme within a broader global network of presses that share similar missions, keeping Pluto in conversation with independent publishing well beyond the United Kingdom.