Status Open Weds-Sat 1:30-6pm Founded 1966 | Country of origin UK | |
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Founders John La Rose (1927–2006), Sarah White Headquarters location 76 Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park, London Nonfiction topics Black culture; Black British, Caribbean, African, African-American and Asian literature Official website New Beacon Books – 2014 Internet Archive Image of Official Website (now closed) | ||
Black author only store new beacon books faces the free market
New Beacon Books was a British publishing house, bookshop, and international book service that specialized in Black British, Caribbean, African, African-American and Asian literature. Founded in 1966 by John La Rose and Sarah White, it was the first Caribbean publishing house in England. New Beacon Books was widely recognized as having played an important role in the Caribbean Artists Movement, and in Black British culture more generally. The associated George Padmore Institute (GPI) is located in the same building where the bookshop resided at 76 Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park, London.
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History
New Beacon Books started out as a publishing house that was run out of the Hornsey, North London, flat of John La Rose and Sarah White. It was named after the Trinidadian journal The Beacon, which was published between 1931 and 1932. In 1967, La Rose and White moved New Beacon Books to new premises, in Finsbury Park, where the company also began to function as a specialist bookstore. Early publications included Foundations by John La Rose (1966), Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays by Wilson Harris (1967), and a new edition of John Jacob Thomas's 1889 study, Froudacity (1969).
Other notable works published by New Beacon Books include: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in the Anglophone Caribbean (1984); Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) and Myal (1988) by Erna Brodber; Martin Carter, Poems of Succession (1977); Lorna Goodison, I am Becoming my Mother (1986); Mervyn Morris, The Pond (1973) and Shadowboxing (1979); and Andrew Salkey, A Quality of Violence (1978).
The 50th anniversary of New Beacon was celebrated with a series of events held during the latter part of 2016, including an International Poetry Night on 3 December internationally acclaimed poet and GPI Trustee Linton Kwesi Johnson at the British Library, where it was announced by director Sarah White that the bookshop would be closing as a retail outlet. As she had explained at the start of the celebrations: "In 2017 New Beacon will be undertaking a reorganisation so its traditions and vision can continue into the future though not necessarily within the same structures."