Winter 2017 Launch Party

On 1 January 1913 a new kind of bookshop opened in London. Located in a rundown street off Theobalds Road, it occupied three floors of a Georgian house, and was presided over by an idealist whose private income – largely derived from family-owned asylums – never quite met the shop’s expenses. This was Harold Monro, poet, publisher and editor of The Poetry Review, to whose subscribers he announced his intention of opening a bookshop ‘devoted to the sale of poetry, and of all books, pamphlets and periodicals connected with poetry’. For the next two decades he was to put the Poetry Bookshop at the heart of the London poetry scene. The other figure bestriding literary London at this time was Ezra Pound: in tempera­ment, taste and ambition the two men could not have been more different.