Allison & Busby

In 1965, Clive Allison (15 June 1944–25 July 2011) and Margaret Busby (born 1944) met at a party in Bayswater when both were undergraduates; he was President of the Oxford Poetry Society and she the editor of a literary magazine at London University. Busby later remembered, "[a]s the party ended, we continued talking and walking late into the night, and by the time we parted company had already decided on a course of action that would shape the rest of our lives: we would start a publishing house to produce poetry, not in the expensive elitist hardback volumes in which it traditionally appeared, but as cheap paperbacks that even people like us could afford."

Two years later, in May 1967, Allison & Busby was launched. At the time Busby was the UK's youngest and the first black woman publisher. In 1969, they set up office in a friend's flat in Soho; the first book published after that date was The Spook Who Sat by the Door by the African-American author Sam Greenlee, which was rejected by numerous publishers in both the US and UK. Allison's then-wife Lyn van der Riet also worked for the company in the ensuing years, as did Lavinia Greenlaw, who went on to become a respected poet and novelist.