The Orage Press

Like many small presses, the Orage Press began in an almost accidental way.

It's origins lie in a suggestion, made half jokingly in a pub, over a pint or two

of beer, to start a new art magazine.

 

We do not really remember who came up with this somewhat foolhardy suggestion, but it was made after one of the monthly meetings of the New Leeds Arts Club. The New Leeds Arts Club was a short lived, but vehemently radical, cultural group, founded in 1992, whose members would meet in a pub called The Victoria, located behind the Town Hall in the northern English city of Leeds. There they would hear talks on art, literature and society, and engage in sometimes heated discussions on the latest art exhibitions and books.

 

A sense of the passion that was generated by the New Leeds Arts Club can be gauged by the claim some people make that it was the location for the last time the old Vorticist method of dealing with criticism was used by an artist in England to settle a dispute. Following a suggestion he was 'just a follower of fashion', one artist stood up, crossed the bar and punched his critic on the nose, sending him flying onto the floor. But in quieter moments the members of the New Leeds Arts Club would also sit relatively quietly to listen to music and poetry.

 

Perhaps all that is why the title The Tempest seemed so appropriate. Remarkably it lasted three issues, despite having no money to work with, and seeming to stoke even more heated debate (or arguments) amongst the editorial board than the New Leeds Arts Club had managed. In the end we ran out of money, and so The Tempest closed, and soon afterwards so did the New Leeds Arts Club, But, if we are honest, by then we had grown tired of the squabbling, even if it had all been wonderful when at its best.

 

But that was not the end of the story. After the collapse of The Tempest several new northern arts journals started to appear, some of which we claim were the offspring of the The Tempest. Most notable were the far glossier title Versus (now also defunct) and the sternly academic Parallax (still going strong, but oblivious to its New Leeds Arts Club origins).

 

Also born from the wreckage of The Tempest was a vaguer idea to start an occasional press, similar in ethos to the New Leeds Arts Club and The Tempest, but without quite so much friction amongst the publishers. That is where the Orage Press comes in.

 

Orage is, of course, the French word for tempest, and so we pay oblique homage to our origins. But we should acknowledge that the Orage Press is also partly named after the founder of the original Leeds Arts Club, Alfred Orage.

 

Existing from 1903 to 1923, the original Leeds Arts Club was a much older and longer-lived organisation than our New Leeds Arts Club (1992-1996), but it was the inspiration for all that we did.

 

So everything comes around full circle, and in retrospect it must seem far more neat and tidy, and almost calculated, than it ever appeared at the time. But history is sometimes like that. Coincidental, but neatly coincidental.