About
New Beacon Books was founded as a publishing house in August 1966 by John La Rose with the active support and assistance of Sarah White.
They were joined by Janice Durham in 1979 and Michael La Rose worked with them for ten years from 1983 to 1993. New Beacon Books is also assisted by a dedicated group of volunteers.
Growing up in a colonial society in the Carribbean made John La Rose acutely aware that colonial policy was based on a deliberate withholding of information from the population. There was also a discontinuity of information from generation to generation, publishing therefore, was a vehicle to give an independent validation to one's own culture, history, politics - a sense of self - and to make a break with discontinuity. It is this conception, which permeates the work of New Beacon.
New Beacon was named after the magazine The Beacon, which emerged in Trinidad in 1931-1932, with contributors such as CLR James, Alfred Mendes and Albert Gomes. This journal had a tremendous cultural impact at that time.
New Beacon went into book selling in 1967 because of the demand for books stimulated by the formation of the Caribbean Artists Movement, also formed in late 1966 in Britain, and the cultural resurgence among black in Britain that came into being with the black consciousness and black activist movements.
New Beacon developed first as specialist booksellers, producing from 1967 the first ever specialist catalogues of Caribbean materials combining works in English, French and Spanish. Later catalogues combine materials from the Caribbean, Black Britain, Africa and African America.
Through the work of New Beacon Books certain other institutions were founded and developed. New Beacon Books has always felt it important to encourage others with similar interests and perspectives to join hands, wherever possible, to bring about progressive change.
