Founded in 1885 by a group of freethinkers who were unhappy with the increasingly political and decreasingly intellectual tenor of the British secularist movement,[1] the Rationalist Press Association was established to publish literature that was too anti-religious to be handled by mainstream publishers and booksellers.

[1] In 1890 Watts formed the Propagandist Press Committee, with George Jacob Holyoake as President, in order to circumvent the problem caused by booksellers who refused to handle secularist books.

[1] The Association became quite successful after 1902, when it started selling reprints of serious scientific works by authors such as Julian Huxley, Ernst Haeckel and Matthew Arnold.

The Association's continued success in selling books of a heretical nature, mostly by agnostic or atheist authors, contributed to a growing rationalist zeal and a growing demand for this type of literature.

Yet its success also contributed to its demise: rationalist literature became so popular that the Association's readership was taken by larger, more established mainstream publishers.