The Minority Press

The Minority Press was a short-lived British publishing house founded in 1930 by Gordon Fraser (1911–1981) while he was an undergraduate student at St John's College, Cambridge.

[1]"In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment.

The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time.

For such capacity does not belong merely to an isolated aesthetic realm: it implies responsiveness to theory as well as to art, to science and philosophy in so far as these may affect the sense of the human situation and of the nature of life.

Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition.

Not only does the modern dissipate himself upon so much more reading of all kinds the task of acquiring discrimination is much more difficult, A reader who grew up with Wordsworth moved among a limited set of signals (so to speak): the variety was not overwhelming.