The Two Rivers Press operates from a converted ironmonger's shop on the western edge of Aberystwyth, Wales. Its founder and sole full-time employee, Owen Trefor, has run the press from this address since 2007, when he moved it from his kitchen table in nearby Bow Street.
Two Rivers publishes poetry. It has published one hundred and thirty-eight titles since its founding in 2004, an average of six and a fraction per year. Its list is approximately equally divided between English-language Welsh poets and English-language Irish poets, with occasional excursions into Scottish work.
The press is not famous. It is, by its own founder's reckoning, slightly less famous now than it was a decade ago. "The window for a small poetry press in the British Isles closed quietly between 2014 and 2019," Trefor said. "Nothing dramatic happened. It just closed."
The evidence is in the print runs. Two Rivers's first titles, published between 2004 and 2010, ran in editions of between eight hundred and twelve hundred copies. Those editions typically sold through within four years.
Between 2011 and 2017, the standard print run dropped to six hundred. The sell-through period extended to about six years. Between 2018 and 2025, the standard run is now four hundred, and the sell-through period, where it can be measured, is between seven and ten years.
Trefor does not regard this trajectory as a disaster. He regards it as a fact about the market for new poetry in English in the British Isles. He notes that the same trajectory is visible, in varying degrees, at every comparable press he knows of.
What is more interesting, he said, is what has not changed. The number of submissions Two Rivers receives each year has remained roughly stable at between three hundred and four hundred unsolicited manuscripts. The number of titles the press chooses to publish has also remained stable.
The press's acceptance rate, in other words, has stayed at about one to two per cent of submissions. The decline is in the readership, not in the writers.
This pattern recurs across the small-press poetry sector in ways that few people outside the trade discuss. The number of poets writing publishable English-language poetry in the British Isles has, by every available measure, grown since 2000. The number of readers willing to buy a hardback or paperback book of poetry has, by every available measure, shrunk.
The reasons are not mysterious. Poetry has migrated, partly, onto platforms that do not generate print sales — literary websites, social media accounts, podcast readings, occasional anthology appearances. The contemporary reader of poetry is more likely to read a poem than to buy a book of poems.
This is, Trefor observed, true of him as well. "I read more poetry than I did in 2004," he said. "I buy fewer books of it. I do not think I am unusual."
What sustains Two Rivers, in the absence of a growing trade readership, is a small but stable network of institutional buyers. Welsh and Irish university libraries, a handful of arts council-funded poetry centres, and approximately a hundred and fifty individual subscribers who receive every new title automatically.
The subscriber programme, started in 2011 at Trefor's wife's suggestion, generates approximately twenty-eight per cent of the press's annual revenue. The subscription rate, currently ninety-five pounds per year for four titles, has been raised twice in fourteen years.
The remainder of the press's revenue comes from arts council grants (about twenty per cent), bookshop sales (about thirty-five per cent), and occasional rights licensing for translation editions in continental Europe (about seventeen per cent).
The arts council grant, Trefor noted, is renewed every three years and is never guaranteed. The press has had two close calls in the last decade, including a 2021 funding reduction that required Trefor to take a year without salary.
During that year, he worked part-time as a school librarian in Aberaeron to cover his household expenses. The press continued to publish, on a reduced schedule of four titles rather than six.
The 2025 grant cycle, which runs through 2028, was renewed at the previous level. Trefor said he was relieved but not complacent. "You learn not to plan beyond the current cycle," he said.
The press's editorial method is unchanged from its founding. Trefor reads every submission himself. He responds to every submission within ninety days. He says yes, on average, to fewer than ten manuscripts a year, of which six become published books.
The two manuscripts a year that are accepted but not published are held in what Trefor calls his slow file. They are scheduled for future seasons, sometimes years in advance, when the right list slot or the right co-publication opportunity arises.
This is the editorial luxury of a press that does not need to publish every accepted book within the year of acceptance. It is also, Trefor noted, the editorial discipline of a press that cannot afford to publish more than six titles a year regardless of how many it accepts.
The next Two Rivers list, scheduled for autumn 2026, contains three Welsh poets, two Irish poets, and a posthumous collection by a Scottish poet whose work the press has championed since 2009. The print run, in each case, will be four hundred.
Trefor will read each of the six manuscripts at least three more times before they go to press. By his own estimate, he will spend about forty days on each book between acceptance and publication. The books, between them, will be read by perhaps two thousand four hundred people in the first three years after their publication.
"It is not a large readership," Trefor said. "It is, on the other hand, a real one."
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