The St Ives Printing and Publishing Company was established by John and Virginia Carver in 1951 for the express purpose of purchasing one of two local newspapers then published in St Ives, The St Ives Times.

The purchase of the town’s other newspaper, The Western Echo in 1957 led to the merger that created today’s newspaper The St Ives Times & Echo.While publishing the highly esteemed St Ives ‘local’ we have, on and off, always published books and pamphlets. Perhaps the most notable was Hyman Segal’s Familiar Faces of St Ives, a book of his celebrated portraits of local characters which graced the walls of the Sloop Inn, St Ives. An illustrated hardback of poetry, Cornish Pasty, by painter and founder of the St Ives School of Painting, Leonard Fuller and illustrated by Marjorie Mostyn, was also notable in this period.

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From the mid-1980s, under my proprietorship, the book list has steadily expanded. Titles concentrating primarily in the subject areas of art, environment and local history. Subjects inextricably linked in the minds of St Ives people and areas in which the company has considerable expertise. Quietly, almost unnoticed our stable of titles grew. Each book developed a life, market and focus of its own, so it is only now, some twenty years later and with many of our early titles out of print, did we realise that we have a modest but substantial catalogue.