The TANGENT STORY
Tangent Books was founded by Richard Jones and Steve Faragher who had met while editing various magazines for Future Publishing in Bath. After leaving Future in 2002, they set up their own contract magazine company in Bath and in 2004 decided to dabble in books as a sideline.
They formed a company called Naked Guides Ltd (still the official name of Tangent Books) and published the Naked Guide To Bristol and the Naked Guide To Bath. Jones and Faragher fully intended to produce a series of streetwise, funny and informative guidebooks for every major city in Britain, Europe, and the World. Instead just one more Naked Guide has seen the light of day since 2004 – the Naked Guide To Cider.
In the meantime they published a series of football quote books, a couple of autobiographies, a book about a Lands End to John O’Groats cycle ride and the first of several books by Stanley Donwood. The name Naked Guides was becoming less relevant to the titles being produced. So in 2008 Faragher and Gideon Kibblewhite (author of the Naked Guide to Bath) were dispatched to the pub and told not to return until they had found a new, more relevant trading name.
It took them many hours, but eventually they returned in high spirits.
“We’ve cracked it,” slurred Kibbblewhite.
'“We’ll change the name to Tangent Books,” exclaimed Faragher, “because (cue drum roll) you keep going off on tangents.”
A few years later, Jones returned from Bath to his native Bristol and took over the day-to-day running of Tangent. The return to Bristol reconnected Jones with many of his old friends on the local music scene who he had met when he was music editor for the Bristol Evening Post. Tangent became more focussed on producing Bristol titles, usually celebrating the city’s music, art and political sub-culture.
Tangent is a purposefully radical publisher: both in the content we publish but also in the authors and writers we choose to publish. We publish books whose stories, thoughts, images and writing will not be published elsewhere; whether because of location, economy or content. Radical, witty and irreverent by nature, we hope you find something to enjoy, and make you think a little too.
We adhere to certain values which are best summed up as:
Tangent will not knowingly discriminate against any individual on the basis of their colour, creed, sex, race, religion, gender or gender identity. We don’t work with Tories and will not publish any books about Bristol City FC.
Up The Rovers!
Richard Jones, Publisher