Blackfriars from 1924 to 1934

In a letter to Fr Bede Jarrett, dated 17 July 1925, Basil Blackwell refers to the financial instability of Blackfriars, this journal, which he had published since 1922: ‘The policy of safety, no doubt, is to cease publication at the end of this volume’ — volume VI.On his father’s death, in 1924, Basil Blackwell, then aged thirty five, took over the bookshop in Oxford. At this distance, it looks as if he decided to focus on building up the bookshop, rather than the publishing house he had founded in 1921. Not until the 1950s did his become a significant name in academic publishing, with such books as Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, a classic as it turned out, never out of print. By then, Blackwell’s was the leading academic bookshop in the United Kingdom.According to the letter asking Bernard Delany to resume the editorship, Fr Bede says that Basil Blackwell had come to regard Blackfriars as ‘little more than respectable’, whereas he expected it to be ‘fresh, daring and sane’ when he took on the job of publishing it.