Cam Rivers Publishing
Publishing high quality and accessible books across civilizations
W.H. Rivers (1864-1922)
Professor Alan Macfarlane FBA
The co-founder and Chairman
Zilan Wang
The Co-founder and Director
Aims
The aim of the Press is to help authors to publish books which are serious, yet accessible, in all the arts and humanities. It publishes books which lie between strictly academic books with all the academic paraphernalia, and ‘trade’ books of a non-academic kind. It also aims to make western ideas better known in East Asia, and vice versa. It is thus part of an effort to create a bridge of understanding between the civilizations at the opposite ends of Eurasia through sharing ideas and imaginative experiences.
History
Cam Rivers Publishing (originally Cambridge Rivers Press) was set up by Cambridge anthropologists Professor Alan Macfarlane and Zilan Wang in 2015. The company is named after one of the founders of modern fieldwork anthropology and a distinguished doctor, the Cambridge academic, W.H.Rivers, who went on the second Torres Straits anthropological expedition with A.C. Haddon in 1898. It was one of the projects under the umbrella of the Cambridge Rivers Project and the Vanishing Worlds Foundation, the former started in Cambridge in 1983.
Its publishing office is located in King’s Parade, Cambridge. It makes use of new ways of printing and distributing books across the world by platforms such as Amazon. It also collaborates with award-winning printing companies in the UK to produce high-quality books which are available for sale in local bookstores in Cambridge and are utilized for both private collections and library archives.
It also benefits from the unique set of contacts with publishers, media and academic and educational institutions in Asia which Professor Macfarlane and Zilan Wang have developed since 2003.
Connections through the work on cultural exchange between China and Cambridge around the legacy of the famous poet Xu Zhimo, with poetry and arts festivals since 2014, have made it possible to publish a number of the leading poets and other writers in China. Contacts within British academic life have likewise made it possible to publish works by leading western intellectuals.