Downfall of the house built on Lawrence and Woolf

Duckworth, publisher of Virginia Woolf, Anthony Powell and D H Lawrence, has become the latest in a long line of independent publishers to go into administration.

The attempt to find a buyer comes after the sale last year of John Murray, the leading family publishing house launched in 1768 and run by seven generations of John Murrays, to Hodder Headline.

Founded in 1898 by Virginia Woolf's half-brother, Gerard, Duckworth has, in recent years, endured a period of turbulence. In 1998, the financier and new chairman, Stephen Hill, laid on a lavish centenary dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, attended by, among others, Twiggy and Iris Murdoch but a year later he sacked the managing director, Robin Baird-Smith, and brought in a Hollywood producer to "exploit the synergies between commercial fiction and Hollywood". It was not a success.

The swing from the genteel world of the independent to the cut-throat world of the mass conglomorate is nothing new but the sale of Duckworth seems to mark its final stages. "This process has been going on now for the best part of 20 years," said Nicholas Clee, editor of The Bookseller. "The general books industry is polarised between the multinational conglomerates and bigger independents. Even for a company like Faber, it's quite hard to compete in general fiction, the kind of books that might win the Booker prize and cost a lot.

"Twenty years ago, a tiny company like Andre Deutsch was publishing people such as John Updike, Norman Mailer and V S Naipaul. It's hard to believe now."

Faber has been comfortably cushioned by its former poetry editor T S Eliot, whose work made an unlikely and extremely lucrative transition to the West End stage in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Cats. Its new chairman, Stephen Page, who took over when Matthew Evans went to the House of Lords, has restructured the company and used profit to boost marketing and sales.

Bloomsbury, founded by Nigel Newton in 1986, can, thanks to Harry Potter and a canny business sense, do whatever it likes. That has included publishing Sophie Dahl's first "novel" and a company trip to a hotel near Versailles.

But, for everybody else, the dream of the publishing company founded from the kitchen table now seems a distant one. Those that do survive usually operate within small, niche markets and often with a degree of subsidy. Bloodaxe Books, the poetry publisher founded by Neil Astley in 1978 and based in Northumberland, has received substantial sums from the regional arts funding body Northern Arts, while the poetry publisher Carcanet, in Manchester, has been subsidised by the Arts Council and by the millionaire Robert Gavron.

Serpent's Tail, which specialises in non-mainstream and gay fiction, was started with private money and is only now, after 15 years, and the publication last year of the bestselling The Sexual Life of Catherine M, going into profit. The economics are extremely challenging.

Visitors to the old Duckworth offices, before it moved to its current Soho premises and sold its Hoxton Square freehold, remember a cosy and idiosyncratic place full of leaning towers of manuscripts and wooden ducks. The days of cosy attics, gentleman's agree-ments, and leisurely lunches have almost gone, replaced by the leaner, more efficient culture of the open-plan office.

Robin Baird-Smith, now happily ensconced at Continuum with many of the authors he published at Duckworth, is saddened by its imminent sale. He said: "I think it could have worked all right if we'd been left to get on with what we do well." He said he hoped that the company would be bought by "some wealthy individual". The deadline for bids is today.