We are not anti-AI at Squire Press.

We use AI extensively in our work. It helps us move faster, test ideas, untangle messy processes, and handle parts of publishing that would otherwise eat enormous amounts of time. Used well, it is a tool, and a powerful one.

But tools are not the same thing as authors.

That distinction matters more now than it used to.

We are entering a period in which more and more writing will be partially or wholly machine-generated. Some of it will be competent. Some of it will be useful. Some of it will even be beautiful in passing. But one thing it will not be is what a book has traditionally been: the trace of a human mind, a human sensibility, and a human life meeting another across time.

That is part of what books are for.

And it is one reason Forgotten Classics matter so much right now.

When we publish a Forgotten Classic, we know something with absolute certainty: the work was written by a human being. Not just nominally, not in some heavily qualified legal or technical sense, but actually. A person sat somewhere in the world, lived a life, suffered, loved, observed, imagined, and made sentences out of that experience. However distant in time they may be, they remain unmistakably human on the page.

In a strange way, the rise of AI has made older books feel newer.

They offer something increasingly rare: not perfection, not trend-consciousness, not synthetic fluency, but human presence. The oddity of a mind. The pressure of a real era. The texture of a sentence no optimization process would have chosen. The idiosyncrasies are part of the point. So is the sense that another person, irreducibly themselves, made this.

That is especially true of forgotten books.

The canon has its place. But the forgotten book often carries a different charge. It has not been endlessly filtered through institutions, fashion, or overexposure. It comes to us with more strangeness intact. It can still surprise. It can still feel discovered rather than assigned. And because it has survived neglect, obscurity, or historical bad luck, its reappearance can feel less like consumption and more like recovery.

That is the work we care about.

Squire Press exists to recover neglected works worth reading, and to present them with care. That care is also human. Restoration is not mechanical. It involves judgment, taste, context, and restraint. It means comparing sources, correcting errors, making design decisions, writing supporting material, and deciding what should be preserved versus what should be clarified. Even when we use modern tools, including AI, the work remains guided by human editorial standards and human responsibility.

That is the promise.

Not that every stage of the process is untouched by modern technology. That would be false, and honestly a little silly. Publishing has always used the best tools available. The promise is something more important: that the books themselves come from human beings, and that our job is to honour that humanity rather than flatten it.

In other words: written by human beings, restored by human beings, for human beings.

That may sound obvious. It is no longer obvious.

The more synthetic language fills the world, the more valuable genuine human writing becomes. The more abundance turns into noise, the more worthwhile it is to recover books that still bear the marks of an actual soul behind them. Forgotten Classics are not an escape from the present. They are one way of meeting it honestly. They remind us what literature is, and what it is for.

That is why we publish them.

Not because the past was perfect. Not because technology is evil. Not because every old book is good.

But because some books deserve to live again, and because in an age of artificial language, the old human voice matters more than ever.