There are very, very few good publishers in this country," says Alessandro Gallenzi, publishing director of Hesperus Press, "lots of printers of books."

In less than two years Gallenzi and his partner, Elisabetta Minervini, both 34, have established Hesperus Press as one of the most distinctive publishing houses we have. They have produced 70 titles, slim, beautifully packaged paperbacks offering carefully selected texts of forgotten classics, the minor works of major writers, and new translations of foreign literature, all briefly introduced by a well-known name and offered with a minimum of fuss and scholarly apparatus.

Gilbert Adair, who has written forewords for them for works by Jules Verne, Theophile Gautier and Nikolai Leskov among others, gives a plain account of what makes them so remarkable. "What I admire about Hesperus," he says, "is that it is the only publisher never once to have published a dud. Everything they have published is good, everything."

A.N. Wilson, another regular introducer for them, says: "They are intellectually serious, charming, thoroughly deserving of any success which has come their way. Why they have come to live in this dump of a country is a mystery to me."

Gallenzi, from the Colli Albani near Rome, and Minervini from Molfetta, further south, met while they were students. Both have worked as translators, Gallenzi translating English and Russian into Italian - his version of Pope's The Rape of the Lock took him five years, he says - and Minervini into Italian from French. Early on, they decided they wanted to set up their own publishing house, one way or another, there or elsewhere.

Gallenzi won a place to do a PhD in literature at Leeds but soon after arriving decided not to take it up. Instead, Minervini came over to join him and they began working in publishing. She joined the marketing department of Continuum; he worked for a book distributor importing English books into the Middle East. They spotted a gap in the market between academic publishing and trade paperbacks and managed to find backers, one being Gallenzi's former employer in Jordan, the other a medical publisher based in Switzerland.

They have used their trade experience cannily to control costs. The books are printed in Dubai and warehoused in Jordan, before being airfreighted over as and when needed, thus avoiding storage charges here. In this way, they can publish relatively small print runs.

For a translation, they estimate they need to sell 2,500 copies to break even. So far 25 or so of their titles have sold more than 4,000. Last year they sold 200,000 books, a good proportion of them in the States, and managed to record a trading profit, without recourse to grants.

These figures look tiny enough compared to the real world of massmarket publishing, or even to the successes scored by those independent publishers lucky enough to hit the jackpot (Profile's Eats, Shoots, & Leaves has now shifted 464,000 copies; Canongate's Booker winner, Life of Pi, some 588,000). But Hesperus is aiming high, not wide. "Our main criterion is literary quality - we don't compromise on that," says Gallenzi firmly.

Their list is already remarkable. Some of the titles are appealing republications of fairly familiar books: Jane Austen's Love and Friendship, Swift's Directions to Servants, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, In the Cage by Henry James, Kafka's Metamorphosis in a new translation, and so forth. But many minor works from major writers will be unfamiliar even to the well-informed. Who knows Thackeray's Rebecca and Rowena, Wilkie Collins's Who Killed Zebedee? Arctic Summer by EM Forster, The Green Dwarf by Charlotte Brontë, Lois the Witch by Mrs Gaskell, The Enchanted Isles by Herman Melville, or The King of Pirates by Daniel Defoe? Specialists perhaps, able to search out original or scholarly editions, but very few general readers.

Hesperus, aided by editorial director Jenny Rayner, have also made some real discoveries. Some previously unpublished sketches by Virginia Woolf appeared in Carlyle's House, for example, while The Tragedy of the Korosko is an astonishingly prescient yarn by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, about a party of naive Anglo-American tourists cruising the Nile in 1895 who are captured by dervishes and offered the choice of conversion to Islam or death.

Then there are many enterprising translations too: of Leopardi, Verga, Svevo, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov, ETA Hoffmann, Kleist, Zola, Hugo, Huysmans. And the foreword contributors range from Doris Lessing and Germaine Greer to Tim Parks and John Updike.

It reveals much about the state of publishing in Britain now that there should be so much scope for the initiative Hesperus has shown. " Penguin and Oxford have left a gap, definitely," Gallenzi observes. "They have reduced the commissioning, they're living on their backlists. The focus has switched for them to making the most of what they have. There are absolutely loads of things going out of print for no reason."

At prices ranging from £5.99 to £7.99, Hesperus books aren't cheap, but then they are handsomely turned out with stiff, flap covers and highquality paper, more reminiscent of European paperbacks than the English ones that yellow and split in a few years. "Sometimes, in this mentality of 'eat as much as you like for £5.99', it may seem a bit expensive, but we are targeting a very refined, sophisticated readership."

Their inspiration comes from such great European houses as Einaudi, Fischer-Verlag and Gallimard. The next step is to create a modern classics list and ultimately they plan to publish new writers too.

"It's a question of creating a community, of authors, of people who love literature," they agree, finishing each other's sentences. "Authors are approaching us and will approach us more and more as we get established." They want to provide a real alternative to the wares pushed by the big corporate publishers and the chain bookshops, now normally dominated by three-for-two offers and deep discounting. "There is an attempt to narrow down more and more the choice of books."

There are other brave and original independents about, such as Short Books, Daedalus and Pushkin Press (with its superb editions of Stefan Zweig). Just last month. another started up, Bitter Lemon Press, offering the best literary crime from abroad. But in Hesperus Press (motto: et remotissima prope, to bring near what is far) we are lucky enough to have been gifted with our own fully European publisher here in London.

What have we done to deserve it? Why did they come? "It's a much better environment here for investing in people and people's ideas," reckons Gallenzi. "In Italy, it's a closed shop. more limited, if you want, more parochial," adds Minervini. "Here we have the world as a stage."