Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005
Edited by Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright
University of Queensland Press
For a fascinating occupation, book publishing has generated some very dull books. Histories of publishing companies plod glumly through details of turnover, staff appointments, successes and books that got away, then there are the booksellers’ or publishers’ memoirs that refight old battles about difficult authors, contracts or distribution problems. Completely missing in most of these are the rich characters, the eccentrics, the impossible or wonderful authors, the great or fatheaded decisions, the jokes, the moments of glory, the gems of ad hoc brilliance that make up so much of the story.
They also fail to point out that most people who work in the book industry find it, despite moderate remuneration and often ridiculous hours, richly satisfying.
But now we have Paper Empires, the third and final volume of a collaborative history of print culture in Australia. The first two parts dealt with publishing, bookselling and reading from 1788 to 1890, and then from 1891 to 1945; in this volume 66 contributors take the story from the end of World War II to the present day. Crammed into the book’s 430-odd pages are dozens of subjects, including the fortunes of significant publishing companies, the nurturing (or otherwise) of writers, the process of making books (including editing and design), the retail book trade and technological challenges to the book.
With so much information in a relatively small space, there is an element of “Pay attention, class!” to some of this, largely softened by the book’s most striking feature: a series of short chapters or essays, described as case studies, focusing on particular aspects within general discussion. These include brief biographies of key players, analysis of Aboriginal publishing and editing, the role of writers’ centres, libraries and much else, and they greatly increase the book’s vitality. True, they also make the book feel rather bitsy – this is a book to delve into rather than read straight through — but it is hard to see how else such an overview could have been organised.
At the beginning of the period, local publishing was largely confined to textbooks (anybody else remember the horrible Betty and Jim primary school maths books of the late 1950s?). There was also the behemoth of Angus&Robertson, which was not only a publisher but a bookseller and printer. A&R’s sclerotic publishing and business practices came under challenge during the ’60s by a generation of younger publishers, some larrikins, all eager to make their mark.
There is a fascinating chapter by David Carter about the influence of They’re a Weird Mob, published in 1957. This small book describing the absurdities of Australian life allegedly through the eyes of Italian migrant Nino Culotta (in fact a pharmacist named John O’Grady) had sold 940,000 copies by 1981 and stayed in print until 1999. Weird Mob was the first of many books chortling at the peculiarities of the Australian way of life, though while Let’s Stalk Strine described the way Australians really spoke, the national broadcaster insisted on choosing announcers whose vowels maintained a BBC-like purity.
In the ’70s, local publishing really took off: the nationalistic mood culminating in the election of the Whitlam government encouraged a sense of possibility and released much creative energy. Offset printing was replacing letterpress, so books became cheaper and quicker to produce. Small independent publishers could start up much more easily, and they did “with a gusto difficult to imagine today”, according to Morrie Schwartz, founder of Outback Press. Outback, like Lonely Planet, McPhee Gribble, Currency Press and others, found and published books on feminism, politics, theatre, fiction and history for a young, thoughtful readership who wanted to read about their society, their experiences. And the British publishers who had taken advantage of the lucrative Australian market began building local lists, too.
During the ’70s and ’80s classics came from small publishers: A Fortunate Life and My Place from Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Helen Garner’s first fiction from McPhee Gribble, Mother I’m Rooted, the first significant Australian anthology of women’s poetry, edited by Kate Jennings and published by Outback Press, the playtexts of David Williamson, Jack Hibberd and others from Currency Press.
All these companies flourished for a while; some grew, some declined, smashed between the Scylla and Charybdis of Australia’s small, scattered population and the high cost of book distribution. Technology has made producing books easier and cheaper, but getting them to an audience is just as difficult and expensive.
These days successful publishing is largely in the hands of conglomerates and multinationals. The paperback is king; Australian-produced educational material has all but replaced imports. But, as ever, being a book publisher is no way to get rich: in 2001 the 20 largest publishers in the country generated no less than 76 per cent of the industry’s total turnover and they had extremely small profit margins. “We are all more business-like these days because we have to be,” writes Robert Sessions, publishing director of Penguin. But it’s cheering that Lonely Planet and Allen & Unwin, two locally owned companies, are among the big players.
Paper Empires tells an exhilarating story, though unfortunately the lunatic energy of the book business fails to emerge in much of the writing. Some omissions are glaring: there is very little about scholarly and reference publishing, for instance. However, it highlights areas that are often overlooked: the discussions of indigenous publishing are particularly interesting. But I would have liked to see more evaluation of the subject, perhaps even a final summing-up of the place of books in Australian culture.
So much narrative does give the book a scattered feel; the Frank Moorhouse cover quote that this “tells the intriguing story of Australia’s exploration of itself through books” is not entirely accurate. But still, as part of the first and most comprehensive general history of books we have had, Paper Empires deserves to be applauded and celebrated.
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Australian’s Review of Books, 6 September 2006
