Preliminary Pages

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A History of the Book in Australian 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market.
Ed. Martin Lyons and John Arnold. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001, 444 pp.
AU$60
ISBN 0702232343 (hbk)
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=9780702232343
Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005. Ed. Craig Munro and Robyn
Sheahan-Bright. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006, 433 pp.
AU$45
ISBN 0702235733 (pbk)
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=9780702235597
Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. St
Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007, 416 pp.
AU$39.95
ISBN 9780702234699 (pbk)
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=9780702234699
These volumes of book and publishing history represent one of the most significant
contributions to cultural history in Australia over the last decade. They are also part of a
remarkable growth in book and publishing history over roughly the same period in a number
of other national contexts. Other large book history projects include the Cambridge History of
the Book in Britain, five out of a planned seven volumes published so far, about how ‘our
knowledge of the past derives from texts’ and the five-volume History of the Book in
Canada/Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada project going since the early 1990s
(http://www.hbic.library.utoronto.ca/home_en.htm). These biblio-genome projects are all run
by dispersed teams of historians, literary scholars, librarians, and information specialists and
aim to define Britain’s and Canada’s places within an international network of book history
studies. Such projects, like the History of the Book in Scotland, established at Edinburgh
University in 1995, are often aligned with on-going bibliographical databases. The Cambridge
book history covers 1,500 years while the Canadian project, like the Australian one, is divided
into the stages of settlement: beginnings to 1840; 1840-1918; and 1918 to 1980.
Coeval with these national projects has been the development of the annual journal Book
History (from 1998) and the thriving international scholarly forum, The Society for the
History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, created in 1991 to provide a global network
for print historians, who up till then had often worked in isolation. SHARP now convenes an
annual international conference and has more than 1,200 members in over 40 countries,
including ‘historians, literary scholars, librarians, sociologists, scholars and professionals
working in publishing studies, classicists, bibliophiles, booksellers, art historians, reading
instructors, and both university-based and independent scholars’. The SHARP website
provides links to more than 80 ‘Book History Projects and Scholarly Societies’
(http://www.sharpweb.org/). It’s no coincidence that this moment should also have produced,
in what is perhaps the nostalgic autumn of the Gutenberg era, a Companion to the History of
the Book (eds Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 2009), Alberto Manguel’s loving celebration
The Library at Night (2008) and histories of bibliocide like Fernando Baez’s A Universal
History of the Destruction of Books: from Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (2008), all universal
in scope.

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Apart from their obvious value as multi-disciplinary studies of the long-term and foundational
centrality of print in Western cultures such collaborative and large-scale projects have had
discernible effects within the academic ecosystem. They turn our attention back to
considerations of exactly what book knowledge was, and in doing so have revived the
circulation to some extremities of the scholarly humanities where the pulse was getting pretty
low, like palaeography, textual editing, library history, bibliography and codicology. In
Australia and New Zealand, for example, we have seen a new-look Bibliographical Society,
with its refurbished journal Script & Print, conferences on important topics like the limits of
the book in the digital age (July, 2009) and the cross-over popularity of exhibitions of
incunabula and pre-modern books like ‘The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated manuscripts
from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand’ at the State Library of Victoria and ‘Script into
Print’ at the University of Tasmania (both 2008). Talented postgraduates are being drawn to
research projects, for example, in Australian library history and the inter-colonial book trade.
In mid-2008 Melbourne was designated a UNESCO City of Literature and as Australia’s own
bibliopolis is to build a Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
The Australian History of the Book project (HOBA) remains incomplete, at least in published
form, with the first of its three volumes, ‘To 1890’, yet to appear, although eagerly
anticipated. This volume will be interesting for how it represents the shift from colonial book
paucity to ‘Australia’s role in the rise of the first, imperially networked mass reading public in
the late Victorian period’. The two HOBA volumes published so far cover large historical
spans: 1891 to 1945, and 1946 to the near present (2005)—from Nat Gould’s first bestseller,
The Double Event, to the Second World War, and the post-war period into the twenty-first
century. (Would 1888, the beginning of Angus & Robertson [A&R] as publisher have been a
more logical point of division in the stages of Australian book history?) In each case, the
format the editors have employed is a multi-authored collection of chapters and
accompanying ‘Case-studies’ organised into larger sections, in volume 2 ‘Publishing and
Printing’, ‘Bookshops and Libraries’, ‘Genres and their Place in the Market’, and ‘Reading’;
and in Paper Empires, ‘The Rise of Publishing’, ‘Book Business’ and ‘Reading Readers’.
The tone for HOBA is set in Martyn Lyons’s introduction to the second volume where he
begins with the story of Clive Bleeck, an employee of the New South Wales Railways who,
over a lifetime of after-dinner typing, wrote 250 ‘novels or novelettes’: westerns, crime
thrillers, romances and ‘space operas’ (xiii). Clive Bleeck, Lyons asserts, ‘is a healthy
antidote to all those who confuse the history of literary production with famous novelists,
literary prize-winners and a commemorative plaque at Sydney’s Circular Quay’ (xiii-xiv).
Lyons is pretty firm about what HOBA isn’t, and it’s not a history of ‘big-ticket authors’ but
the history of print culture. Such history might start out from figures like Bleeck and move
towards the ‘ultimate destination of books—their readers’ (xvi), while literary history, subject
to a nationalist agenda and the identification of the ‘uniquely Australian’, excludes him (xiv).
The story this volume tells is rarely as black-and-white as this mission statement might
suggest but it does set up an opposition between book and literary history, which is worth
considering in terms of how the contemporary literary and cultural studies field is developing.
Notwithstanding book history’s celebration of Bleeck’s productivity, his subjectivity as a
writer, more’s the pity, is equa lly lost in print culture history as in traditional literary history.
Nevertheless, the historical scenario this volume describes is clear: the predominance of the
book imperium run from London—at the ‘end of the Second World War, little more than 15
percent of the books sold in Australia were of Australian origin’ (xviii)—and the various,
resilient attempts to ‘shape a national literary culture’ (xix).

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Richard Nile and David Walker’s chapter, ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the
Australian Book Trade, 1890-1945’ (following Henry Lawson’s characterisation of London’s
publishing headquarters) details the origins of the economic determiners of the book trade in
this period—the Berne International Book Copyright Agreement of 1886 and the British
booksellers’ Net Book Agreement of 1900—that put in place the commercial and economic
framework that would colonise Australian print culture for nearly a century. Other chapters
tell the story of the huge book reading and buying market that Australia represented in this
period and its importance to British publishers and Australian booksellers as a source of
profit. There are plenty of facts and figures: John Arnold, for example, in his chapters about
bookshops and retailing, printing technology and circulating libraries, is able to conjure
relevant and revealing statistics out of the Sands & McDougall Post Office Directories, the
Commonwealth Year Books, and other sources of bookselling history with practised ease.
Deborah Adelaide’s fascinating chapter about writers’ incomes, from 1900, draws on
published sources but also on considerable trawling through archival papers.
Nile and Walker’s chapter is followed by Jennifer Alison’s about Angus & Robertson, from
its beginnings in the 1880s to 1945, drawing on the company’s unpublished records and
papers in the Mitchell Library. Thus, the contending elements of Australian book history are
defined: economic imperialism by the British book trade (enhanced by local censorship
control as Deana Heath demonstrates) and national cultural aspirations. The history of this
icon of Australian publishing is followed by case studies of other ventures in native
publishing: A. W. Jose and the Australian Encyclopaedia, David McKee Wright and the
Bulletin, the Bulletin and the Communist Party as publishers, and so on. One of the most
important historical shifts this volume documents is ‘the gradual replacement of Australian
wholesalers by local branches of British and (later) American publishers’ (Arnold,
‘Bookshops and Retailing’ 127). This is causally related to the founding of the first
Booksellers’ Association in 1924, an important cultural and commercial organisation that will
evolve throughout this period and into the next. The connections between both publishers and
booksellers and the great collectors and bibliographers who will build the foundations of a
national book culture are threaded throughout these studies: Sir John Ferguson was the son-
in-law of A&R’s founder George Robertson; David Scott Mitchell and William Dixson both
had important personal connections to A&R’s bookshop and to Tyrrell’s.
Another important facet of book culture in this period is the growth of public libraries.
Melbourne was the first colonial city to establish a public library, in 1853; presumably this
fact was emphasised in that city’s bid for a UNESCO City of Literature. It wasn’t until 1869
that Sydney followed by opening what would become the State Library of New South Wales
(Hobart 1870; South Australia 1884; Perth 1889; Queensland 1902). The importance of
libraries to their communities is reflected, not just in the public pride of a state institution, but
also in the flourishing—after the decades of establishment and before television—of other
forms of lending libraries including the Mechanics’ Institutes or Schools of Arts libraries,
neighbourhood or local circulating libraries and workplace libraries, like those provided for
employees by the Commonwealth Bank, the NSW Public Works Department, the NSW
Railway Institute, retailers like Anthony Horderns and David Jones, as well as other
companies and commercial organisations (Lyons, ‘The Library in the Workplace’ 176).
One of the revealing links between libraries and the reading practices of people is evident in
the history of the bestseller in Australia. Mechanics’ Institutes libraries, often funded
municipally, were charged with the ‘diffusion of useful and technical knowledge’, but
actually what their borrowers wanted was popular fiction—Nat Gould and Zane Grey, as the

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perfectly accurate scene at the ‘Mullumbimby’ library in Lawrence’s Kangaroo illustrates
(Bremer and Lyons, ‘Mechanics’ Institute Libraries’ 212). This would develop into a problem
for the growth of a readership for serious works of Australian literature, at least in Nettie
Palmer’s view. She noted in her diary in 1927 that despite the fact that Australians are big
buyers of books and voracious readers ‘the truth is that our promiscuous reading public is not
used to the deepest kind of reality in books about the background it knows’ (Nile and Walker,
‘The Mystery of the Missing Bestseller’ 241). The multi-authored format allows this volume
to cover the range of indiscriminate popular reading by the Australian public that Palmer
observed, with case studies of newspapers, journals, women’s magazines, non-fiction, text
books, and children’s literature. In his essay at the beginning of the section on ‘Reading’,
Patrick Buckridge makes the interesting point that it is the ‘permeability of Australia’s
reading culture to overseas influences that makes it possible to plot’ the shifts in reading
‘norms’ (326). Buckridge observes a shift in the Australian reading public, over the 1930s and
40s, away from an idea of ‘serious reading’ with its origins in British book and reading
culture towards an American model, whose pioneering advocate he sees as Walter Murdoch
with his hundreds of ‘democratising’ newspaper columns about what to read and in his
influence on the education system (330-31). Although they are mentioned briefly at various
points, the school reader series and school newspapers in various states are underestimated, I
think, in their influence on the formation of Australian readerships over the 50 years from
1890. Their important role on the operations of both literacy and the educational systems in
various colonies and states, and even including their heritage format in the present, surely
warranted a chapter or case study of its own.
Martin Lyons certainly recognises the important role played by children’s literature in the
‘Australianisation’ of the reading public (351). Lyons’s chapters about reading practices and
about reading models and communities are outstanding examples of research and writing.
They are underpinned by historical research into literary societies, reading circles, home
reading unions, and the autobiographical writing of professional writers but they are also
characterised by a perspicacious sense of the subjectivity of the reader in her historical
circumstances. Hence the emphasis on the working class female reader, the interstitial female
reader, the boringness of ‘self-improvement’ as opposed to the emancipatory value of
autodidacticism (‘Reading Models and Reading Communities’ 382). There is also a notable
subtlety about Lyons’s evocation of reading in this historical period and this is perhaps why
he includes the various paintings of female readers by E. Phillips Fox and Grace Cossington-
Smith’s 1919 painting ‘The Reader’, as emblems of the secret history of Australian reading
and as a counter to the myth of a predominantly outdoors culture.
By the beginning of the third period of the HOBA, 1945, ‘print had lost its monopoly as both
an information and an entertainment medium’ to radio and cinema (Lyons, ‘The Book Trade
and the Australian Reader’ 407). Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright’s volume tells the
story of the growth of Australian publishing, the paperback revolution, the ‘advent of
international publishing conglomerates’ and the invention of the internet (‘Introduction’ xi).
Once again, trade and economic agreements are essential determiners of the history of the
period: the ‘Statement of Terms’ between retailers and British book traders that fixed book
prices in Australia changed as British publishers like ‘Longman, Collins and Harrap began
setting up their own Australian stock-holding warehouses in Australia’ (Munro and Curtain,
‘After the War’ 5). Brigid Magner’s case study ‘Anglo-Australian Relations in the Book
Trade’ details the story of Britain’s protection of what was its largest export market in
Australia, since the late nineteenth century.

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Just as the origins and rise of Angus & Robertson is the big story of Arnold and Lyons’s
volume, the saga of the A&R wars is an important thread in the Paper Empires volume. The
takeover crises begin in the late 1950s, when A&R is the ‘most powerful force in Australian
bookselling and publishing’, with the first incursion into the Old Firm’s boardroom by Walter
Vincent Burns quickly followed by the commercial gorilla, Sir Frank Packer. This fight,
masterminded on the anti-Burns/Packer side by the academic scrapper, Colin Roderick, and
supported by a group of A&R authors including Kenneth Slessor, Ruth Park, and Dame Mary
Gilmore ends in temporary victory against the corporate predators (Munro and Curtain 13-
17). Until Gordon Barton, that is, in the 1970s. Along the way there are case studies of
Cheshires, Frank Eyre and Oxford University Press Australia, Lloyd O’Neil and Lansdowne
Press, Rigby, Sun Books, and of the Ure Smith/They’re a Weird Mob phenomenon. Frank
Thompson sees the runaway success of John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob—first
published in 1957 with 300,000 copies sold in the first three years plus Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 film version—as marking ‘the beginning of the modern era in
Australian book publishing’ (‘Sixties Larrikins’ 33). Thanks to David Carter’s anatomy of the
publishing success of O’Grady’s novel, narrated by the fictional Italian migrant ‘Nino
Culotta’, we can now recognise that this was more than just a local bestseller. It was
obviously a comedy of assimilation that responded to the fact that within a few decades two-
thirds of all Australians would be post-World War II immigrants and helped to shape the
attitudes of Australians to post-war European migration, and it did this on the ground of
vernacular Australian language and manners.
In the early 1970s, both the economic and cultural landscapes shift again. As the publishers’
and booksellers’ commitment to the ‘Terms of Agreement’ dissolves, many energetic, local
publishing ventures arise (UQP, Outback, Currency, Fremantle Arts Centre), the Australian
Independent Publishers Association is formed (1975) and A&R is asset-stripped and reshaped
by Gordon Barton and Richard Walsh. This period, immediately preceding the globalisation
of Australian publishing, has the glow of a golden age about it partly because this volume is
narrated predominantly by players in the Australian publishing industry who are taking a
backward glace at both a moment of cultural energy as well as their own youth: ‘Outback
Press was founded in Melbourne in 1973 with a gusto difficult to imagine today’ (Morry
Schwartz, ‘Inner-urban and Outback’ 63). Robert Sessions’s ‘Thirty Years On’, Louise
Poland’s ‘Allen & Unwin’, Tony Wheeler’s ‘Lonely Planet’, and Diana Gribble’s ‘McPhee
Gribble’ tell similar stories. The frequently anecdotal element in these accounts needs to be
checked against Katherine Bode’s quantitative analysis that indicates, at least in the case of
fiction, that the period between 1960 and 1979 was a ‘time of decline, rather than growth’ in
local publishing (see ‘Beyond the Colonial Present: Quantitative Analysis, “Resourceful
Reading” and Australian Literary Studies’ JASAL Special Issue 2008, 187). Also, the
legendary quality of this era in Australian book history should have acknowledged Michael
Wilding’s percipient understanding of the economics of Australian publishing by someone
who, in the 1980s golden age, was a participant, as writer, critic and publisher (see for
example his numerous articles about Australian publishing, including ‘Small Presses and
Little Magazines in 1970s’, Australian Literary Studies 9.4 [October, 1980]). Whatever, the
big story of this volume is about how the ‘fledgling post-war publishing industry’ [A&R, Ure
Smith, Cheshire, etc.], that was once ‘almost exclusively Australian owned and controlled’
and that had its finest years in the outburst of independent and proudly Australian publishing
in the 1970s and 80s, was assimilated by globalisation (Craig Munro, ‘2001 Publishing
Report Card’ 86).

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This shift is complete by the time of the JIS, or Book Production in Australia: A Joint
Industry Study, of 2001, the ‘most thorough analysis of the book publishing industry ever
undertaken’ (Craig Munro, ‘2001 Publishing Report Card’ 85). And the most tangible sign of
the new world publishing order is the advent of Nielsen BookScan, the computerised sales
monitoring system, in 2002. From here on, the history of the book is imported into the
economic, technological and cultural present of globalised media conglomerates. It sounds
mind-numbing but Simone Murray’s description of the shift from the old paradigm of a
market-differentiated book, as the predominant and discrete material object of publishing and
reading, to a multinationally networked, screen-dominated ‘content streaming’ pinpoints the
moment:
Capitalising on Western governments’ deregulatory economic policies during
the period [the 1990s], a handful of globalised media players emerged with the
structural capacity and managerial will to incubate and promote high-budget
content franchises across all corporate subdivisions. (‘Content Streaming’ 127)
From here on, the fate of the book is inextricably bound to an increasingly digitised and
mediatised mode of production dominated by the giant, northern-hemisphere-based
conglomerates of Bertelsmann, News Corporation, von Holtzbrink, and Pearson. At the time
of writing, there is considerable anxiety within the Australian publishing and writing
community about the likely dismantling of local copyright—the last defence, it seems, of
Australia’s independent and locally controlled book culture. The federal Productivity
Commission has been asked to report by May 2009 on the current provisions of the Copyright
Act 1968 (the ‘Copyright Act’) that restrict the parallel importation of books from the US,
Europe and the UK. Authors, publishers and agents are united in their opposition to the
abolition or minimization of local copyright but it is unclear whether this stance against the
encroachment of globalization will be successful (see ‘Australians for Australian Books’ at
http://www.ausbooks.com.au/category.php?id=7 ).
On the other hand, book-types may not need to feel as belated about Simone Murray’s
scenario as they might. One of the noticeable lacuna in the HOBA project so far is a
recognition of the way in which books in the past weren’t as culturally and economically
discrete as we might assume. Philip Waller’s history of early twentieth-century networks of
books, cinema, stage production, and the economics of copyright and authorship—like
Arnold Bennett’s novel Buried Alive (1908), followed by the play The Great Adventurer
(1913) and then film of the same title (1915) or Baroness Orczy’s novel, play and film The
Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) or Hardy’s sale of the film rights for Far From the Madding Crowd,
for example—is worth recalling before we get too outraged about the depredations of
contemporary ‘content streaming’ (see Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in
Britain 1870-1918, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006: 8-10). In that sense, Australian book history, in
constituting itself in opposition to bad old literary history, might need to be wary of
narrowing itself too much as a branch of cultural history. Chapters on, or case studies of,
Dennis’s Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (poetry, cinema, stage and television versions),
Clarke’s His Natural Life (serial, book, illustrated book, cinema, stage, and television
versions) and the many adaptations, post-1945, of books to other media might be seen within
the kind of precursive history Waller suggests (‘Back to the Future’ is his chapter title).
Another curious blind-spot in the HOBA project so far is any account of historical
bibliography; for example, there are brief mentions, but no sustained histories of ‘national’
bibliographers like Ferguson, Petherick or Morris Miller.

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But there is much of interest in this volume: chapters and case studies on writers’
organisations and centres, the growth of Indigenous publishing, literary festivals and prizes,
the National Book Council, the history of state patronage of writers and government industry
support in the post-war period (Stuart Glover, ‘Literature and the State’), editing, design and
book production including ‘Commissioning’ by Diane Brown, ‘Editing Indigenous Writing’
by Josie Douglas and Robyn Sheahan-Bright, and case studies of individual books like
Drusilla Modjeska’s The Orchard (Kath McLean) and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly
Gang (Paul Eggert). Given the experience and professional positions of the editors, it’s no
surprise that the chapters on the book trade are by significant and knowledgeable figures in
the recent history of Australian bookselling like Michael Zifcak (Collins, National Book
Council) and Terry Herbert (Bookworld). These participant accounts sit alongside more
academic studies like Robyn Sheahan-Bright’s ‘For Children and Young Adults’, Ingrid
Day’s sociological survey of adult reading practices, ‘Romancing the Reader’, and David
Carter and Roger Osborne’s detailed survey and analysis of periodicals in the post-war period.
This chapter usefully reminds the reader about the brief moments of Flexmore Hudson’s
Poetry and Helen Palmer’s Outlook if they want to go hunting for them in libraries, although
they overlook Hemisphere. The comprehensiveness of the volume’s overview of print culture
is underscored by the chapter on the less glamorous topic of ‘Education and Reference
Publishing’, with its string of case studies about curriculum materials, university presses,
dictionaries and style guides, and government publishing.
As with the Lyons and Arnold volume, Paper Empires concludes with a section about readers
and reading; once again, Patrick Buckridge offers the overview. Buckridge notices the way in
which reading has reinvented itself and readers redefined themselves outside higher education
in recent decades but still according to the ideology of ‘good reading’, practices of private
identification, and communal forms of readerly connection like ‘book clubs, reading groups
and writers’ festivals’ (‘Readers and Reading’ 348). The connection between the Chicago-
based Great Books Foundation, the Britannica Great Books of the Western World franchise
and the Women’s Weekly is a 1950s and ’60s version of the blend of useful and improving
knowledge institutionalised in the Arts and Mechanics’ libraries of the ’20s and ’30s (see
Buckridge, ‘The Women’s Weekly and “Good Reading’” 367). In this sense, the history of
reading may be more cyclical, Buckridge argues, than book history with its linear progression
through sequential economic and industry paradigms. Perhaps this model doesn’t take
account of what many would see as fundamental structural changes to reading practice and
reading experience currently presented by screen culture, including digitised books, SMS
messages, and Kindles. Paper Empires also has less emphasis overall on libraries and their
role in book history than does the Lyons and Arnold volume, although it does conclude with
two important case studies of public libraries by Alan Bundy and Catherine Harboe-Ree (on
the National and State libraries systems). All the same, I suspect that scholars of library and
information history would be surprised at the small amount of space given to libraries as
institutions of the book in this volume. A random list of aspects of book history where it
intersects with libraries that aren’t covered in HOBA includes legal deposit, theory and
practice of knowledge organisation, book conservation, digitisation, curatorship, social
memory, the psychopathology of collecting.
Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing is not part of the HOBA project, but it
shares a number of authors, overlapping coverage (feminist and Indigenous publishing, Text)
and methodologies with that project, and has the same publisher, UQP. The emphasis in this
volume, though, falls on the publishing industry since 1990, on the making of books rather
than the book as cultural artefact, cognate with the cultural, entertainment and leisure

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industries: ‘industry dynamics’, ‘the industry and new technologies’ (including ex-D. W.
Thorpe MD, Michael Webster’s first-hand account of the development and introduction of
BookScan UK/BookTrack/Nielsen BookScan), ‘industry sectors and genre publishing’ as its
sections are titled. And like the HOBA volumes, Making Books has kindred relations to
studies of publishing as commerce in other national contexts, like James Raven’s The
Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (2007) that begins, as
it happens, from the historical hub of Paternoster Row.
The editors position their collection as part of the growing interest in cultural history
approaches to print and publishing studies (including HOBA) but that currently lag behind
research and analysis of ‘non-print areas of the media and entertainment industries’ (1), and in
relation to a sense of crisis in Australian publishing, ‘especially in the “culturally valuable”
forms of publishing—poetry, literary fiction and serious non-fiction’ (3). For recent, local
perspectives on the related, global crisis called the death of the book, see Emmy Hemmings,
‘Shares and Share Alike’, and Jenny Lee, ‘The Trouble with Books’ in Overland 190
(Autumn 2008) and David Carter’s review of Sherman Young’s The Book is Dead (Long Live
the Book) (Australian Humanities Review 44, March 2008). The brief of Carter and Galligan’s
contributors was to take more of a critical and evaluative overview of recent and
contemporary publishing in Australia, the effects of new technology and ‘specific industry
sectors and/or publishing genres’ (10) and, like the HOBA project, these contributors are a
mixture of industry participants and experts (Michael Webster, Robin Derricourt, Nick
Walker) and academic researchers and analysts. Anne Galligan usefully addresses the
tensions in the fact of a cultural industry like publishing where complex sets of cultural
values meet the economics of production and distribution, and where paradigms of the
‘knowledge industry’ and the ‘content market’ contend (‘The Culture of the Publishing
House,’ 34, 44).
Curiously, the underestimation of the importance of libraries in relation to the publishing
industry, broadly defined, persists. As Stuart Glover points out in a passing reference in his
chapter, ‘Publishing and the State’, ‘[f]ederal and state government spending on libraries
constitutes the third largest category of cultural spending (after broadcasting and national
parks)’ (92) and that’s not including university library spending. It does raise the question of
the relations between libraries as powerful institutions of the book and print, and publishing,
two cultural sectors with at least one important common object, the book. While the focus of
Carter and Galligan’s collection is on the ‘sustained research and scholarly analysis’ of the
publishing industry in ‘contemporary’ Australia, exhibitions such as the State Library of
Victoria’s The Independent Type: Books and Writing in Victoria (2009) suggest that libraries
may also tell the story of publishing in ways that institutions of social memory do (1).
In her opening chapter, ‘Exploiting the Imprint’, Jenny Lee extends Simone Murray’s
analysis from Paper Empires of the predominance, within the global conglomerate world, of
‘content’ and thus the ways in which books can be ‘parlayed into multi-format media
phenomena’ and ‘strong coteries of fans can be recycled through a vast range of media’ (Lord
of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) (21). The crisis Carter and
Galligan refer to in their introduction is specified in Lee’s identification of the casualties of
this unforgiving market restructure, ‘mid-list authors, particularly those of a literary bent, and
scholarly writers and publishers’ (25). Here Lee makes an important point and one that
resonates back over the history of Australian publishing since its beginnings in the 1880s:

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Yet for the spasms of paranoia to which it is prone, the Australian publishing
industry has risen to the challenge of this increasingly difficult environment.
Paradoxically, the push towards globalisation has been accompanied by a steady
increase in the popularity of locally published works. In 1970, local titles
accounted for barely 10 per cent of Australian book sales; by 1989 their share
had risen to 48.6 per cent, and in 2002-03 it was 64 per cent. […] Book exports
have also increased (27-28)
And this trend has been confirmed since Lee’s data of the mid-2000s. This is a remarkable
aspect of contemporary publishing in Australia: that the globalisation and conglomeratisation
of the book industry, including crucially the 1991 amendments to the Copyright Act, have
actually encouraged growth and provided opportunities for medium to small Australian
publishers. In 2009 the ‘market share of Australian-originated books has increased to the
point where they now hold 60 per cent of the [book] market’ (Mark Davis, ‘Literature, Small
Publishers and the Market in Culture’ Overland 190 [Autumn 2008]: 6). David Carter’s
analysis of this overall picture of Australian publishing from the viewpoint of ‘fiction’—a
broader category than ‘literary fiction’—reveals that, in terms of book sales, in ‘2003-04
fiction represented 18 per cent of non-educational titles and 10 per cent of all Australian
printed books sold […] a small but significant proportion of total books publishing and sales
of Australian titles in Australia’ (234). If one excludes educational publishing sales from
these figures, then the percentage of fiction sold is much higher (36.7). Carter’s chapter also
includes data about sales of ‘Literary novels as a proportion of total novels, 1990-2006’, that
doesn’t conclusively support the sense of a crisis in literary publishing. Bronwyn Lea’s data,
though, points clearly to a halving, by 2006, of traditional poetry volume publishing by
twelve medium-sized and independent publishers since the boom years 1993-1999 (250). But
this is one genre where, as Lea recognises, the uptake of new media outlets for publication has
been enthusiastic and innovative and it probably remains true that ‘Australia enjoys a much
larger readership [of poetry] in proportion to population than in most Western countries’ (see
251).
Making Books positions itself as a cultural history of the present and recent past and as such it
provides an impressive range of industry analysis, cultural diagnostics, and data presentation.
There is even a glossary of publishing terms. It will be of interest and use to all readers and
scholars in the field of cultural studies, and also to members of the writing programs and
communications and publishing teaching-research communities. The collection is also of
special interest to the literary studies community because of its address to the ‘crisis’ in
Australian and culturally valuable publishing. This address includes the empirical analysis of
literary publishing data, as in the Carter and Lea chapters, through to more wide-angle
arguments like Mark Davis’s about the ‘decline of the literary paradigm’ and Richard
Flanagan’s passionate defence of a sustainable national book industry against ‘market
Stalinism’ (147). It is also a significant contribution to the disciplinary evolution of the
humanities in Australia providing, as it does, a socio-economic and methodological context
for knowledge about industry history, cultural policy, literary education and print
technologies.
Part of the interest for anyone in the field of literary studies in Australia, and this goes for the
HOBA volumes as well, is that this expert publishing and book history is no doubt changing
the way we think about literary studies in the present, including literary history. Going back to
Martyn Lyons’s point about book as opposed to literary history: whatever the limitations of
individual instances of literary history in Australia in recent decades, the significant degree of

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theorising about literary history that has been going on within literary studies in its Anglo-
American manifestation for decades now means that hardly anyone is likely to think about
literary history in the way Lyons suggests they do. There are, for example, many important
recent instances of literary history that are responses to innovative and even experimental
thinking about what is possible within the genre (see New Literary History 39.3 [Summer
2008] about literary history and globalisation for example). But there’s no doubt that these
volumes alter the field irreversibly. An effect of book history on literary history is no doubt
discernible in Robert Crawford’s 2007 Penguin history of Scottish literature for example,
which is titled Scotland’s Books. It begins with a perspective on Burns and Scott that is
unthinkable without recent book history. And a number of chapters in the HOBA and Carter-
Galligan collections could easily have appeared in a contemporary literary history—Jennifer
Alison’s chapter on Angus & Robertson, Diane Brown and Susan Hawthorne’s ‘Feminist
Publishing’ and Sonia Mycak’s ‘Multicultural Literature’ for example. As literary studies in
Australia shifts to encompass and learn from these instances of biblio-cultural history our
knowledge of the social and economic filiations of literature expands beyond the
interpretative, the canonical and the private, but recursively, such that how we read literature
and what we understand by it are also changed.
Philip Mead, University of Western Australia