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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20 (2013)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20

(2013)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Roger Osborne
Taking turns in Australasia
Histories of the book in Australia and New Zealand

With the rise of book history elsewhere, the last two decades in Australia and New Zealand has seen a sharp increase in studies of books and other printed forms as significant mediums of cultural transmission. This is reflected most clearly in a series of book-length studies that established the foundations of the field in Australia and New Zealand, directing attention to the work that needs to be done in order to develop a better understanding of print culture, more broadly. So far, the bulk of this understanding has been built on analyses of extant archival evidence which focus on the construction of histories bounded by national and, perhaps, nationalistic discourses. Such discourses have attracted criticism in recent years from advocates of trans-national histories that position Australian and New Zealand cultural production in a global frame. This has occurred in step with the development of national bibliographical databases and other digitisation initiatives, energising the study of book history in Australia and New Zealand with a computational turn that promises to challenge and extend the field by presenting large-scale alternatives to the micro-studies that have dominated the field to date. To suggest how this might influence the way book history is done in Australia and New Zealand in the next decade, this essay reflects on the major volumes devoted to the history of the book in Australia and New Zealand, it summarises a selection of essays that respond to the national and empirical foundations of the field, and it considers the methodological and theoretical challenges posed by new studies that draw on trans-national themes and computational methods.

As a discipline, the history of the book in Australia and New Zealand has been served by a series of publications that began in the 1990s and continue to this day. The first broad summary came from New Zealand in 1997 with the volume, Book and print in New Zealand. A guide to print culture in Aotearoa,1 an ‘extended bibliographical essay’ that ‘sketched an outline of local book trades, reading habits, institutional practices, and cognate activities in New Zealand, at the same time as it gave an overview of existing

research and gestured towards important gaps.’2 Studies such as these are currently being reassessed with plans for an updated multi-volume history of the book in New Zealand at the Centre for the Book at the University of Otago. Australia soon followed with several volumes in its national series. The first volume, A history of the book in Australia, 1891-1945. A national culture in a colonised market, appeared in 2000, and the second, Paper empires. A history of the book in Australia: 1946-2005, was published in 2006. Making books. Contemporary Australian publishing, complements these volumes by concentrating on the years since 1990.3 This first wave of research activity and publishing established the field of book history in the region, and directed attention to untouched archival records that contribute significantly to our understanding of Australian and New Zealand culture.



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Figure 1. Book and Print in New Zealand, 1997




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Figure 2. A history of the book in Australia, 1891-1945, 2000


These publications were made possible by a strong network of researchers who have gathered regularly at conferences devoted to the history of the book since 1994. Taking over from earlier seminars held in conjunction with events such as the annual Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand conference, the first History of the Book in Australia conference was held at the State Library of New South Wales in August 1996. This continued annually until 1999, providing a venue for researchers to present early versions of work that would eventually appear in the published volumes mentioned above.4

The ‘Australia’ in the title of these conferences was always flexible. The proximity of New Zealand and the close connections between the print cultures of both countries provided opportunities for New Zealand researchers to test out the histories they were writing at the time. The Books and Empire conference hosted by the University of Sydney in 2003 was followed by similarly themed conferences at Wellington (2005), Kolkata (2006), and Cape Town (2007). These were organised as regional conferences under the auspices of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (sharp), a practice that most recently saw a conference devoted to ‘The Long Twentieth Century’ hosted in Brisbane in April 2012. Presenters at these foundational conferences

have come from diverse backgrounds, providing a variety of perspectives on book history and the main fields of authorship, reading and publishing. Academics from English, media studies, cultural studies, economics and history departments have regularly mixed with professional librarians, archivists, booksellers, publisher's editors, and others from the publishing industry.

The following pages provide a brief survey of the major themes that have emerged from these foundational studies. This will demonstrate where the first wave of book history in Australia and New Zealand is currently positioned, and support my suggestions for the new directions that should follow in the near future.

Authorship

Government intervention in the form of grants and subsidies has relieved the lives of some authors, but the fact remains that, like most places in the world, making a living from writing in Australia and New Zealand has never been easy. Because of the limited opportunities for Australian and New Zealand authors to see their work published in book form, many have looked to overseas publication first, or they have published their work in local magazines and newspapers. But none of these methods guaranteed an enduring success in a fickle marketplace, and for many years the royalty rates for colonial authors published in Britain was half the going rate for English writers at home. Our understanding of the conditions of authorship has been largely based on evidence from the papers of prominent authors and their associated publishers, but this has been tempered by recent studies of popular authors from outside the canon. Significant numbers of authors travelled overseas to further their writing careers, creating large expatriate communities, particularly in London.5

Since the first half of the twentieth century there have been many attempts to establish organisations that represent the rights of authors on a regional and national scale, but the last fifty years has seen an increased professionalism in the business of writing with the formation of groups such as the Australian Society of Authors (1963) and the New Zealand Writer's Guild (1975). Even still, the average annual income of Australian writers continues to hover around $12,000, and the vast majority of writers rely on income from other sources such as teaching in order to continue writing. As recent research has shown, the idea of Australian and New Zealand authorship necessarily extends beyond national boundaries to intersect most strikingly with the print culture of Great Britain and the United States of America. Indeed, writers such as Tim Winton have openly declared the importance to their livelihood of these separate markets.6 The cultural and professional intersections that Australian and New Zealand authorship

has had with other national book histories complicates the idea of what an Australian or a New Zealand book is.

Publishing

The history of publishing in Australia and New Zealand is dominated by themes that foreground the tension between the influence of imperial connections and concerted attempts to shape a national literary culture within and against those connections.7 Australia and New Zealand have been Britain's largest export market for books and other cultural material and this has had a significant effect on the local industry at every level. Local publishers are often deservedly regarded as saviours of a national literature that is either unacceptable to dominant, imperial competitors, or is under threat of dilution through publication and delivery to a more general overseas market. Publishers who have prevailed under such conditions are described in case studies in many of the publications listed above.8

 

These case studies range from short sketches based on limited external evidence to larger case studies such as one on Angus and Robertson that has since supported a book-length study.9 In New Zealand, long-lived publishers such as Whitcombe and Tombs and Reed, both established in the nineteenth century, have had book-length studies devoted to them.10 Editors and other prominent figures in publishing are given short biographical notices, and, in the most recent volume of Australian book history, Paper empires, short memoirs from such figures are included, building up an encyclopedic network of reference points for future study.11 As we come to know more about the place of Australian and New Zealand culture in multi-national networks of publication and distribution, it will be important to reflect on the ways in which we have recorded the history of Australian authorship and publishing. Despite attempts to limit the movement of books into Australia with tariffs and other restrictions, Australia and New Zealand have always been subject to much more than a national culture.

Readers and reading

The position of Australia and New Zealand as consumers of culture beyond their own national products is clearly seen in the studies of reading that have been conducted

since the 1990s. The pioneering studies of Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa have made way for more nuanced studies of reading groups and the analysis of library holdings.12 Our understanding of Australian and New Zealand readers and their reading practices has often been inferred from the records of libraries and bookshops, but direct attention to readers has been limited. Martyn Lyons' interviews have partially filled that gap by adding the memories and opinions of elderly Australians about family reading and borrowing habits. This has been supplemented by many other analyses of individual libraries or examinations of literary societies and organised reading communities. Initiatives to gather data on a large scale have been conducted by several scholars. The Australian Common Reader database gathers borrowing records of a number of schools of arts and mechanic's institutes, supporting at least one article that attempts to look at this from a distance.13 Australia and New Zealand are also working towards their own versions of the Reading Experience Database,14 an initiative that will gather more first hand knowledge of direct reading experiences.

Bookshops and libraries

With great distances between towns and cities, the efficient distribution of books in Australia and New Zealand has required highly organised institutional and personal networks. Study of bookshops and libraries has been limited by a dearth of archives, but the fragments that survive in collections across Australia and New Zealand provide a good idea of the reading material that was available in small towns and in cities.15 For many Australians, the local school of arts or mechanic's institute library was the primary source of reading material. While the improvement of the local population was at the centre of a library committee's motivations, surviving records clearly show that library patrons demanded popular fiction. Other institutions such as the many Workers Educational Associations or the New South Wales Railway Institute mixed a strong collection of material aimed at improving members, but even in this context British and American popular fiction was a steady diet. Personal libraries have also attracted attention, providing further insight into the reading habits of individual families and small communities.16

The histories and archives of bookshops provide contexts into which different types of readers and reading can be placed. An understanding of bookshops and booksellers in

the region is greatly assisted by publications such as the Booksellers stationers and fancy goods journal of Australia and New Zealand, Australasian bookseller and publisher, and All about books.17 With advice about how to display books and what sort of books to stock for particular readers, these publications are an understudied resource.18 Histories of radical bookshops have demonstrated the types of reading material available to members of radical sub-cultures. More salubrious institutions like Dymock's Bookshop in Sydney and E.W. Coles in Melbourne provided a space to meet socially just as much to purchase or borrow books.19 The examination of the history and partial archives of such bookshops provide a useful portrait, but evidence of sales and effectiveness often have to be taken with a grain of salt. Since 2002, however, students of bookselling in Australia have been assisted by data provided by Bookscan, a more reliable counter of book movements, but not open to everybody for analysis.20

Perspectives on book history in Australia and New Zealand

The histories briefly described above have completed the first wave of book history research in Australia and New Zealand. This research has been influenced by extant material evidence that ultimately reflects the collection policies of local, regional and national archives. Now that the groundwork has been laid and the first maps of the field are available for scrutiny and critique, the absences, inaccuracies, and lop-sided concentrations have become evident. Recent years have seen an increase in stocktaking activities and reassessments of the role book history plays in contributions to our knowledge of national cultures. The following pages take account of several positions in this period of reassessment in order to best account for the many ‘turns’ that are currently affecting the field of book history and print culture in Australia and New Zealand.

David Carter, professor of Australian literature and cultural history at the University of Queensland, sounded one of the first significant reassessments, influenced by the ongoing transition from theory-driven analyses, and the rise of a so-called new empiricism with its exploration of digital methods of enquiry.21 For Carter, this shift encourages researchers to look beyond histories based on monolithic works of literature and towards the institutions that make the production and consumption of

cultural objects possible. Accepting a broader view forces researchers to reconsider the object of study, and Carter asks, ‘Is the object of our research still literature or is it books, publishing or print culture. Is what we're doing still literary history or is it book history, the history of reading, or something else again - the history of cultures or subjectivities?’22 For Carter, the most productive way to proceed in a field that exists at the ‘intersections of literary studies, critical theory and more empirically inflected kinds of book or print culture studies’ is with a method that ‘can best be described as agnostic towards literature.’23 This enables the prolific author of pulp fiction to be compared with the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful author, each contributing to the positioning of forms and genres within a cultural field that tends to situate popular works at an opposite pole to literary works. Because of Australia's participation in transnational culture, Carter argues for ‘a history that's played across three intersecting scales - the history of Australian literature, the history of literature in Australia, and the history of book or print in (or “through”) Australian society.’24 Such a project necessarily looks beyond ideas of nation, requiring researchers in disciplines such as literary studies and cultural history to perform much more of the ‘boundary work’ advocated by Robert Dixon.25

The shift towards networks, institutions and structures has been counterbalanced by views that maintain an interest in the micro-study because of fears that important aesthetic questions will be displaced or silenced by broader cultural questions. In arguing for reengagement with the concept of the literary ‘work’, Paul Eggert, Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow, suggests that creating a dichotomy of overarching book-historical explanations and particularist case study ‘leaves the literary exactly where it was: that is, unattended to.’26 In contrast to Carter's direction of energy towards contributions to cultural history, Eggert argues for the necessity to ‘configure a conjunction of bibliography and book history in the study of literature.’27 Using Henry Lawson's short story collection While the Billy Boils as a case-study, Eggert demonstrates that the ‘textual versions, bibliographical formats, and biographical and book-historical positionings’ of Lawson's collection of short stories ‘can be seen to have acted as a gauge of successive formations of Australian culture from the 1890s until the 1970s, sometimes indeed as a lightning rod of disputation.’28 The results of such an approach show the benefits of a close examination of a single work over time, particularly canonical works that continue to find a place in the culture of different periods. Far from being ‘agnostic towards literature’, this approach positions the frame of enquiry directly on the material of literary works and those people who bring the work to life through

reading. Quoting D.F. McKenzie, Eggert reminds us that ‘no book was ever bound by its covers. The book, in all its forms, enters history only as evidence of human behavior, and it remains active only in the service of human needs’.29

The ‘shifting frames’ of enquiry advocated by Carter are also supported by Katherine Bode in the first book-length study of Australia's literary history and book history using quantitative methods.30 Bode, Head of the Digital Humanities Hub at the Australian National University, agrees with those who argue that no amount of individual case studies will completely fill the field of enquiry with absolute statements of truth, but she also questions claims of complete knowledge produced by the ‘distant reading’ of large sets of data. In her study of publishing trends in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her critiques of feminist arguments about the status of female authorship, and her revisions of literary history by expanding the field of enquiry to include works of popular fiction, Bode draws on the growing bibliographical dataset that is being compiled in the long-running AustLit project.31 Bode's is not the only study that has used AustLit data to support distant reading of Australian literary history,32 but it is the first to adequately theorise the place of such methods in contemporary scholarship.

Bode exercises caution in making statements about literary history extracted from the statistical analysis of AustLit data, pointing to the inevitable gaps in such large-scale projects and the subsequent partiality of the visualisations that such methods provide. Nevertheless, she follows Jonathan Zwicker's argument that quantitative methods ‘make accessible - through patterns and series - solutions to problems that are virtually inaccessible through the methods of traditional literary history.’33 The results of quantitative analysis are indications rather than proof of literary historical trends and so scholars are encouraged to follow Willard McCarty's advice to pursue research programs that facilitate ‘modelling’ rather than to pursue the unachievable end of an absolute ‘model.’ For Bode, modeling is explicitly contingent and speculative, but, she argues, so are traditional methods that are limited by the fragmentation and subjectivity of the archival record.34 The material archive is not rendered obsolete by digital methods, rather, it enhances its value by directing attention to those elements that have relevance from a quantitative point of view. In many cases, these elements will produce new knowledge rather than a critique of the old, providing new ways to answer old questions and fresh directions for future studies of Australian literary and book history.

The use of book history in the service of cultural history or literary history as encouraged by those mentioned above introduces facets of book history that are further nuanced by the so-called trans-national turn in book history. The first wave of founda-

tional studies laid the groundwork for a reassessment of the national in the context of international or transnational studies. Acknowledging that the first wave of ‘national’ book history is partly influenced by the collection policies of the archives available to researchers and the funding incentives from governments that encourage detailed examinations of distinct national traits, Sydney Shep argues that the histories that have come out of such debates are frequently seen as closed ‘monumental’ products rather than ongoing modes of enquiry that open up debate. But, without a reassessment of the ‘imagined communities’ that have informed the construction of the ideas of nation and nationhood in recent book history, new knowledge will be stymied. To emphasise this point, Shep quotes Shef Rogers, who argues:

[W]e as print culture historians in commonwealth countries have an ethical obligation to avoid or at the very least question nationalistic structures for our discipline, and should actively pursue models that seek more to create international connections than to construct an apparent national history as a means of affirming a country's cultural independence.35

If we are to embrace the nationalistic histories of the book that have emerged in the first wave of research activity and acknowledge the transnational nature of books, book historians of the near future will have to closely consider the ‘high mobility, ethnic diversity, and fragmented skill sets’ of settler societies like Australia and New Zealand.36

What follows is a discussion that aims to demonstrate the reach of transnational book history, using G.B. Lancaster's Pageant as an example. This will reveal the transnational networks at play in the life and career of a migratory writer who relied on the transmission of literary property to earn a living from her work. The microhistory can be complemented by a much broader macrohistory that draws on data that is becoming more accessible and more manipulable in the computational turn of humanities research. Combined, these two case studies suggest future directions and possibilities for book history in Australia and New Zealand, histories that examine much broader inter-cultural relations, transfers and exchanges in projects that will need to embrace collaboration and group authorship.

Case study 1: G.B. Lancaster's Pageant and the limits of trans-national publication

G.B. Lancaster is the pseudonym of Edith Lyttleton (1873-1945), the Australian-born, New Zealand-raised international traveller and prolific author of magazine stories and novels. In October 1934, at a meeting of the Australian Literature Society, Lancaster's best-selling novel, Pageant (1933), was awarded the Society's Gold Medal for best Australian novel of the previous year. The novel had achieved outstanding success in Great Britain and the United States of America, enjoying selection by both the English Book Society and the American Literary Guild as their book of the month. Indeed, the first edition of this Australian novel was American.

Selection by book clubs guaranteed significant sales and prompted a wide exposure that influenced sales in bookshops, pushing the American Century edition to fifteen thousand copies and the English Allen and Unwin edition towards bestseller status. An Australian edition, published by the Bulletin-backed Endeavour Press, sold six thousand copies. But the resounding critical and commercial success of the novel concealed strong divisions in the negotiations between the author and three publishers, divisions exacerbated firstly by the trade restrictions of international copyright laws and the Traditional Markets Agreement, and secondly by the income tax reporting requirements of four countries. The American, English, and Australian editions of Pageant were produced for three separate book markets and reading cultures, but they are inexorably linked by the networks of a trans-national book trade, and the contractual agreements made between the author and her publishers.

Any study of G.B. Lancaster's fiction is indebted to the pioneering work of Terry Sturm whose account of the author's career provides a unique insight into the life of a professional author in the first half of the twentieth century.37 Sturm has traced Lyttleton's career from her success in the British and American magazine market through her accomplishments as a writer of fast-paced popular novels set in the colonial areas of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. At the height of her success in the early 1920s, Lyttleton earned as much as £50 for an eight thousand word short story, more than she could expect to receive for a novel that sold anything less than 12,000 copies. Her fiction was much in demand by the editors of England's main magazines and she often had trouble meeting this demand. For English magazines, Lyttleton set her stories in Fiji, Hawai, New Guinea and elsewhere.

But her success was rocked by the death of her mother and sister in quick succession in the mid 1920s, and her production of stories dried up during the late 1920s. But the hiatus from professional writing allowed her to revisit her family roots and reassess the type of fiction she wanted to write. Out of this period emerged plans for Pageant and thoughts for similar treatment of the New Zealand and Canadian past. But, starting again as an author in an uncertain and competitive market meant being subjected to the legal and institutional restrictions of the international book trade. As a publishing gamble, a book by a forgotten author set in Australia attracted long odds, and so the

Century Company looked for the most satisfactory agreement for their bottom line. As the first publisher, world rights gave them more power in the negotiations in which the Traditional Markets Agreement (tma)38 was a factor.

Existing as an agreement between gentlemen publishers, and formalised in 1947, the tma created two distinct markets: one for British publishers that included the major countries and cities of the Empire; and one for the United States of America that included the Americas and the Philippines in addition to the main national market. Exporting books directly to England was out of the question and so securing world rights gave the Century Company the bargaining power they needed to make the most of the literary property they had acquired from Edith Lyttleton. Tensions between Australian and New Zealand publishers and British publishers over Australasian rights further complicated the transaction, pushing the author further to the background of negotiations of the literary property.

The contract for the publication of Pageant was signed on 29 July 1932, locking in a number of standard conditions, but also locking in conditions that gave the Century Company significant control of the literary property. Edith Lyttleton regretted this arrangement for the rest of her life, because it stripped her of any power to determine the fate of Pageant in the world market and it stripped her of a large proportion of the profit from the book's publication. Lyttleton's advance and royalties was boosted by income from the Literary Guild, which paid three thousand dollars for 33,000 copies, and the British rights were sold to Allen and Unwin. Allen and Unwin eventually negotiated to sell Australian rights to Sydney's Endeavour Press with the stipulation that the British publisher retained all rights for publication in New Zealand. Following the contract for Pageant, this income was to be divided equally between the Century Company and the author. But, hidden behind these arrangements were the taxes each publisher was obligated to retain within their own jurisdictions. After English and American taxes, publishers' fees and her agent's commission, Edith Lyttleton received less than 30% of the royalties produced.

This example provides a crude, economic model of the effects of a migratory author publishing the same work in several national markets. The real and imagined boundaries of national markets control the movements of books and extend the idea of authorship and the idea of the work into distinct events that are joined by a myriad of personal, cultural and institutional networks. Case-studies like this one that draw on the material archive to reveal the human agents involved in the production and distribution of books provide a preface to a much larger exploration of the dynamics of the networks that make up the book trades that intersect with Australian and New Zealand book history. But, to date, we have been unable to see how this dynamism exists. The following pages suggest ways in which this might be done.

Case study 2: American publishers and trans-national publishing networks

In contrast to the Lancaster case study which was driven by archival research in libraries in several countries that included first-hand retrieval, viewing and analysis of material documents, a more distant view of trans-national publishing networks can be visualised by exploiting bibliographical data created by databases such as AustLit. The structures and networks that emerged in the example of G.B. Lancaster show the human actions involved in the production, sale and consumption of literary works of art. The identification and description of these networks rely on the records and correspondence saved in the archive, a situation that, at best, only occurs with a few authors. Gaps in the record have to be filled with a scholar's speculation or argument based on comparison with similar cases, but, in effect, the narrative that forms is never conclusive and awaits augmentation or correction by subsequent research and discovery. Zooming out from a micro-study to consider the broader field can provide some assistance, but, to date, the resources and methods to do this have not been available or exploited to their fullest extent. To demonstrate the potential for looking at structures and networks on a large scale, the following pages consider evidence drawn from AustLit data that supports the visualization of relationships between Australian authors and American publishers.



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Figure 3. Detail of a visualisation of relationships between Australian authors and American publishers


For a project that aims to explore the publication of Australian novels in the United States of America to the end of the twentieth century, a spreadsheet of authors, publications, publishers, dates, and other information provides information on more than 2,500 novels over more than one hundred and fifty years.39 This allows raw numbers to be graphed, but it also allows for an examination of the strength of relationships between authors and their publishers in the United States of America.40 For instance, the network visualisation in figure 3 displays a detailed view of the relationships between Australian authors and American publishers for the years 1840-2010. The major publishers emerge, and the size of St Martin's Press reflects its status as a reprint publisher. The productivity of authors also emerges. Figure 4 shows the intense concentration of activity around the New York-based publishers William Morrow and Doubleday, reflecting the long association of Morris West, Nevil Shute and Jon Cleary with the former and Arthur Upfield with the latter. Prolific writers of pulp fiction such as Maysie Greig and Carter Brown also display intense concentrations, leveling the field so that books and authors of all persuasions jostle for position. This then provides a backdrop against which fine-grained analyses of the material archive can be discussed. While not conclusive, it provides a temporary model of the larger field in order to support and encourage enquiry.



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Figure 4. Detail of a visualisation of relationships between Australian authors and American publishers


Visualising how Australian books are positioned in relation to Australian authors, publishers and others is a new method of enquiry that will be supported by the continued development and openness of the AustLit database and other digital initiatives in Australia and New Zealand. Continuing digitisation of Australian and New Zealand newspapers is opening up the archive to questions and queries and supporting visualisations of trends over time. These digitisation projects are helping to uncover information about authorship, reading and publishing that until now has remained locked in the material archive. This openness will not only lead to new answers to old questions, but it will also lead to new questions.

Prospects

In the coming years, the results of several large-scale studies will emerge, but they will be augmented, and perhaps challenged by the results of analyses of the visualisation of data.41 It will be important to keep these competing models of enquiry in balance in order to get the best out of both methods, and it will be important to make sure that material and digital methods of enquiry contribute to the same discourses in order for constructive criticism to proceed. With short book histories, small populations, and digital initiatives that continue to open up the archives to analysis, Australia and New Zealand are poised to enter a second wave of book history that will be increasingly collaborative, trans-national and digital.


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