JASAL 9 Reviews 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. 1 JASAL 9 Reviews 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). 2 JASAL 9 Reviews 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.