A Press Achieved: The Emergence of Auckland University Press 1927-1972
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A Press Achieved: The Emergence of Auckland University Press 1927-1972
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| ISBN-13: | 9781775580065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 172 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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A Press Achieved
The Emergence of Auckland University Press 1927 â" 1972
By Dennis McEldowney
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2001 Dennis McEldowneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-006-5
CHAPTER 1
Genesis
The Auckland University Press was never 'established' on a particular date, except in a formal and constitutional sense some time after books bearing the imprint had first been published (and that recognition was, you might say, a minor side-effect of the Vietnam war). Reference books, like The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, have for a long time given 1966 as the year of the Press's establishment, which is the year the first full-time Editor of University Publications was appointed, but this has more to do with the editor's ego than with strict truth. When he came to Auckland to begin work, one of the first things the Registrar said to him, in a cautionary or precautionary tone of voice, was, 'We have no immediate plans for establishing a university press.' Don't get ideas above your station, was the clear message. Yet even before that, minutes of the Publications Committee had occasionally referred to the University Press as if it were an entity already in existence. The appointment of an editor was important, but it was a step in a long evolution.
Like all such bodies, the Auckland University College had published occasional pamphlets and even books, mostly about its own affairs, almost since it opened in 1883; but occasional works do not constitute a publishing programme. Such a programme, which led in a direct line to Auckland University Press, began in 1927, with the publication of 'Auckland University College Bulletin, no.1'. Thirty-three bulletins, sequentially numbered, were published before the series was suspended during the Second World War. The first, of only seven pages, was entitled Milk Production; Sweet Milk for City Supply, and was by William Riddet, Logan Campbell Professor of Agriculture at Massey Agricultural College. Until the previous year, when Auckland and Victoria amalgamated their agriculture departments to form Massey, Riddet had been Professor of Agriculture at Auckland. Bulletin no. 2 came from another soon-to-be-moved school: The Relation of Forestry to Science and Industry in the Dominion of New Zealand, by H. H. Corbin, Professor of Forestry. The first two were typical of those which followed. The intention was to disseminate immediately practical information. 'Bulletin', with its connotation of current news ('The king's life is drawing peacefully to its close') was more appropriate to them than to some of the later titles.
As well as the overall sequence, each bulletin had a series number. Riddet was no. 1 in the agricultural, Corbin no. 1 in the forestry series. In the wake of the Depression and the Napier earthquake, economics and geology were the next series to begin. There were several bulletins on earthquake-resisting construction. It was not until 1935 that English literature made its appearance; history followed in 1936. Of the thirty-three pre-war bulletins, about half were reprints from journals and proceedings of conferences, supplied by the original publishers and issued with new covers. Writing in 1963 about the bulletins, H. O. Roth said, 'I have been unable to find out what arrangements [for publishing] existed in earlier years.' They were probably the direct responsibility of the Registrar, the all-powerful Rocke O'Shea, and his successor Lawrence Desborough.
One substantial book was published by the University before activity was interrupted by the war. In 1840 and After, Essays Written on the Occasion of the New Zealand Centenary, edited by Arthur Sewell, Professor of English, the focus was not on New Zealand, but on the institutions and beliefs of the society from which the settlers came, since 'British institutions and ways of thought became the framework on which the new order was built. ... What kind of civilisation was it that was brought to this country? What views did men then hold about the universe? What was their philosophy of life?' The authors were most of the professors, plus a lecturer in journalism and a member of the College Council. The last two, R. H. Melville and Douglas Robb, mistook their brief and wrote respectively about the press and medical practice in early New Zealand. One can only speculate on what pressures of time and tact persuaded the editor not to omit them.
The bulletin series was resumed in 1947 with no. 34, history series no. 2, Hone Heke's Rebellion, an Episode in the Establishment of British Rule in New Zealand, by James Rutherford, Professor of History (450 copies printed by Whitcombe and Tombs Limited at a cost of £42 10s). The following year, before any more were published, the Professorial Board (precursor of the Senate) recommended to Council 'that there be established in the College, the office of Editor of College Publications' and further recommended that Mr E. H. McCormick be appointed to this 'office'. The recommendation was endorsed by Council in May 1948. Eric McCormick was in the second year of his brief tenure as Senior Lecturer in English, and through his work with Centennial Publications had more experience of publishing than any other academic. He was 'to act in a full editorial capacity for [the bulletins], with power of rejection and selection if necessary after discussion with an expert'. He was also 'to arrange for printing, typography etc.' of inaugural lectures, and to undertake general supervision over 'special or occasional publications'. Distribution was to be done by the Library. Unspoken but understood was that editing was a spare-time occupation without additional remuneration.
Among his 'duties' he also approved the purchase of reprints of articles by academic staff in scholarly journals, which were paid for from the 'bulletins and reprints fund'. Publishing competed for funds with reprints for another fifteen years. The rationale was that both reprints and bulletins were part of the Library's exchange programme with overseas libraries. The Library was the chief beneficiary of the University's expenditure on publications, which is why the Librarian became an ex officio member of the Publications Committee when it was eventually established. At the time of McCormick's appointment the University's annual grant to the fund was £25, raised to £100 shortly afterwards; he was informed that he was also 'at liberty to apply to Council for a further sum of £200 as the occasion warrants'.
During McCormick's editorship the nature of the bulletins changed decisively. All were original work, and the humanities (history, English, modern languages, philosophy) predominated. They were longer, thirty to fifty pages, and Bob Lowry, who printed most of them at the Pelorus Press, improved their typography.
The publication of bulletins was by no means a commercial operation. McCormick would have repudiated such a notion, if it had occurred to anyone to express it. It was axiomatic that university publishing was a service to the academic community and, if it could be extended with integrity, to the public. In McCormick's time the price (usually two shillings) was about twice the unit cost of production, but between a quarter and a third of every edition was given away (besides the Library's requirements, authors were entitled to twenty copies and any member of the academic staff could have one free). Several of McCormick's bulletins were suitable for use in teaching (Keith Sinclair's The Maori Land League, Sydney Musgrove's The Universe of Robert Herrick, K. B. Pflaum's Philosophy Today) and the editions of five or six hundred sometimes disappeared surprisingly quickly and had to be reprinted. Nevertheless, in a typical year, sales accounted for only 20 per cent of income. Although McCormick endeavoured, without much success, to persuade local and overseas booksellers to stock the bulletins 'on a small commission basis', he had no desire to change the system.
Nor did he apparently aspire to publish longer books. There was a more suitable outlet, to which authors were sometimes directed, in the New Zealand University Press, established reluctantly in 1947 by the University of New Zealand and sustained by the voluntary enthusiasm of J. C. Beaglehole and Ian Gordon, but 'from beginning to end an unwanted child'. McCormick broached with Beaglehole the possibility of NZUP distributing Auckland's bulletins, but NZUP never established a satisfactory system for distributing their own books, let alone others.
When Eric McCormick gave up lecturing in 1950 and was given a two-year appointment by the University of New Zealand as Senior Research Fellow, he remained Editor; but at the end of 1952 he left the University altogether to become a full-time writer. His successor in the editorship was M. K. (Mike) Joseph, Senior Lecturer in English, already a poet and to become a novelist, a genial and peaceable man. He was Editor for ten years, except for his second year, 1954, when he was on leave and was replaced at first by the young historian Keith Sinclair and later by Sydney Musgrove, Professor of English. At the end of his tenure Joseph reported that he had 'made no radical changes in the system [McCormick] laid down'. This was almost true though not quite; it was certainly true of the bulletins themselves. Including McCormick's period, twenty-nine bulletins were published between 1949 and 1962, an average of just over two a year (with a range of none to six). Of these, only eight had any direct relation to New Zealand: four on episodes in New Zealand history, two on politics, one on land-use surveys, and one on divorce. None of the many on literature had a New Zealand reference. The writers were all on the staff of the university, except for several contributors to Ends and Means in New Zealand Politics, a series of radio talks edited by Robert Chapman. Only three came from outside the faculties of arts, law, and education. None was wholly, one partly, written by a woman, a reflection of the rarity of women on the academic staff. Equally a reflection of the University of their day was the impression the bulletins gave that New Zealand studies were mainly concerned with practical matters, while the life of the mind belonged elsewhere.
Most bulletins focused on a narrow aspect of a narrow research interest. It is tempting to quote as typical of the Joseph period Charles Aders, a Biographical Note, by Joseph himself, and Antoine Bret (1717–92), the Career of an Unsuccessful Man of Letters, by A. C. Keys (which was a monograph, not a bulletin, of which more shortly). But this would be unfair. A number of bulletins were of a broader nature. The editor of the journal Seventeenth-Century News was so impressed by Sydney Musgrove's The Universe of Robert Herrick (of McCormick's period) that he imported 50 copies into the United States to make them more readily available to his readers. John Reid's Macmillan Brown lectures, The Hidden World of Charles Dickens, was praised, though with reservations, by the noted scholar K. J. Fielding in the Review of English Studies. (The hidden world was the world of archetype and folk-myth, not of Ellen Ternan.) Most bulletins were noticed and some reviewed at greater length by specialist journals; more surprisingly, they usually attracted some attention locally: brief notices in the New Zealand Herald and the Otago Daily Times, longer, more scholarly reviews in the Press and occasionally the Listener.
Some time during Joseph's editorship, responsibility for distributing the bulletins and reprints was shifted from the Library to the Registry, which may have been an early indication that the Library was losing interest in acquiring books by exchange. During his term the annual grant increased slowly from £150 in 1953 to £500 in 1962, with a number of special grants to meet extra commitments. This routine of spending the grant and asking for more was so ingrained in university staff that some of them had trouble adjusting to the later practice of covering commitments in more innovative ways.
CHAPTER 2Joseph needs protection
Joseph was responsible for two changes in the system he inherited from McCormick. One was the establishment of a parallel system of monographs, for works overlong for bulletins. The size of bulletins was limited by what could comfortably be printed in a single, saddle-stitched or stapled section. Monographs ran to several signatures and were case-bound, though without jackets. There were only five of them; two with a New Zealand reference, C. A. Rogers's Measuring Intelligence in New Zealand and a bibliography of the works of A. R. D. Fairburn by Olive Johnson; one example of mainstream Shakespearean scholarship, J. K. Walton's The Copy for the Folio Text of Richard III; and two more esoteric works, A. C. Keys on Antoine Bret, already mentioned, and New Light on Aphra Behn, by W. J. Cameron. Most of the monographs were printed in editions of 400 copies, which had also become the standard number for bulletins.
When the University of New Zealand was dissolved in 1962 and with it the New Zealand University Press, stocks of four NZUP books by Auckland academics were given to the University. They were The Male Characters of Euripides, by E. M. Blaiklock, The Expatriate, a Study of Frances Hodgkins, by E. H. McCormick, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, by Sydney Musgrove, and The Origins of the Maori Wars, by Keith Sinclair. The Blaiklock remained in its cartons, the McCormick sold slowly, the Musgrove, a pioneering study of Whitman's influence on Eliot, sold out and was reprinted in Auckland, and The Origins of the Maori Wars became the foundation of the Auckland University Press back list. Joseph negotiated the publication by Paul's Book Arcade, with a subsidy of £165, of the 1960 winter lectures, Distance Looks Our Way, edited by Keith Sinclair. Longer books were slowly infiltrating.
Joseph's other innovation, towards the end of his time, was a Publications Committee. On 19 June 1961 he wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, Kenneth Maidment:
Much of the work of Publications is. ... straightforward; but every so often a more problematical case occurs, for which some kind of joint responsibility would be desirable. I have one such problem before me at the moment, and whatever I decide is likely to give offence to some of my colleagues. I feel that, in such a case, it would be fairer to all concerned if the decision were a more impersonal one. What I would like to suggest is a small committee who would decide all general questions of Publications policy, and who would be responsible for acceptance or rejection of all our own publications, routine matters being left in the hands of the editor.
The 'problematical case' was Joseph's acceptance as a bulletin of a largely statistical study of the 1960 general election, by Muriel Lloyd Prichard, an economic historian, and J. B. Tabb, of the Accountancy Department. Robert Chapman, Senior Lecturer in History specialising in political studies (which had not yet achieved a department of its own), objected to this invasion of the field by those he regarded as amateurs. With two members of the Political Science Department at Otago, Keith Jackson and Austin Mitchell, he had recently completed a much more substantial book on the same election, which had been submitted to the University of Otago Press and referred by them to the Oxford University Press for possible joint publication. Joseph wrote to Alan Horsman, Professor of English at Otago and acting editor of their Press:
The specific point Mr. Chapman put to me was that, if the Oxford University Press and/or yourselves were aware of a rival publication in the field, it might endanger the acceptance of his book. I have therefore held up our study, which was just on the point of going to the press. ... Needless to say, I do not in the least wish to be unfair to either side in this matter; it also seems to me important, for the sake of good relations, not to seem unfair. I have also discussed the matter at length ... with Dr. Lloyd Prichard and Mr. Tabb, and they are naturally reluctant to have their work delayed. ... Do you feel that our publication is seriously likely to affect the acceptance of your[s]?
Horsman was 'inclined to doubt' that the bulletin would prejudice the book's chance of acceptance. The book, he said, was a study not only of this particular election result, but also of the nature of New Zealand political life, substantial enough to stand on its own merits, 'and if the Otago Press were able to take on so large a thing unassisted, it would be considering these merits rather than any possible rivalry with another publication of a rather different scope.' He thought the same would apply to OUP, 'who are in any case unlikely to hear of the bulletin'.
The bulletin duly appeared, and the Chapman, Jackson and Mitchell book was published in 1962 by OUP alone as New Zealand Politics in Action, the 1960 General Election. Also in 1962, Joseph's second novel was published, A Pound of Saffron, about ruthless politics and personal relations in a notional University of Auckland, so skilfully crafted that no matter how they tried (and many did) no one was able to equate his characters with actual university staff.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Press Achieved by Dennis McEldowney. Copyright © 2001 Dennis McEldowney. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION,PART ONE,
1. Genesis,
2. Joseph needs protection,
3. McCormick's plans,
4. Sorrenson's vision,
5. Search for an editor,
PART TWO,
1. The Editor arrives,
2. Learning on the job,
3. Finding books,
4. Rexcourt,
5. A guerrilla war,
6. Books found,
7. Money,
8. A con job,
9. Printing,
10. A Press at last,
11. The grocer's shop,
EPILOGUE,
NOTES,
APPENDICES,
Memorandum of Agreement,
List of Publications 1927 — 2000,
INDEX TO LIST OF PUBLICATIONS,
GENERAL INDEX,