47 
The History of the Book in New Zealand
47 SHEF ROGERS
A narrow, mountainous pair of islands stretching almost 800 miles through the South Pacific, New Zealand possesses a rich and well-documented print heritage despite its geographic isolation. From 1848, would-be colonists could peruse E. J. Wakefield’s Hand-Book for New Zealand for a recommended list of books on practical topics such as cooking, ornithology, and astronomy. Early settlers, conscious of a non-literate aboriginal population far larger than their own, deliberately recorded their efforts to establish a local print culture. Jim Traue, a former chief librarian of the Turnbull Library, has argued for two histories (aboriginal and colonial) of New Zealand print culture and notes that the country’s settler history is typical of other 19th-century colonies: its print history begins with newspapers and periodicals, then only gradually moves to books.
New Zealand’s book history is, therefore, very much a history of importation, even for books in Maori. Numerous Europeans (particularly whalers, sealers, and traders from New South Wales) visited in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Christian missionaries brought books and printing presses to provide religious works for the Maori; they made strenuous efforts to establish a written form of the Maori language and to record Maori oral culture in print (see 9). By 1815, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) had produced a Maori grammar and Maori primers, printed in London and Sydney. In 1830, at the Kerikeri Wesleyan settlement, the Revd William Yate printed Maori hymn sheets and a six-page Maori catechism. The CMS further established the printed word in New Zealand when William Colenso arrived with a Stanhope press in 1834. Colenso overcame numerous technical problems to produce the New Testament in Maori in 1837 (the Old Testament was not fully translated until 1868) and remained active as a printer in both Maori and English until 1840, one of his last publications being the printed version of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding constitutional document. His ledgers survive in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, making New Zealand one of the few nations able to produce the account books of its first significant printer.
Nine months after the Treaty of Waitangi, Queen Victoria established New Zealand as a separate Crown colony; organized settlement soon followed. In almost every New Zealand Company community, colonists established printing presses within a year of arrival: sixteen newspapers were founded by 1851, 28 by 1858. The Government created an official Printing Office in Auckland in 1842–7, and in Wellington from 1864, until its privatization in 1989. For many years it was the country’s most technically advanced printer, producing parliamentary material, along with numerous major reference works and New Zealand’s largest publication, the telephone directory.
Population grew rapidly with the discovery of gold in the South Island in 1861. Each new strike seemed as likely to yield a newspaper as a nugget, with 181 newspapers founded 1860–79. These mainly English-language newspapers depended heavily upon reprinting material from overseas publications, eagerly resetting stories from newspapers and magazines as soon as a ship berthed. Although it was often cheaper and easier for a newspaper to serialize a syndicated British work, original local writing was also published, especially accounts of inland exploration and of native flora and fauna. This local interest was reflected in the scientific nature of many of the 19th-century pamphlets printed for exchange via the postal services with colleagues internationally. The third governor-general, Sir George Grey, was especially active in collecting and translating Maori songs, while fictional and semi-fictional accounts of settlers’ experiences provided popular topics for early literary efforts.
Newspapers were also the main publishers of printed Maori, other than the religious books imported and printed by missionaries. Although the largest book produced in 19th-century New Zealand was the Maori Bible, most other printed books were in English. The Government Printer continued to produce some works in Maori, but after publication of The Native School Reader for Standards II and III in 1886, government policy shifted towards teaching the Maori to read in English, a focus retained in schools until the beginnings of Maori language immersion schools in the late 1970s. Maori only became an official language of New Zealand in 1987, and the first New Zealand publisher specializing in Maori, Huia, was not established until 1991.
English-language printing and publishing expanded significantly from the 1880s. Distribution improved with the coming of railways between most of the main centres; the new telegraph cable to Australia in 1876 improved the speed of international communication. The major Australian periodical distributor, Gordon & Gotch, gradually expanded from Victoria throughout Australia and into New Zealand at the turn of century, and remained a major periodical supplier (although a subsidiary of PMP Communications since 1992). Booksellers continued to order books independently, under various legal arrangements intended to maintain Britain’s dominance over Commonwealth markets. Until World War II, there were no European or American wholesale booksellers in New Zealand; many publishers still find the country too small a market to merit the presence of a wholesaler, locating Australasian offices in Sydney or Melbourne.
Within the country, however, the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries saw the development of significant bookselling chains that also became successful publishers. First and foremost was Whitcombe & Tombs. The bookseller George Whitcombe and the printer George Tombs, both of Christchurch, merged their businesses in 1882, expanding to Dunedin in 1890, then throughout the country and ultimately overseas to Australia and England. Deriving early success from its educational publishing, Whitcombe & Tombs merged with the Dunedin printing firm Coulls Somerville Wilkie to form Whitcoulls in 1973. The new company dominated publishing until the mid-1980s and remains the country’s most significant retail bookselling chain.
Educational publishing continues to dominate New Zealand book production, with millions of copies sold. From 1877, the New Zealand government required all regional authorities to provide public schools, but not books; those remained a cost to students’ families. Seeing an opportunity in the market because of the high prices of imported texts, Whitcombe & Tombs began selling, then publishing, school textbooks. The first challenge to the firm’s dominance came in 1907, when the government established the School Journal, distributed free to primary schools. Only after World War II, however, did the newly formed School Publications Branch of the Education Department begin producing a regular series of publications that gradually eroded Whitcombe & Tombs’s textbook market.
Although the average press run for a textbook exceeded 5,000 copies, print runs for more literary works could be as small as a few hundred. Nonetheless, New Zealand’s most successful literary publisher, Caxton Press, managed to sustain quite a strong list in this small market. Begun by several like-minded friends from Canterbury University between 1933 and 1935, Caxton quickly established a reputation for high-quality printing of well-regarded writers; but as other literary publishers came on the scene, Caxton returned to its roots as a printer. Similarly, the Dunedin printing firm McIndoe (established 1890) was, under John McIndoe III, a notable publisher from 1956 until the mid-1980s, but then reverted solely to printing. In 2002, it merged with a complementary printing firm to create Rogan McIndoe, but closed in September 2008. Another significant literary publisher, Pegasus Press (1947–86), issued more than 100 volumes of poetry, as well as seven of Janet Frame’s novels, and was one of the first New Zealand firms to secure international joint publication agreements and translation rights for its authors. Four university presses, all established since 1960, have developed, in addition to their academic titles, specializations in New Zealand poetry, fiction, history, or natural history. They all subsidize these academic and New Zealand-centred ventures with revenues from traditionally lucrative textbook titles.
Children’s publishing, predominantly in English but with a consistent Maori presence, has long been an important part of New Zealand publishing. Edward Tregear’s Fairy Tales and Folk Lore of New Zealand and the South Sea (Wellington: Lyon & Blair, 1891) is considered the first New Zealand children’s book (see 17). Whitcombe & Tombs entered the market with Johannes Andersen’s Maori Fairy Tales in 1908 and developed a series, Whitcombe’s Story Books (1904–56), with c.450 titles—the largest children’s book series in the world. With its research into literacy and methods of reading instruction, and the talents of such witty authors as Joy Cowley, Margaret Mahy, and Lynley Dodd (not to mention many captivating illustrators), New Zealand has become a leader in early reading series. Publishers such as Nelson Price Milburn (now an imprint of the Thomson Corporation), Wendy Pye, and Mallinson Rendel maintain New Zealand’s reputation in this field.
The New Zealand publisher best known internationally is undoubtedly A. H. & A. W. Reed. Like Whitcombe & Tombs, A. H. Reed found a niche market—religious publications. From the mid-1930s, he became a leading figure in the New Zealand trade, with historical booklets for general and educational markets, sports books, and other popular works on local topics. He was joined by his nephew A. W. Reed in 1925; together, they wrote more than 100 of the approximately 1,000 titles published by the firm.
Such local successes dwindled in the face of faster transport and a global media. By the end of the 20th century, there were no longer any major New Zealand-owned printing companies or bookselling chains. This shift away from local ownership began with the arrival of firms like Collins, Random House, and Longman in the 1960s, though the pace of mergers quickened at the end of the 20th and start of the 21st centuries. Whitcoulls absorbed the Government Printer and was, in turn, taken over by U.S. Office Products; London Books is owned by the Blue Star Conglomerate, owner of U.S. Office Products; and Reed, having changed names and hands at least six times, became part of Reed Elsevier. Smaller independent booksellers and publishers survived, but faced tough competition from the chains’ discounts and from increasing use of the World Wide Web for individual orders of less readily available titles. Borders Bookstores opened its first New Zealand branch in Auckland in 1999 and operated a total of five outlets before its Australian parent holding-company, RedGroup, went under in February 2011, enabling the Pascoe Group to return those shops and the Whitcoulls chain to New Zealand ownership.
Despite the dominance of multinationals in its domestic market, New Zealand retains a strong international presence in intellectual publishing. The Royal Society of New Zealand (established in 1867 as the New Zealand Institute) has fostered a range of specialist scientific journals and research programmes. In association with the Government Printer, the Royal Society developed the world’s first computer typesetting system in the mid-1970s. Developments in digital printing have further transformed the publishing industry and reduced costs for shorter runs of books. Government support for an upgraded Internet feed has eased electronic exchange of published material in print and film media.
Although New Zealanders have always purchased relatively large numbers of books, they have also been eager borrowers. The Otago region on the lower South Island supported 116 public libraries and athenaeums between 1872 and 1884 (for an 1881 population of 135,023); the province of Nelson at the top of the South Island sustained eleven institutions holding collectively some 12,000 books in 1874 (for a population of 22,558). The novelist Anthony Trollope, visiting in 1872, commented: ‘In all these towns are libraries, and the books are strongly bound and well thumbed. Carlyle, Macaulay and Dickens are certainly better known to small communities in New Zealand than they are to similar congregations of men and women at home’ (Rogers and Rogers, 3). British publishers’ colonial editions made many current works of fiction available in the colony more cheaply than in London, although booksellers and libraries sometimes had to settle for what arrived rather than precisely what they wanted. Australia provided alternative import sources, predominantly through the New South Wales Bookstall Co. and later Angus & Robertson.
Within two decades of settlement, readers could select from a good range of books and, in the larger towns, from an assortment of subscription libraries. George Chapman’s lending library in Auckland held more than 4,000 titles in 1863. Traue has shown, through comparisons with Australia and Britain, that ‘within 40 years of settlement New Zealand had more public lending libraries per head of population than any other country in the world’ (Traue, ‘Fiction, Public Libraries’, 86). As with all such comparative statistics, the per capita qualification is crucial; New Zealand’s high figures result, in part, from a fairly sparse and dispersed population. Nonetheless, demand was strong and reading widely valued. One reason that colonial New Zealand enjoyed so many libraries was that provincial, and later central, government education boards offered institutions with libraries an annual subsidy of up to £100 to purchase books. From 1877 to 1902, however, this subsidy was made available only if an institution imposed an annual borrowing fee of at least 5s., although most permitted free on-site reading. This stricture discouraged the establishment of free municipal libraries. It also reinforced a Protestant sense of propriety that regarded the reading of fiction as entertainment, and therefore a personal luxury. Later, the influence of the Carnegie Corporation encouraged a move away from lending fees; eighteen institutions benefited from its support, as did universities and other specialist libraries when the Corporation funded overseas training for librarians in the 1930s and 1940s. Even free institutions, however, retain a semblance of the older view, with modest fees ranging from 50¢ to $5 rental for the most popular items, such as detective fiction or current bestsellers. Such fees permit libraries to collect a much broader range of works and still meet the demand for current fiction.
In a country so dependent on importation for the availability of books, libraries play a major role in providing access to them, and few towns of any size lack a public library. The Library and Information Association of New Zealand boasted 459 institutional members in 2006, for a country with only five main cities. Public libraries (as opposed to the earlier subscription services) first came to most small towns in the form of mobile libraries (book vans) operated by the Country Library Service set up by G. T. Alley in 1938. The service continued until 1988, when it was replaced briefly by a mail service, until overtaken by the Internet. In 1942, the government formed the School Library Service, a programme that amalgamated with the Country Library Service to form the first National Library Service in 1945. Meanwhile, copyright legal deposit requirements fed continual growth of the General Assembly Library in Wellington, which, together with the National Library Service, formed the basis of the National Library established in 1965.
The National Library houses the Turnbull Library, one of New Zealand’s three most significant heritage collections; the others are the Grey Collection (Auckland City Libraries) and the Hocken Collections (Dunedin). All three—gifts from dedicated collectors interested in the early history of New Zealand—were established between 1882 and 1920, but have been continually expanded by further gifts and bequests to ensure that the country’s print heritage is well preserved.
The small publisher remains the norm in New Zealand: a 2003 report found that only a few multinational publishers, such as Penguin, successfully exported New Zealand titles, while three-quarters of New Zealand publishers together generated just 2 per cent of the total revenue from book exports. Thus, the majority of New Zealand books are just that—books written by New Zealanders for New Zealanders. International distribution, where it occurs, is most likely to be carried out by a multinational publisher, while book production may take place either in New Zealand or overseas, primarily in Asia. Fortunately, New Zealanders continue to borrow and buy books in healthy numbers, and the number of publishers and titles continues to rise, although the average size of print runs is probably dropping.
A small country of slightly more than 4 million people, New Zealand has always been self-conscious about documenting itself. This has resulted in the creation and preservation of much material. Yet, this abundance of sources, the bifurcated strands of New Zealand print history, and uncertainties about the social status of print have also produced, problematically, a certain hesitancy about composing a national history of the book. The exemplary selected studies of aspects of print history in Book & Print in New Zealand have sketched out what is known of many aspects of New Zealand print culture, and recent investigations have added greatly to knowledge of Maori newspapers. More detailed bibliographies, such as George Griffiths’ Books and Pamphlets on Southern New Zealand (2006), acknowledge the significance of the local even as they enumerate a daunting number of potential new sources. Teasing out the strands of local, national, and international history remains a desideratum, one that will probably await the completion of histories in other former colonies, including Australia and Canada. Allen Curnow, New Zealand’s most famous poet, memorably characterized New Zealand as a ‘small room with large windows’, and the publishers, readers, and writers of New Zealand will undoubtedly maintain their tradition of a strong local sense of place mediated by a broad international perspective.
A. G. Bagnall, New Zealand National Bibliography to the Year 1960 (5 vols in 6, 1969–85)
J. Curnow et al., eds., Rere Atu, Taku Manu: Discovering History, Language and Politics in the Maori Language Newspapers (2002)
Exports of New Zealand Published Books, report for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (2003), www.mch.govt.nz/publications/book-export/export-nz-books-report.pdf, consulted Mar. 2007
P. Griffith et al., eds., Book & Print in New Zealand (1997); online at the New Zealand Etext Centre, www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-GriBook.html, consulted Sept. 2007
P. Parkinson and P. Griffith, Books in Maori, 1815–1900 (2004)
L. Paterson, Colonial Discourses: Niupepa Maori, 1855–1863 (2006)
H. Price, School Books Published in New Zealand to 1960 (1992)
A. Rogers and M. Rogers, Turning the Pages (1993)
J. Traue, ‘The Two Histories of the Book in New Zealand’, BSANZ Bulletin, 25:1–2 (2001), 8–16
—— ‘Fiction, Public Libraries and the Reading Public’, BSANZ Bulletin, 28 (2004), 84–91