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by Boomert - Paper Empires by Robyn Sheahan-Bright & Craig Munro _*_ 09 Jan 2010
In his essay on the Burns takeover of A&R, co-editor Craig Munro gives us an illuminating quotation from George Ferguson. In a piece about ‘tradition’, Ferguson wrote: ‘It is the duty of the old hands to pass it on, of the youngsters to learn it, of all to guard it.’

Today this sounds quaint. With a general tendency for people to move on quickly, corporate memory is in short supply. It is therefore fortunate that the late Professor John Curtain conceived, and that Munro and Sheehan-Bright executed, a volume of industrial memory. So, what sort of job has been made of it?

The book adopts an overview-plus-case-studies approach for its chapters, recognising that no single author or small team could produce a balanced account of such a broad topic. So we have 400 pages encompassing 80 contributions from over 60 authors. The case studies range over a broad field, and many of the key personalities, firms, publications and issues are covered.

However, there is a downside to this editorial approach: it results in the absence of a grand design. History is not just about kings and battles; it is about cause and effect, about the cultural, economic and technological setting for the kings and their battles.

For example, the book has good accounts of some early triumphs of trade publishing, but says little about the educational publishing on which most trade publishers of the 1950s and 60s depended or the evolution of today’s strong educational publishing industry.

Similarly, several articles refer to changes to copyright, trade practices and technology, but there is no article that relates these changes to daily life in a publishing office. In short, the story has slipped down the cracks between the case studies.

There are, however, many bits which are truly compelling,. particularly in the early section, where the passage of time has allowed a coherent narrative to emerge from the chaos of corporate and personal jousting. Everybody will enjoy Munro’s piece on the Burns takeover. We are shown both Beatrice Davis rejecting and Sam Ure Smith accepting the now-iconic They're a Weird Mob, and Paul Eggert shows how it should be done in his essay on Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.

The best bits are the essays which tell a fairly tight story at sufficient length to include some sights, scents and sounds of the times. The least satisfactory are those which attempt to cover a vast topic in three pages. In short, the book has its flaws, but is an important, useful and often very readable addition to the literature.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Author Biography: Robyn Sheahan-Bright
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