Through a series of major shareholding-related manoeuvres beginning in 1958, New Zealand-born Walter Burns took up a position on the Angus & Robertson board in 1959 before being appointed managing director in February 1960. According to Craig Munro, George Ferguson ‘proposed that Burns be made director’ when the position was made vacant by the resignation of Don Walker (who never fully recovered from a stroke the previous year). Although Burns was widely acknowledged as a ‘financial bloke skilled in company affairs’ but ‘not a publisher or a bookseller’, Ferguson reasoned that ‘business being the jungle it is these days, it might be well to have this kind of advice on the Board’.

At the beginning of another period of reorganisation, George Ferguson reassured Walter Butcher that the London office was ‘an essential part of the [Angus & Robertson] publishing operation’ and that it would be ‘maintained in some form though not necessarily in its present form’. With rhetoric that former London executives Hector MacQuarrie, Barry Rowland, Stanley Amor and John Ferguson would perhaps have recognised from years past, Ferguson reinforced the view that as far as general publishing was concerned the London operation was fundamental to Angus & Robertson's ‘retention and attraction of [Australian] authors’, lest the company lose writers to the British publishers whom the London office was selling its books to. It was, in Ferguson's judgement as director of publishing, an essential part of Angus & Robertson's mission and was ‘not regarded as an expendable operation’. Furthermore, in response to a claim made by the new London chief editor Alec Bolton that a ‘profitless prosperity’ was being reflected in ever higher turnovers, record months and then dismal end-of-year final analyses, Ferguson countered in February 1970 that nobody on Angus & Robertson's board actually expected the London office to make a profit.

British publisher George G. Harrap once said about the Australasian Publishing Company he helped set up in Sydney that ‘it is not easy to command success for ventures of the sort in another country where much has to be learned of local customs and conditions’. It can be, he concluded, an ‘uphill task’.

With evidence of the many uphill tasks that an Australian publisher had to overcome in order to show profit in domestic and export markets, this book has traced the material conditions of Angus & Robertson's London office when selecting works for publication, distribution and sale to British audiences.

As discussed in previous chapters, there was a two-fold rationale for Angus & Robertson to setup a London office. One goal was to secure British and American titles; the other was to sell Australian books in the United Kingdom. Bearing in mind that London was the centre of a massive English-language book trade that included Australia, Ferguson was concerned that authors would leave Angus & Robertson unless it offered a ‘reasonable chance of distribution in the big overseas English-speaking markets’. When new Angus & Robertson managing director Walter Burns announced in 1960 that ‘publishing in London was finished’, not surprisingly this galvanised opposition to his ‘Napoleonic’ management and merchandising principles (discussed further in the next chapter). Just a year earlier, Angus & Robertson's Sydney office had resigned from the Australian Booksellers Association over an attempted resolution that ‘no bookseller who was also a publisher could hold any executive office in the A.B.A.’ Given that Angus & Robertson doubled as publishers and booksellers and had staff on the committee, Ferguson dismissed the Australian Booksellers Association in the belief that it would lose most of its ‘bargaining power’ with British publishers following his company's resignation.

Although this book is not the first study to interrogate the extensive Mitchell Library holdings of the Angus & Robertson archives with regards to the company's business operations, it is the first whose central concern is the company's production and distribution of Australian books within the United Kingdom through its London office. Often footnoted as worthy of further investigation, this is an area of history which to date has only been narrowly scoped without reference to key archival volumes held by the State Library of New South Wales, Australia. Heather Rusden's interview with Alec Bolton and Suzanne Lunney's interviews with George Ferguson, Douglas Stewart and Ernie Williams provide some context but are limited due to the anecdotal nature of reminiscences. The majority of material published on Angus & Robertson, which is substantial, also records very little about the company's London operations. The best account is by Neil James in 2000, which places the London office's business within the framework of the Australian company's general overseas operations. It draws on interviews conducted by James with publisher George Ferguson and former occasional London office employees John Ferguson, David Moore and Sam Ure Smith. These also take the form of reminiscences regarding operations and managers in the United Kingdom. Essays appearing in the firm's own publication, Fragment: The House Magazine of Angus & Robertson and Halstead Press (1954–9), offer further perspective and so does commentary from Collins' Australian managing director, Ken Wilder, ‘who sat on the Angus & Robertson board with a watching brief‘ during the 1960s.

The Hand that Signed the Agreement

On the back of stronger sales in 1952, January would not be a propitious start to 1953 for the London office. Due to a fire which turned the old storeroom into a ‘horrid cavern’ and the backyard into a ‘ghastly heap of half burnt and soaking books’, the present attempts to break into Britain's ‘fiercely contested market’ with Angus & Robertson's titles was set back by £4,888 in damaged stock. Although the branch had over-reached its 1952 target of £12,000 by a thousand pounds sterling, the first quarter of 1953 would be very quiet commercially while the office waited for resupplies from Sydney.

In the business to create sales large enough to justify the capital costs involved in sustaining the production, sale and distribution of wholly Australian books (or what MacQuarrie described as ‘books with a limited appeal’), the London office sought to publish what the market demanded. That is, books not ‘of the normal procession which ends with dignity in the offices of various well-established publishers’ but rather ‘something fresh, new … original and lively’.

No doubt as a consequence of their dedication, the first two titles published (and manufactured in Britain) under the auspices of ‘Operation London’ were texts of American origin: Esquire Etiquette: A Guide to Business, Sports and Social Conduct by the editors of Esquire Magazine was a title first published in 1953 by Lippincott, based in Philadelphia, as was the 1950 title by Sheila MacKay Russell, A Lamp is Heavy.

These books were of the kind that once would likely have been refused importation into Australia direct from the United States during Australia's ongoing licensing and dollar conservation situation. They were also books in which copyright for the Australian market would conventionally have been purchased by British publishers through ‘their infamous pact about American rights’.

An Australian publishing company whose headquarters were based in Sydney, New South Wales, Angus & Robertson was founded by two Scots, David Mackenzie Angus and George Robertson, in January 1886 after Robertson bought a 50 per cent share in Angus' own 110 Market Street bookshop for £15. The partnership was initially concerned only with the bookselling business that Angus started eighteen months earlier in June 1884. The bookshop was stocked with ‘New and Second-hand Books … purchased in the home markets on very favourable terms' by a friend of Angus based in the United Kingdom, a Mr Young J. Pentland. Angus & Robertson's first entry into Australian publishing began in 1888 with a thin book of verse by H. Peden Steel titled A Crown of Wattle (71 pages). This was followed in the same year by Sun and Cloud on River and Sea (72 pages) by Ishmael Dare (a pen name for Arthur W. Jose who frequently wrote and edited for Angus & Robertson) and Facsimile of a Proposal for a Settlement on the Coast of New South Wales (3 pages) by Sir George Young (a work originally authored in 1785).

Angus & Robertson's modest experiments in local publishing continued into the 1890s. An expansion of its core bookselling business had required a move in 1890 to larger premises at 89 Castlereagh Street. A new ten-year partnership agreement was drafted and its starting capital was £2,331 7s 1d.

Through the activities of one travelling salesman named Bernard Robinson, Angus & Robertson was to learn that overseas branches could not forever remain independent of local book trade politics. In late February 1950, George Ferguson notified Hector MacQuarrie that the long-overdue catalogue of Angus & Robertson's titles was nearing completion and would soon be on its way to London. Though in actuality the catalogue would not be at the proof stage until July, the pressure increased for MacQuarrie to have salesmen ready to cover London, Scotland and the English provinces. So too to have regular advertisements – ‘as attractive as those of, say, Faber, Chatto or Jonathan Cape’ – start appearing in the Bookseller in order to ‘prepare the way for … travellers’.

Angus & Robertson was very enthusiastic about the cargo of books in transit and produced circulars for display in the Bank of New South Wales, located in the West End of London, and also for the Australia House on The Strand, London. But while Angus & Robertson's London office was ‘enjoying considerable success in the London area’, it had ‘little to speak of outside the metropolitan area’.

It was a staunchly held belief of George Ferguson's that Angus & Robertson could not afford to ‘neglect any reasonable chance’ of selling Australian books overseas, especially in London. MacQuarrie referred to this as Ferguson's ‘overwhelming keenness to sell [his] literary children on this market’. So when long-serving London travelling salesman Sydney A. Sewell returned from a London luncheon with the idea that, through MacQuarrie, Angus & Robertson might take over the Australia House bookstall (located on the Strand) in lieu of developing a new Australia Bookshop, Ferguson replied that he was ‘absolutely all for this’. Having only a ‘grim’ relationship with the current bookstall operator, who occasionally defaulted in paying for stock obtained on credit from the London office, MacQuarrie took the idea to C. L. Hewitt, Official Secretary for Australia in London and made a case that Angus & Robertson's management of the small store at the entrance to Australia House would be of ‘immense propaganda value to the country’. Moreover, it would incorporate a ‘glowing display of all the best and most exciting books published in Australia, and about Australia’.

As a ‘lasting monument to the importance of the Commonwealth and a splendid addition to the architecture of London’, built on what was formerly described as a ‘rustic spot in urban surroundings’, Australia House was Australia's High Commission in the United Kingdom.

The challenges of rebuilding operations between the Sydney and London offices of Angus & Robertson after the Second World War were exacerbated by the tight post-war import and export restrictions between Australian, sterling and dollar areas. Although precisely determining which restrictions altered which conditions of the Australian book trade during the 1940s and 1950s is challenging; the nature of the impact of import licensing emerges most clearly in correspondence between Australian publishers, industry organisations and the Department of Trade and Customs.

During the Second World War, the Division of Import Procurement emphasised how imperative it was that space on ships destined for Australia was ‘conserved only for those commodities considered to be of primary importance to the war effort’. Post-war currency shortages accentuated the need to preserve exchange reserves, and applications for licences to import fiction in paper covered editions – more specifically books in the genres of juveniles, light romance, detectives and westerns – were not made available ‘under any consideration’.

The above sentiment expressed by Robert Haupt in 1988 about the presence of British publishers in Australia and, by implication, overseas or imported texts in the local book trade, echoes other sentiments recorded decades earlier and equivalent complaints are heard today. Legally and commercially across the course of the twentieth century, British trading rights pertained to exclusive English-language rights throughout the former empire.2 Within this framework Australia was the largest export (or ‘run-on’)3 market for British books to 1959, valued at its peak to be worth £4,387,810 sterling in export turnover for British publishers;4 this value was a significant increase over Australia's estimated purchases of British books of £1.5 million sterling in 19485 and the second largest market for British books behind the United States after that time.6 During this period Australian booksellers, among whom the Australian firm Angus & Robertson doubled as publishers, were able to negotiate concessions from the peak organisation, the Publishers Association of Great Britain,7 prompting Hector MacQuarrie, managing director of Angus & Robertson's London office, to claim in 1949 that