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10 - The End of the Pulp Jungle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2022

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Summary

Stanley Horwitz was less directly involved in the publishing side of his business in the late 1960s, and spent more time overseas, including in the United States and Canada. He was also deeply engaged in the ABPA, the peak body for the publishing industry. His role in the ABPA, including a two-year term as its president in the late 1960s, further contradicts the narrative that as a pulp publisher Horwitz operated in isolation from mainstream Australian publishing. Stanley Horwitz's ABPA presidency places him at the very centre of the local publishing industry at a time of major change. This included the growth of the publishing sector, increasing overseas competition and the even greater prominence of the paperback, the modernisation of many bookshops, efforts to press the Australian government to bring its copyright legislation into line with the Universal Copyright Convention, the introduction of the International Standard Book Number, and the decision by more publishers to print offshore. Stanley's presidency can be viewed as a recognition that the times suited the man whose company had always approached publishing as a business, who had developed the Carter Brown series into an international paperback publishing phenomenon and whose locally produced pulp paperbacks had ridden the paperback boom in Australia. Stanley's ABPA involvement is also another clear example of his role as a purveyor of vernacular modernist tendencies in Australia, as the canny businessman balanced his role as a commercially aggressive purveyor of salacious paperback fiction, with a role in the ‘publishers’ establishment’, as the ABPA was referred to by one business magazine in the early 1960s.

Horwitz was not the first pulp publisher to be in the ABPA, which was established in 1948 from the merger of Victorian and NSW publishers’ associations. Currawong, Invincible Press and Frank Johnston had been members in the 1950s. Horwitz joined in early 1962, around the time that paperbacks were emerging as a reality that mainstream Australian publishers were forced to deal with. ABPA documents from the early 1960s, held by the National Library of Australia, show the organisation was then still overwhelmingly British focused and preoccupied with everyday business matters, like the phrasing of publishing contracts, the best methods for storing standing type and how to arrange credit for faulty books.

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2022

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