In 1963, the Melbourne newspaper The Age ran a 12-part series on Australia's leading publishers. The first instalment focused on A&R, which from its beginnings a second-hand bookstore in 1884 in Sydney had, by the early 1960s, the article claimed, become the most powerful force in Australian bookselling and publishing. The journalist, John Hetherington, interviewed George Ferguson, the firm's 52-year-old managing director and grandson of George Robertson, its Scottish co-founder and the man who expanded the business from a book retailer into ‘a great publishing house’. Ferguson was still relatively fresh from seeing off a company takeover by New Zealand-born property developer Walter Burns, who had alienated A&R's board and staff by wanting to adopt a commercial approach and focus on books ‘of more popular appeal’. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ferguson's statements were laced with lofty sentiments about the mission of publishing quality literature and the challenge of continuing his grandfather's mission of expanding the market for Australian books overseas, not to make a profit, but because ‘It just seemed the right thing to do.’ ‘In publishing, there's one test you have to keep applying,’ Ferguson is quoted as saying, ‘not “Will it sell?” but “Is it good?” You have to keep on believing that […] You can't run a publishing house like a factory.’

Towards the end of the series, The Age focused on Horwitz, under the title, ‘This Is the House That Paperbacks Built.’ The article began by describing Horwitz as having ‘the glossiest publishing offices in Australia’.

Hetherington reported that while A&R published a hundred or so new books a year, Horwitz was releasing 18 to 20 titles a month and was the single largest player in Australia's growing paperback market. It was unashamedly business minded in its approach to publishing fiction, which was commissioned, written and marketed to specific editorial criteria that the company referred to as fiction ‘categories’ or ‘formulas’.