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’.