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First published 2000
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/aup
© The contributors, 2000
ISBN I 86940 23I 6
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The history of the book is not bibliography, although it often relies on the careful description of books given by bibliographers. It is not textual criticism, although it both draws on the work of textual critics and supplies them with information. Its focus goes beyond the content of books to the book itself as an object, to its history, to the interrelated details of its gestation and production, and to its influence on readers and the world. It covers therefore an almost unlimited variety of subjects as they are touched by books, a variety illustrated in this book. So is the wealth of detail that must be investigated before anyone can confidently write 'a' history. The essays have been selected from papers presented to a conference on the history of the book in New Zealand held in Auckland in 1995 that was convened by
The essays fall into several natural groupings. There are three on the meeting, sometimes the collision, between Māori oral tradition and the written and printed word. Jane McRae's general survey shows the complex relationship which has developed
Two essays show the desirability to colonials of books as objects. The most surprising revelation in The East India pilot, which she describes delicately conserving, included navigation charts of New Zealand and was probably used here.
The focus then shifts to authors and publishers. There are two essays on women novelists of the 1930s: The godwits fiy, the parallel development and 'intertextuality' of nearly everything
Several of the new writers of the 1930s and beyond were typographers and printers; all were aware of the aesthetic dimension of the craft. Alan Loney shows the intimate relation between writing poetry and its typography, in which as in other respects New Zealand poets were following the lead of their English contemporaries.
There are two essays which, although widely separated in time, are both about learning to read in specific social contexts. Describing an illustration in a medieval Book of Hours, of 'St Anne teaching the Virgin to read' (relating to New Zealand because it is in the Reed collection in the Dunedin Public Library),
Finally, in a subversive and provocative essay,
In writing of the growing literacy of the middle classes in the Middle Ages, when every home had to have a Book of Hours,
In September 1999 the Government Statistician sent shivers down a good many spines by revealing that the 1999 New Zealand official yearbook would be available only on the Internet. This seemed to be definitive evidence of the feared Death of the Book. (More immediately it was evidence of the commercial model imposed on government departments.) According to the report in the New Zealand Herald of 21 September, 'Statistics NZ said it had been unable to negotiate an arrangement for the book to be printed. It had borne the cost of preparing the contents, but had wanted a publisher to bear the cost of printing and distribution.
The New Zealand Herald headed its editorial the following day, 'When a book is not a book'. The Department, it said, 'has an obligation to ensure that all the details that make us what we are will be found in forms to which all New Zealanders have access. One of the forms is a book, an object with print on paper, between two covers, readily available for scientific research or casual perusal. It may exist only in every library in the land, but we need to have such a book to hold in our hands and say: this is New Zealand.' There are signs here of that attachment to the form of the book, to its look, weight and even smell, which technocrats despise as sentimentally Luddite.
Yearbook in 2000, 'and I expect one at least every second year afterthat. However the market for books is affected by at least two trends, one being the volume of up-to-date information we can now deliver at minimal cost through the Internet, and secondly the variety of other reference books now available.' But he also said, 'If we are to continue [publication in book form] we need people to keep on buying it. For most of the decade the sales of the Yearbook were around 5000 a year. About 10,000 sold in 1990 but that plummeted to 2000 last year.' Citing the 1990 Yearbook is a red herring: it was a sesqui-centennial souvenir with historical summaries and photographs. Its
The delivery of up-to-the-minute statistics is in fact one field in which the Internet is undoubtedly superior to the printed book. The Yearbook is often outdated by the time it appears. Mr Cook's intention to print a book at least every two years may not survive a further decline in sales, and a clear demonstration that the latest statistics are not last year's or the year before's but last week's, will probably ensure that decline. Even if 'every library in the land' continued to buy it, every publisher knows there are just too few libraries to sustain a publication by themselves.
The sentimental attachment to the book is not enough. There is a more cogent question to be asked. If the Yearbook is available only on the Net, how long will each version stay there? For every edition of the Yearbook leaves a legacy of itself, in the year-by-year rows in public libraries, or even the odd copies on private shelves, 'for specific research or casual perusal'. It is essential for the historian; it is gives the casual browser the raw taste of a period.
The advent of printing and the book must have been equally unwelcome to scribes and connoisseurs of illumination. Its unintended, unforeseen consequences were only beginning to be explored in the 20th century. One of the greatest of them was in giving ordinary readers a sense of history. Before the printed book there was the present and there was a semi-legendary past. Some of the specifics, the ways in which one period and one place differed from another, were known to some scholars, but books were needed to make them widely known. The process began remarkably quickly. The chief difference between Chaucer's dealings with the past and Shakespeare's historical plays is that Shakespeare had more books to read. As books accumulated in libraries and were used to write more books, the sense of the past as a foreign but discoverable country spread. This depended not only or even primarily on 'history books', but on books (including fiction) recording an author's present, in details which the author (however consciously writing for posterity) would often think nothing of, because they were taken for granted.
The development and influence of the Internet is certain to be equally unintended and unpredictable. Anything predicted about it now, even by knowledgeable people, may be laughable in 50 years or even 10. But at this time the question is whether the Internet has the capability of recording its own history. What is
The history of the transition of Māori oral tradition to the published book is clearly underwritten by the 19th-century circumstances in which Māori as oral indigenous people and Pākehā as literate colonisers met and lived. Their extraordinarily different lives and the political drama which changed Aotearoa into New Zealand ensured that all their encounters would be tentative and mediated, including those over utilisation of the book as a new means of preserving and publishing Māori knowledge. At the end of the 20th century tentativeness and mediation remain in book production as much as politics and other media capture the oral tradition.
A full account of this publishing and a history of Māori acquisition of literacy which would ideally inform it have yet to be written. Contributing to such a history are: Conflict and compromise
, ed. by I. H. Kawharu (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1975), PP-27-54; D. F. McKenzie,
In this partial history of the transformation of oral compositions to print, I am principally concerned with books of quality, and with especially composed texts: whakapapa, karakia, whaka-tauki, waiata, kōrero (genealogies, incantations, sayings, songs, narratives). Thus excluding slight books, and oral documentation about custom, crafts, etc.
In a literate tradition an excellent book is the apotheosis of knowledge. The process of its production is by and large secular and the author admits the widest possible reading and response. A fine oral performance — an expert's long oration on tribal history, a kinswoman's poetic lament for her chief — might be equated with such a book in the compositional skill, intentional public delivery, critical attention and reply. But the oral production has a pervasive religious strain and a circumscribed audience. In ancient Māori society, ritual frequently played a part because language and knowledge had been acquired from the gods. Today there is strong feeling for the ancients' beliefs, but observance of them swings between what might be termed the old and oral and the new and literate. At the most conservative (perhaps by reason of losses from colonisation rather than tradition), acquisition and dissemination of texts is held to be private. For contemporary views, see 'Foreword: learning and tapu', Te ao hurihuri
, ed, by
A Māori oral tradition developed after the settlement of Aotearoa ca.8oo H. M. & N. K. Chadwick quoted in ad, modelling and incorporating its Polynesian precursor, which has been described as 'one of the two finest oral historical traditions in the world'. Te Ao Hou, 49 (1:964), 23-5,42-7.
A 1970s survey reported most native speakers over 30 years of age and only two per cent of children with Māori as their first language. A 1995 survey noted a continued decrease in fluent speakers, but an increase in learners.
Transactions and proceedings of the New Zealand Institute
, 25 (1892), 439-49.
Notably Maori oral literature
(Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1987).
Well-produced books of the oral tradition, in Māori or English, are relatively few, hard to find (many are out of print), little read. Quantity, accessibility or popularity may be regarded as trivial measures of worth but they reveal currency, importance, appreciation. The paucity of either popular or serious books partially explains, and is explained by, the rarity of Māori oral tradition as a subject of study in our schools and universities. Print-centred scholars want books for thought. Conversely, a respected Māori proverb professes, 'Ko tā te rangatira, ko tāna kai he kōrero' (As for the chief, his food is speech).
Sir Ko nga moteatea, me nga hakirara 0 nga Maori
(1851) and
All out of print in 1999. A 3rd edition of Ko nga mahinga a nga tupuna Maori
was
revised by
Grey schooled himself in the traditions to improve his governing. In publishing them, in part for goodwill between Māori and Pākehā, he remarked on their artistic merit, complexity and purpose. See comment in Preface to Polynesian mythology
, reproduced in
Te Rangikāheke, in his mid-thirties, spent from at least 1849 to 1856 writing for Grey who paid him with money, goods and accommodation. The prose following the songs in Ko nga moteatea
can largely be attributed to him, and his manuscripts were one source for the narratives and songs. It is not surprising for the time that neither Te Rangikāheke nor other writers were acknowledged by name in Grey's books.
Names survive in manuscripts and in Nga mahi a nga tupuna
Journal of the Polynesian Society
, 75 (1966), 177-88.
Te Rangikāheke was certainly aware that his writings were intended for all to see. He addressed specific audiences; he made wry or informative asides for Pākehā who were unfamiliar with Māori custom, and he obliged his two readers with comparisons between them. Refer Agathe Thornton, Maori oral literature, pp.59ff, 73, 75 and Jenifer Curnow, 'Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke: His life and work', Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2 (1985), 120-3. Norman Simms, Points of contact (New York: Pace University Press, 1991), pp.105-24, reviews such changes in terms of moving from a rhetorical self as oral performer to a central self as writer.
Until he came to Grey's intentions, Te Rangikāheke's experience of the book would have been the Bible, for it is likely that he was tutored in reading and writing by missionaries at a Church of England Mission Station in Rotorua in the 1830s. Quotations from the Bible in his conversation and oratory Refer discussion by Points of contact
, chapter 4, on the development to a book culture.
Māori did contribute traditions to the Māori newspapers (1840S-1930s) and to early volumes of the Journal of the Polynesian Society (1892-).
Sir George Grey's role as mediator between two very different means and styles of publication and the intellectual curiosity he and Te Rangikāheke cultivated about each other's habits and philosophies were also typical of others. John White's six-volume, bilingual rendition of tribal records, New Zealand journal of history
, 23 (1989), 157-72, and '
White's 'Ancient history of the Maori'
(Wellington: Beltane Book Bureau, [1947]), p.i.
Reilly's scholarship is rewarding for Māori views on collecting and publishing and hence the negotiations between oral and literate minds. See in particular
Māori compilation of their own manuscripts indicates their transitional thinking about the book, as one published collection attests. Two bilingual volumes of traditional knowledge The lore of the whare-wānanga
, were published between 1913 and 1915 by
See Bruce Biggs and D. R. Simmons, 'The Sources of The lore of the Whare-wānanga", Journal of the Polynesian Society, 79, (1970), 22-42.
For this suggestion and some history of the compilation, see Journal of the Polynesian Society
, 103 (1994), 115-70.
Studies in Maori rites and myths
(Kobenhavn: E. Munksgaard, 1958), p.41. Agathe Thornton gives support to his suggestion in her forthcoming
Such manuscripts became the 'book' but there was apprehension about control of this replica of memory. Of the writing taking place in the meeting-house, one Wairarapa elder commented that
karakia to men outside and to those who would desecrate the house; now, because the talks were to be written, the house was open forever'.
Māori literacy and zest for books have been made much of in histories, but In Bible and society (Wellington: Bible Society in New Zealand, 1996) especially regarding printing, markets and distribution; also 'To make a people of the book' and 'This is my weapon: Maori response to the Maori Bible', in
Bible and society
, p.6.
In their first century of literature Māori were clearly wise to many aspects of books and to the potential and pitfalls of publishing their highly prized inheritance. But neither they nor others could write manuscripts or publish without alteration to the form, meaning and practices of the oral tradition. Adaptation to the oral texts was not new — Te Rangikāheke's account of the culture hero Māui had that in common with Homer's Odysseus — but it had been slight, conservative, highly patterned, and executed by those in a tribal world and homogeneous culture. Those same texts published by 19th- and 20th-century Māori and Pākehā encompassed a new sphere of reference, and changes to them reached
If we examine how Te Rangikāheke's oral tradition has been put to use in books, Noted by Jenifer Curnow, 'Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke: His life and work', Agathe Thornton, Ko nga mahinga, for instance, reveals that Grey greatly edited Te Rangikaheke's and others' writing. He changed words, names, grammar, the order of events; he obscured and excised — especially sexual references.Maori oral literature, pp.74-5,81 and D. R. Simmons, 'The sources of Sir George Grey's Nga mahi a nga tupuna', pp.177-88. Polynesian mythology
(1855). Neither Te Rangikāheke's voice nor tribe emerged from books under Grey's name. As
See comments by Maori myths and tribal legends
(Auckland: Longman Paul, 1964), p.23, and Agathe Thornton,
The literature in English offers another measure of the book's impact. It is evidently contrived — a rewriting of myths and legends, ethnographic portraiture, reconstituted tribal history. The book of mythological narratives — of the gods and ancestors in the Polynesian homeland 'Hawaiki', of the canoe voyages to Aotearoa, of encounters with the supernatural, especially in the 19th century — emphasised the romantic and picturesque over the explanatory or educative. Charming, lucid, storybook narration replaced the terse, cryptic and audience-centred originals. Gradual realisation of greater import in the tradition is told by
Fairytales and folktales of New Zealand and the South Seas
(1891) contrasts with
Rewriting by
Particularly in Māori writers, e.g.,
Ethnographies and tribal histories depended on and made an imprint on 19th-century Māori writing. The ethnographies summarised and quoted the ancient lore as evidence of Māori life, Especially notable in Maori marriage
(1960) let Te Rangikāheke perform by simply transcribing and translating his engaging narrative of marriage conventions. The tribal histories borrowed from the oral genres but with their linear chronology and encyclopaedic intent could not reflect the situational, episodic, variant oral narratives or convey their complex referentiality.
The language of these books brought the oral tradition to national and international notice but (as Translating Ireland
(Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p.92.
Ibid, p. 106; Cronin argues that translation as an act of retrieval suggests the culture is lost.
Apirana Ngata, eminent leader of Ngāti Porou, government minister, and promoter of books as guardian of the oral tradition for the future, noted in the 1940s that, although Māori were impressed by print, they preferred to hear words read and to memorise them for 'it was nearer to the old-time narrative of adept raconteurs or of poetical and priestly reciters. More than that, the genius of the race preferred education through the ear, conveyed by artists in intonation and gesticulation'. A history of printing in New Zealand
, ed. by
The history and power of writing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.5.
This goes some way to explain Māori apprehension about, criticism of and lack of interest in the book as repository. The separate, silent, printed text lacks the presence, passion and rhythm of spoken words which evoke and affirm Māori and tribal identity, On the importance of voiced rhythms as symbols of cultural continuity, see Written voices, spoken signs
, ed. by
Nga korero a Reweti Kohere ma
, ed. by
The physical form of the book and reading also inculcated new thinking in Māori about the traditional knowledge. The Bible offered the first opportunity for a comparison with books of like and different kinds which brought ideas from outside the conventional schooling and fostered objective and individual over subjective and collective opinion. Orality and performance taught a provocative, rhetorical mode of composition aimed at engaging the heart of the listener; literacy and the book played it cool and led, as some scholars of oral tradition claim and others dispute, but which 20th-century books by Māori will exemplify, to a new kind of critical thinking in the making of and response to the book. For discussion of changes in interpretation and readings possible with the text on the page in relation to Homeric epic, see the essays of Written voices, spoken signs
, and to Maori literature,
In a further example of the impact of the book, oral publication depended on and was rendered dramatic by that essential feature of the tradition, poetry. It is not exaggerated, I think, to claim that, amongst other causes, the book served to diminish that poetry. The death of tragedy
(London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p.309.
The history and power of writing
, p.510.
Secular, literate organisation of knowledge took charge of both Te Rangikāheke's and Grey's work and irrevocably changed much about the oral tradition. The book, however, ensured the life of some traditions. Paradoxically it obscured Te Rangikaheke's name for some 100 years while it was kept alive in the tribal memory and preserved in his manuscripts. But the book also brought his name and genius back to readers in the 20th century and in a way which might better reflect his intent for a book.
In this century scholarly editions of annotated translations, a small-book literature, Slight books using the oral repertoire, produced locally or privately in small numbers, for instance, to commemorate the opening of a meeting-house, are part of the scope of the book literature. For analysis of examples with regard to Māori literacy and adjustment of their 'non-book knowledge and system of knowledge onto the book', see Points of contact
, especially pp110ff, 138ff.
Apart from historical interest in Māori acquisition of literacy, it is a reflection of our unease that talk of the book is often couched in oppositional terms of production by Māori and Pākehā. Māori are anxious about dealing only with their own tribal accounts, Pākehā about dealing appropriately with them rather than as appropriation. A reprint of A. W. Reed's Legends ofRotoma (Auckland: Reed, 1997) expresses such anxiety in a statement on the verso of the title page: 'This book is a facsimile of a book published in 1958, reprinted by popular request. The language and illustrations reflect the attitudes of the time.' It is hard to imagine such a disclaimer on a translation or rewriting of The Odyssey.
The immense importance of song is given appropriate emphasis in the 20th century and brought the first Māori scholar's book. Nga moteatea
(1959, 1961, 1970, 1990). He published the texts first in the 1920s in a popular Māori journal
Nga moteatea
, Vol.1 (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1959), pp.riii-xv.
Books of songs from Māori have also arisen out of contemporary practice: Tīmoti Kāretu's dissertation as tutor and composer of the posture dance song For other examples, see my 'Haka (1993), popular songs with performers' interests at heart, a tribal group's collection as dedication to an admired composer. The Oxford history of New Zealand literature
, 2nd ed., ed. by
For instance, Traditional songs of the Maori
' (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1975), and
Books, however, serve crucially as repositories of knowledge as the library gains the edge over memories and manuscripts. And a vital cultural purpose in them is as aid to composers, orators and singers, as in collections of sayings, of the myriad set expressions that are integral to the formulaic character of traditional speech.
The educative, archival and tribal function of books of sayings is realised in He konae aronui
(1951) which he wanted the young and orators to learn from, while Neil Grove and Hirini Moko Mead's series
Prose takes a good share of the book tradition and exemplifies intellectual and stylistic adjustments made in writing the oral. University scholars' editions of manuscripts set a pattern of translated, annotated reproduction, as in Margaret Orbell's Traditional Māori stories
(1991) and the grand tribal history
It was common in the 19th century for the words 'tuhituhi' (writings) or 'pukapuka' (book) to be used in titles of collected writings. This and other recent reproductions prefer 'Ngā kōrero a ...', meaning 'The words of...' — a shift back to an emphasis on speech.
It is my wish that the great bulk of
Ngāti Porou writings should be made available through publication to all of Ngāti Porou, and to all others, as well, who desire to read them. These taonga [valuable possessions] of Ngāti Porou have a crucial importance for our own people, one which I believe will become increasingly apparent in the years that lie ahead. At the same time, it should be recognised that they have great significance as well to many others, Māori and Pākehā, who have a serious interest in traditional Māori thought, religion and society. These writings are part of the literature of Aotearoa. As well as this, along with other Māori writings they form a part of world literature.
Anaru Reedy ,(Christchurch: Canterbury University-Press, 1993), p.10.Ngā kōrero a Mohi Ruatapu
His illustrations — maps of the territory, photos and carvings of ancestors — are explicative for many readers and revive something of the contextual and spatial experience of the oral tradition as it was known to an audience. Although a tribal 'act of retrieval',
An example of a new creative gloss is Tāwhaki-nui-a-Hema
(Auckland: Reed, 1996).
Two books of narratives, one by a Pākehā, one by a Māori, typify the situation at the end of, and likely beyond, the 20th century. I began with Te Rangikāheke's writing on the way to Grey's book, and I now turn to the same work brought to a quite different book. In 1984 The story of Māui by Te Rangikāheke. Her intention, like Grey's, was to bring Te Rangikaheke's writing into a book, but because of what I would call a shift from autocratic to democratic scholarship, the outcome is very different. Thornton gives back the authorship, voice, tribe and personality to Te Rangikāheke. His text is reproduced without the additions and deletions that Grey preferred. Editorial marks are minor and explicit; interpretative insight illuminates the innovative and traditional in Te Rangikāheke's writing, and the value and beauty of his and the oral texts. The English translation is sensitive to the sound and form of the original.
The second book is Ngaa mahi whakaari a Tiitokowaru
(1993), a biographical history of his ancestor, a renowned leader and prophet. Highly regarded as an orator, Broughton's writing proclaims his time in academia. In his introductory chapter he expresses a desire to work the oral style into his written history by including the sayings, songs, genealogy, and incantations which express Māori knowledge.
Ngaa mahi whakaari a Tiitokowarti
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993), p.19.
Like Te Rangikāheke, Broughton tried to bridge the gap between the oral storyteller and writing historian but the gap had closed over time. He shows a greater awareness than Te Rangikāheke of the implicit agreement between writer and readers, in writing the tribe's history at once for himself and for others who will read it differently. But he is already on the path to the history book of scientific scholarship in taking up the use of references. For this, as Anthony Grafton puts it in his exquisite study of the bookish ornament, the footnote, moves him from the
The Footnote
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.68.
There is perhaps nothing new in my brief, selective overview of the transition of Māori oral tradition to books that has not been recognised before in other such histories. The association between this oral tradition and the book is circumstantial, shaped by social, political and literary influences. The means to the book has been mediated in distinctive ways by the 19th-century coloniser and Māori scribe, the 20th-century academic and the tribal scholar. There is the thought, borne out by the Māori authors cited, that purpose and teaching lead towards the book and can effect sophisticated authorship rather quickly. There is also the proposition that Māori oral tradition is a long way from being replaced by the book and equally that it depends on it for its preservation if not for its public performance. The contemporary reality remains, however, that the lack of books and interest in them endangers an inheritance of intrinsic value to Māori and a great poetic statement of the Māori view of our humanity.
The title of this essay was originally 'Aversion to print? Māori resistance to the print medium' because, originally, some comments seemed worth making about Māori responses to the development of print in New Zealand. However, reflection has suggested a more useful and narrower focus, which is the impact, not of the print medium, but of the written word, upon Māori last century. It therefore deals with the print medium only indirectly, and instead assesses the influence of writing and the written word.
The growth of Māori writing and literacy last century in New Zealand has generally been considered in positive terms. There is a huge literature dealing with print, literacy and Māori. A good recent chapter is: The Oxford history of New Zealand literature in English
, 2nd ed., ed. by
In recent years, a number of histories of Māori writing and literacy have been produced. One of the best known is that written by the late Oral culture, literacy if print in early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi
(Wellington: Victoria University Press with the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust, 1985).
McKenzie found an early historical context where, as he saw it, this conflict between the written and spoken word was decisively played out — the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. He suggested that the Treaty signing process provided a critical test case, where the 'binding power of the written word' could be measured against the 'flexible accommodations of oral consensus'. Ibid.
McKenzie argued that the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 could be seen as an ideal context for measuring the impact of literacy and the influence of print in the 1830s. According to him, the Treaty was important because it was witness to a 'quite remarkable moment in the contact between representatives of a literate European culture and those of a wholly oral indigenous one'. McKenzie, Oral Culture, p.9.
In one sense, the answer is very obvious. He was referring to a kind of 'universal impact' of literacy on Māori people, whom he described in broad terms as being of a 'wholly oral indigenous' culture. He was simply referring to their capacity to reacl or write, or to deal with or work with the written or printed word, in a material and conceptual way. In that context, McKenzie presented an argument which was fairly persuasive, though one much contested by a number of historians. For example, Political science, 38 (1986), 185-8; Archifacts, 2 (1988), 17-20; and New Zealand Listener
, 1 August 1987, 60-2.
McKenzie began his argument by questioning just how literate Māori really were when the Treaty was signed. He was sceptical. He argued that the presumed high-level literacy of Māori in the 1830s was 'too readily and optimistically affirmed' by historians. As a result, historians and others had too easily distorted an understanding of the 'different and competitively powerful
McKenzie, McKenzie, Oral Culture, p.32.Oral Culture, p.40. According to McKenzie, in signing the Treaty, many of the chiefs would have set oral qualifications and conditions upon their signing. However, in the end, 'the ability to sign one's name was a trap'.
According to McKenzie, those who prepared the Treaty documents, like This paragraph paraphrases McKenzie, For a detailed account of the Treaty negotiations between Māori and officials, see Oral Culture, p.40, with the inclusion of specific historical participants. The Treaty of Waitangi
(Wellington: Allen & Unwin; Port Nicholson Press, 1987), pp.32-59. If anything, Orange plays down the conflict between Māori seen during these preliminary Treaty discussions. For example, some participants observed Hone Heke to be violent in his opposition to the Treaty, rather more than does Orange.
There are a number of interesting points here. An immediate issue arises if we look more closely at the assumptions that McKenzie is making about the 'meaning and binding power of written statements', as opposed to the 'assumed flexibility of oral accommodations'. In other words, the written word was binding and more powerful, whilst the spoken work was flexible and therefore weaker. The question is, was that really the case? The answer is no — and yes. It is no small thing to assert that the spoken words of Māori were 'flexible' and therefore 'weaker'. In fact, though, oral cultures were seldom recognised as possessing the certitude of the written or printed word, either in the 1840s or in more recent times. For example, in the 1920s Journal of the Polynesian Society
, 35 (1926), 181-203.
Journal of the Polynesian Society, 67 (1958), 162-5.
Such assumptions, then — that the Māori oral response was 'flexible' and therefore 'weaker' — beg the question: was the Treaty signing process such an important test of literacy against orality? The short answer is — probably not, partly because the specific.material stakes of that Treaty signing process were not high. Though much was at stake pertaining to notions of the overall governance of New Zealand, no land or livelihoods were directly at stake. Perhaps, in looking at how things turned out, the oral responses of Māori may well have been 'weaker' in their sustaining power to influence the Crown because they were lacking in a documentary form. This is the point that McKenzie is making.
Māori leaders present at the Treaty discussions on the day, however, were hardly weak. Of course, McKenzie is not saying they were. The discussions were lengthy and at times passionate. But, looking at the directions that the Māori-Crown relationship subsequently took, the point is well made that, despite the power of Māori oratory on the day, the written words on the Treaty document had the greater binding power. In the end, then, we might look more closely at the binding power of writing, as opposed to oral flexibility, because these were indeed opposites, and they were about to enter into a long-lasting and defining tension between Māori and Pākehā.
The Treaty signing process placed Crown officials against Māori in a contest over written documents and oral responses. McKenzie doubts that Māori were sufficiently literate to adequately decipher the documents, much less to appreciate their weighty presumptions. A literate population, he argued, took decades or more to produce. Yet, it was claimed, this had been accomplished in New Zealand, in a mere 25 years. Equally, Māori could hardly be said to have so quickly surrendered their relativities of time, place and person (inherent in the oral process) to the presumed fixities of the written or printed word. Therefore literacy and print had not yet taken such a hold on Māori that the binding written status of the Treaty could continue to be sustained
McKenzie, Oral Culture, p.10
Therefore, if the Treaty signing process is significant for anything in the context of the conflict between literacy and orality, then what is it? It is a common thing, and not a bad thing, for scholars to intensely examine the Treaty of Waitangi signing, in all its complexity, for indicators of 'significance'. Without a doubt, whether one's interest is literature, history, politics, law or jurisprudence, the Treaty has assumed a major significance over time, though it did have its low points last century. Where the issue of the written word against words spoken is concerned, the actual signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by Māori was important. But it was important only to the extent that it demonstrated a willingness by Māori to acknowledge that writing and print now had a place within the new scheme of things, without allowing it to override the intellectual imperatives of Māori 'flexible accommodations of oral consensus and construction'. I have discussed some of the issues relating to Māori oral testimony/sources and
history elsewhere. See Historical News
(October 1994), 4-7-
That was why we might say that the Treaty was, in effect — as far as conflict between literacy and orality was concerned — a secondary context. It does not loom as large enough an event to test written words in sharp contest with spoken words. This is because, for Māori, oral responses were in essence a local matter. Tino rangatiratanga, The meaning of terms like 'tino rangatiratanga' and 'mana whenua' are much debated, even by Māori. For the purposes of this chapter, 'tino rangatiratanga' asserts the customary, long-standing sovereignty of Māori. 'Mana whenua' anchors that sense of sovereignty into a specific landscape, and renders a certain -geographic and historic specificity to the more generic term 'tino rangatiratanga'. Mr
For example, we might look at Taranaki in the mid-186os. Here, after the land wars years, in the wake of land confiscations,
Minutes of Evidence, Royal Commission to Enquire into Confiscations (Sim Commission), 1927, Maori Affairs, File 85/2, National Archives of New Zealand,. Head Office, Wellington.
The exercise of tino rangatiratanga or mana whenua by the tribes and hapu of Taranaki had once turned on their occupying and owning the lands. However, once the tribes had been dispossessed, the exercise of mana whenua changed. Once occupation had ceased it increasingly derived from a knowledge or a memory of the land sustained within the tribe. Thereafter, once possession had passed, Māori customary law concepts of tribal title as a basis of occupancy, like ahi kā roa, were superseded. 'Ahi karoa' means 'long burning fires'. This was the right established under Māori customary law where certain Māori groups could remain in continuous occupation of certain lands by virtue of their 'long burning fires', i.e. the length of their occupation. Papers Relating to the Sitting of the Compensation Court at New Plymouth, Appendix to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR), 1866, A.3, p.3.
The legislative intention seemed always to recast customary tenure in the interests of ready settler access to land and title. This was certainly the intention of legislation like the Native Lands Acts of 1862 and 1865. There, it was declared expedient to 'amend and consolidate all laws relating to land holdings remaining under tribal proprietary customs'. The Acts were also intended to provide for the determining of Māori who 'according to such customs' were the owners. In the end, the Acts sought to encourage the eventual extinction of these Māori proprietary customs, providing instead for their conversion into tides derived from the Crown. Quoted from Native Lands Act 1865, Preamble.
Māori people have recently viewed these measures extremely negatively, especially focusing on the colonial supplanting of customary tenure by a different tenure system, one structured to deny continued tribal retention of mana whenua. 'The confiscation of tribal interests by imposed tenure reform was probably the most destructive and demoralising of the forms of expropriation': Waitangi Tribunal, The Taranaki report, kaupapa tuatahi (Wai 143)
, (Wellington: GP Publications, 1996), p.3.
McKenzie, Oral Culture, p.41.
For all this, the tribes and hapū in Taranaki continued to maintain and assert their mana whenua after 1860. Mana whenua remained as the essence of their collective identity, based on the complex continuum of descent that provided the critical link into the landscape over which that identity obtained its mana. These assertions were focused primarily through the agency of hapu, in whatever forum that presented itself as appropriate. And oral processes of knowledge retention and mediation remained integral to such continuing assertions in Taranaki, as had occurred in Waitangi 20 years earlier.
A primary forum of contest for land in Taranaki after 1863 was the Compensation Court, followed thereafter by many commissions of enquiry, even to the present day. These forums were all of a judicial nature, and involved conflicts between giving effect to new law (statutory and documentary) and giving effect to customary law reposing in oral history and tradition. Here was a significant difference of perception, prosecuted for half a century, originating from a time when the actual tide for that land substantially changed from one party to the other. On 23 March 1866 the Stafford Government advised that the Compensation Court hearings would commence at New Plymouth, on Friday 1 June. Its purpose was to hear and determine claims for compensation from Māori, following the taking of their lands by the Grown under the authority of the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 in the province of Taranaki. New Zealand Gazette, 1866, 142.
The Compensation Courts were essentially extensions of the
On the other hand, against the hapū of Taranaki, as against Māori when the Treaty was signed, were European assumptions about the 'comprehension, status and binding power of written statements' as expressed through the Compensation Courts. The Compensation Court process was complex. What interests us here about this court was its reliance upon the comprehensive status and binding power of its written statements, given that its primary function was to aid the process of title transfer from customary law (oral) to English law (statutory documents). Strong assertions of oral consensus there were, from Māori people, before these courts. But these assertions were mediated through written forms and documents which, in the end, compromised the Māori capacity to represent or defend the seamless nature of customary law by which they lived. For example, in seeking to collect and record details of the substance and basis of Māori claims for the return of tribal lands within the confiscated blocks, the court relied heavily on a printed form entitled He pukapuka tono ki Te Kooti Whakawa Maori, kia whakawakia etahi take whenua. This was a 'form of claim' made available through Native Land Courts and native assessors.Pukapuka rarangi ingoa form, Applications to Compensation Court, Taranaki Confiscated Lands, Box 2A, Land Information New Zealand, New Plymouth.
However, in seeking certain land and kinship details, the form and process were problematic. They compelled claimants to write down and declare interests in land to a degree of specificity to which tribes and hapū were unaccustomed. These were lands long regarded as collectively owned, and the source of collective mana. Such lands were the sacred trust and asset of all the people. Here, for instance, complex laws of tapu were established over time, frequently invoked to protect a profusion of areas of land and waterways from human exploitation or defilement. Tapu declarations were of permanent concern to all Māori. Consequently, it was common for every natural feature to bear a name that spanned centuries of occupation.
Thus, on this form, Māori people were asked to declare 'Te whakaaturanga o nga rohe', the general lands in which they believed they might possess an interest. This largely constituted some of the lands over which their tribe or hapū would have exercised mana whenua, however much this posed difficulties to
As a consequence, the land claims invariably overlapped. The attendant descriptions of 'o nga rohe' were also general ones. These were customary lands for which there could be no limit to claimants, given the encompassing and secure nature of mana whenua, especially as asserted by local kinship groups through their whakapapa perceptions of descent and connected land interests. This was constituted as certain, in the final analysis, by the reality of occupation and the enduring knowledge of the whole area of land, substantiated by whakapapa, and sustained within the tribal memory.
With no documentation of any kind to certify title to land, tribes and hapu relied heavily on such enduring knowledge. A special responsibility lay with those who retained such knowledge, the administering body of elders who knew every prominent natural feature, and the way each was linked to the other within the boundary area between tribes. The responsibility borne by elders of retaining an intimate knowledge of the limits to title was particularly important. This was especially so when outside groups held title to pieces of land or resources, within the tribal domain, as invariably happened.
Before Compensation Court hearings were convened, details of all claims laboriously collected for all lands were copiously transferred by court officials onto extensive schedules. Names of the listed claimants were listed against lands claimed, in preparation for the hearings. Whole days of court proceedings were set aside for the preparation of these schedules that judges and officials used to call and cross-examine claimants, who were compelled to appear if they wanted any chance of a claim being heard, let alone granted. It is clear that, here, we see changes of some
Through Crown devices like the Compensation Court, the process had avowedly become a documentary one. There was very little scope for meaningful oral testimony or consensus beyond the preliminary collection of customary details by court officials through the use of specific documents. Yet there was a greater reason to allow for robust Māori oral responses — the future of the land was at stake. The tenuous nature of this process was especially evident later when grant allocations were finally made by the court to Māori. Many hapū disputed the right of neighbours to receive certain land allotments by way of compensation, if it was land over which they themselves claimed a customary title.
In the end, the size and complexity of the task facing the Compensation Court can be seen by the fact that, in Taranaki, for the Oakura hearings alone, the court heard a total of 270 fragmented claims to portions of the Oakura Block. These claims encompassed over 200 sites and provided the basis for reference for up to 30 hapu. Substantiating the claims became an impossible task for the Compensation Court, despite their enormous holdings of written documents. In the end, allocations of land were made that took little account of the original basis of claims to mana whenua, or to the hapū who were specific to those claims. List of claimants, Owners of the Oakura Confiscated Block, Proceedings of the Compensation Court, 1/11, Land Information New Zealand, New Plymouth.
Throughout the Compensation Court process, it was possible to discover hapū or other collective groups claiming descent, by using whakapapa, landscape and mana as points of reference. These were stressed as customary and long-standing, despite the new political realities facing Taranaki Māori. Such assertions emerge from the enormous holdings of Court written documents. As a consequence, written statements played a significant part in the proceedings, but no substantive accommodation was made by the Crown for any Māori oral responses, much less oral consensus. The use of documents, compiled by Māori, describing the land in detail as a first manoeuvre to retain it, in the end severely constrained the process for Māori. The comprehension, status and binding power of written statements played a critical part in
The signs were there, says McKenzie, at the very beginning. When McKenzie, Oral Culture, p.10.
In 1887 the finest Māori book of the 19th century, a superbly produced edition of the Māori Bible, was published. Yet for Māori this proved not a publication to celebrate but an object of execration. The missionaries had taken away their precious book and replaced it with a fraud. This essay explores why Māori and missionary interests collided over this second edition of the Māori Bible.
A favourite theme in the history of the book has been how print has altered the balance between tradition and renovation in society. Yet the histories of the transmission of texts to newly literate people show that cultural transactions are two-sided, and that newly introduced literary works can be appropriated towards the preservation of tradition. The story of the Māori reception of the Bible has often been used as an example of cultural transformation through print. There is another side to the story, however, in which the Bible has become an instrument in the preservation of tradition.
From the advent of printing, the Bible was gradually recon-ceived as a printed book. As a written text it was more significant, more public, more lasting. Western intellectuals viewed the printed word as an externally verifiable text and, because it was printed, it was a source of coherent ideas. Those able to read were capable of rational thought. In the missionary context this gave the Bible great status — an illiterate people could not possess sacred texts. This did not mean there were no sacred words, but it
Māori tradition was therefore challenged deeply by the advent of reading as much as it was by the Christian religion. The production of editions of the Bible in Māori gave Māori Christianity its own tradition through these books that were remarkable achievements. And while there has been much scholarly attention to the Paihia editions of Scripture by
Yet the edition was, from the point of view of its publishers, the
The 1887 Māori Bible was a moment in a long process. Its two texts, the Old and New Testaments, had quite different histories of translation and publication in Māori. The New Testament was prepared and issued on the Paihia Press in 1837, although a few excerpts had been published prior to this. The scale of the volume meant that its production was transferred to London in 1840, and new editions (with minimal changes to the text) were issued by the Bible Society in 1840, 1842 and 1845. By the end of the 1840s the colony was saturated with copies, some 72,000 in all.
By 1845, however, concerns had grown about the adequacy of the translation. It had obvious deficiencies including clumsy transliterations of English words because of the limited Māori vocabulary of the translators. There were also many typographical errors — hardly surprising given that Edwin Norris, who had checked
Williams went to England in 1851 and negotiated a new edition of the Māori New Testament. This fifth edition, checked by Williams it would seem, was produced in 1852 and is noteworthy for using the 'wh' rather than the 'w', perhaps reflecting Williams's base on the East Coast. See A bibliography of printed Maori to 1900 and Supplement
(Wellington: Government Printer, 1975; reprint of original editions of 1924 and 1928) item no.233,
William Colenso, however, was not impressed. In a letter to the Bible Society he complained that
Two great causes which have operated against ready disposal are the highly unnecessary alterations of texts in a people sensitive to ancient songs, or recitals of histories, so a great difficulty with the new edition, and also all the new little particles, ra ra hoke, na e hold, neo, ro pea which always sound so sweetly to a native ear having been expunged so that the present edition is much less truly a New Zealand edition than the 1st one . . . Doubtless there are differences of opinion on these issues, but the facts speak for themselves.
William Colenso , letter to Secretary BFBS, 3 February 1855 (BFBS Archives, Inwards Correspondence).
Perhaps they did, but the translators sharply disagreed, and the Reverend Robert Burrows on behalf of the missionaries insisted that Māori recognised the purity of the language of the revision.
Another edition of the New Testament and the Psalms with further corrections was issued in 1862. When it was decided to publish a one-volume edition of both Testaments in one Bible, yet another revision of the New Testament was begun by a group of missionary scholars, assisted by Sir Church of England in New Zealand. Maori Bible Revision Committee. See 'Preliminary meetings between Maunsell and Archdeacon W. L. Williams to consider some points regarding the revision of the Maori version of the New Testament, 21 March 1867 [1857?]', in the Robert Maunsell papers, MS 2981, Alexander Turnbull Library, NLNZ (hereafter cited as Maunsell Papers).Revision notes printed for private circulation among the members of the missionary bodies in New Zealand (Auckland: Cathedral Press, 1862) outlines Maunsell's plan for the revision. Committee members are listed in the BFBS, Auckland Auxiliary, 13th Report, 1859, p.8. For Martin see
The Old Testament translations had a much smoother genesis than those of the New Testament. All the 19th-century editions
See Te Manihera: The life and times of the pioneer missionary Robert Maunsell
(Auckland: Reed Books, 1991).
See New Zealand national bibliography to the year 1960, Volume 1: to 1889
(Wellington: Government Printer, 1980; in 2 parts), items no.482-4.
Maunsell took a year to do further revisions for a combined edition. See minutes of the BFBS Editorial Subcommittee, 20 July 1864, no.48 and 19 April 1865, no.2 r (BFBS Archives, Editorial Subcommittee Minutes, vol.7, 1862-4, P-184 and vol.8, 1864-7, P.6o).
So in 1868 a one-volume edition of the whole Bible was published, Williams, A bibliography of printed Maori
, item no.434,
BFBS. Auckland Auxiliary. 2.6th report (Auckland: The Society, 1872), p.7.
BFBS. Auckland Auxiliary, ifth report (Auckland:The Society, 1863), p.5.
Press (Christchurch), 10 May 1865, 2.
Nevertheless the publication was the culmination of a process of great significance for Māori culture. The Māori Bible became a fundamental part of Māori spirituality, particularly on the marae. It became a tapu object, deeply respected and venerated both as an object and for the words it contained. Memorisation of the Bible was highly respected and the text became surrounded with as much tradition as the Authorised Version was in English. How deeply it changed Māori spirituality is an issue much debated in the modern Māori world, but, for example, when Te Kooti had
In 1868 the W. J. Baker (CMS), letter to Editorial Secretary, Editorial Subcommittee BFBS, 4 June [1884] and H. Lang, letter to Editorial Secretary, 13 October [1884] (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.19, pp.132-3 and pp.218-9). See also Maunsell, letters to A. Reid, 26 February 1885 (Maunsell Papers)
Maunsell and Williams worked without the benefit of a large committee of review or any formal meetings and appear to have had no assistance from any Māori. Their only advice was from Archdeacon Ibid., 19 November [1886] (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.22, p.112).
The proofs were supposed to be checked by Bishop A bibliography of printed Maori
, item no.731; Mrs Carleton, letters to BFBS, 8 January 1886 and 11 November [1887] (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.21, p.82 and vol.23, p.29).
Specifications for the new edition were debated from the beginning. The
The edition was finally published late in 1888 and arrived in New Zealand in 1889, although its title page reads 1887. It was the same size as the 1868 Bible, although in board rather than leather covers, and at 1125 pages was about 75 pages shorter than the 1868 edition. The New Testament was separately paginated from the Old Testament, easing the publication of separate editions of the New Testament.
It is fascinating to compare the 1887 Māori Bible with the Revised Version of the English King James ('Authorised') Version. The New Testament of the Revised Version was published in 1881 while the whole Bible was published to critical acclaim in 1885. The key scholarly achievement of the revisers was the abandonment of the so-called 'majority' or 'received text' in the original languages; instead they based their translation on a new critical edition of the Greek and Hebrew, the so-called Westcott-Hort edition. Maunsell's scholarly bent was aroused by such textual issues, and not just in the Old Testament, for he was also a very able Greek scholar, and had evidently long wanted to correct some of William Williams's work.
Yet in this respect the 1887 Māori Bible is a disappointment. Maunsell took a very traditional line on some passages where the new manuscripts had challenged old readings. He retained such controverted passages as John 8:1-11, the long ending of Mark and the trinitarian verse in 1 John 5:7-8, which the English revisers viewed as late additions to the text. Many small textual revisions were missed. Thus in John 1:27 a suspect phrase, 'is preferred before me', was retained by the new Māori Bible, slightly modified as 'nōmua ia i a au'. Many conservatives believed that the Authorised Version was an inspired version, provided to give the Word of God to English people, and there were suspicions of the motives of the revisers. The Authorised Version fixed Christianity as a revealed religion. Maunsell was sympathetic to such views and we can probably see evidence of this in his approach to textual issues. If he was conservative, Māori were even more so, for they deeply shared faith in a sacred book, in which the text was not seen as words communicating a message, but as the voice of God.
In format, however, the Revised Version was much more influential. Maunsell drew attention to presentation of the text in paragraphs rather than verses in the English Revised Version, and the Auckland Committee noted the precedent of the use of paragraphing in the Tahitian Bible. Maunsell wanted to make the book less bulky and expensive, and paragraphing was bound to help, although changes in typeface and textual abbreviations also contributed. Bishop See [Reid], letter to Maunsell [1884] (Maunsell Papers); Maunsell, letter to BFBS, 30 January [1885]; Selwyn, letter to BFBS, 14 April [1885] and Rev. H. T. Robjohns, Napier, letter to BFBS, 14 February [1887] (BFBS Archives, Inwards Correspondence vol.20, p.59 and p.113; vol.22, pp.208-9). See also Minutes of the BFBS Editorial Subcommittee, 29 April 1885, nos. 49-50 (BFBS Archives, Editorial Subcommittee Minutes, vol.16, 1884-5, P.134).
The paragraphing format assumed that the book was to be understood in large blocks of meaning, whereas the Māori tradition of chanting was greatly aided by the separation of verses. The verses were treated by Māori as the basic units of truth to be savoured individually. The notion of reading paragraphs assumes a linear approach to meaning, which was of little interest to Māori. After Māori reacted adversely to this and other features of the edition, Williams insisted that he had always firmly opposed
This new format was accentuated by the use of headings for each paragraph grouped together at the beginning of each chapter which served to define the meaning of the chapter. The headings had been prepared first for a summary of the Bible prepared by Lawry and Maunsell and published in 1875 by the Ko nga tikanga 0 nga upoko 0 te Paipera
(Akarana: Wiremu Ekeni, [1875]). See Lawry, letter to BFBS, 12 February 1876 (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.12, p.67).
[A. Reid], letter to Maunsell [1884] (Maunsell Papers).
The 1887 edition also involved a curious new approach to the Māori language. Many textual changes were made to improve the Māori, at least in the eyes of the translators. Maunsell and
1. to correct misprints 2. to eliminate unnecessary words 3. to harmonise as much as possible the renderings, 4. to correct renderings that are ambiguous or otherwise faulty. We live far apart, so each prepared his notes & forwarded it to the other. Then marked and prepared until we come to matters needing a personal conference.
BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.19 p.218. Also cited in Rev. R. Lang, CMS, letter to BFBS, n.d., who cites Maunsell's letter to CMS (BFBS Archives, Editorial Subcommittee Minutes, vol.16, p.60)
Maunsell went far farther than this, simply because he 'could not restrain his pen when he saw the proofs' and amended passages that had not been his responsibility but were left unaltered by the dilatory Williams.
These many emendations concentrated particularly on word order. The previous approach to translation of the Bible into Māori was primarily word by word rather than phrase by phrase, reflecting English rather than Māori word order at points (although the translators also consulted the Greek and Hebrew). This seems to explain many changes in the new edition. Another factor was vocabulary. The search for a more natural Māori was a key justification for the translation. Grammar of the New Zealand language
(first edition 1842) had insisted on avoiding expressions influenced by English, and noted many examples of constructions used by Māori in their spoken language. He loathed earlier editions of the Bible for this reason.
Linguistic style was another factor. It had been decided that the translation should be written in a dignified classical Māori rather than the Māori in everyday use, and was for this reason called the 'classical edition'.Grammar of the New Zealand language, 3rd ed. (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1882), pp.x, 101.
At the same time a set of contrary principles led Maunsell to eliminate from his version characteristic features of traditional Māori oratory including redundant decorative phrases. These phrases had often presented problems to translators and headaches for proofreaders, since it was difficult to decide how to break them up into word units.
The Māori Bible is much larger than English Bible. This is an inconvenience to [the] Maori, who is almost always moving. It is a wordy language .. . [including] particles and adjuncts which have no meaning. We have agreed to cut off adjuncts (ornamental, as in kote miatanga mai; or Te tino whakatikanguaki o), though a Maori would use them. There was no written language when we came. We are now making one, and compelling, as it were, the colloquial language
to reduce its dimensions. Hence the vast bulk of the erasures you will see.
Maunsell , letter to Secretary BFBS, 30 January [1885] and Lawry to Editorial Secretary BFBS, 26 August [1885] (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.20, p.59 and p.310).
Maunsell, the chief advocate of this policy, overrode criticisms by other translators and curtailed the use of articles and particles with no particular function ('conversational redundancies'), and ornamental adjuncts like 'kote miatanga mai' and 'te tino whakati-kanguaki o Maunsell, letter to BFBS, 30 January [1885] (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.20. p.59) Maunsell, letter to A. Reid, 26 February 1885 (Maunsell Papers). 'N.T. Maori Revision, 16 May 1884', with notes from Matthew to Romans, until June 1884 (Maunsell Papers; Lawry, letters to BFBS, 7 December [1885] and 2 January 1886 (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.21, p.56 and p.116). Abraham, letters to BFBS, 6 November [1885] and 30 November [1885]; Mrs Carleton, letter to BFBS, 19 December [1885]; Bishop Abraham, letter to BFBS, 22 December 1885 and Mrs Carleton, letter to BFBS, 8 January 1886 (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.20, p.340 ; vol.21, p.34 and p.82).
The text was approved by Lawry, who commented that 'the revision reads smoothly, is terse, idiomatic, and forceful, and preserves words, phrases and constructions that should be of value to linguists and critics'.
A further factor was a dispute over the dialect of language used in the revision. The first translations, particularly of the New Testament, were written in the
Maunsell preferred the translation to reflect the 'central dialect' of Māori, which he saw as the Waikato form of Māori, from the region where he had worked, and Lawry felt that this dominated the 1887 edition.Grammar, and it influenced all his translations. In Colenso's opinion this had affected the acceptability of the earliest editions of the Old Testament in the Hawke's Bay.
Arguably by the 1880s the translators were less in contact with Māori and missed many of the subtleties of these issues. The translation was prepared in Auckland and, unlike earlier translations, there is no evidence of consultation with Māori. The failure to allow Māori to participate in and own the task of translation reflected the continued paternalism of the Māori mission of the Church of England.
The response to the 1887 edition was disastrous. Copies proved virtually unsaleable. No doubt this was affected by the decline in Māori population, and the inadequate distribution network at the time, but the problem went deeper. The translators had first experienced Māori dislike of revisions after the publication of the revised New Testament and prayer book in the 1850s. According
Bishop of Waiapu, letter to Dr. Wright, 14 April 1896 (BFBS Archives, Extracts From Letters, vol.34, p.265).
It is a matter of opinion what factors were most critical in the rejection. One reason was that the revisers made no attempt to attract Māori support. However, given the number of alterations over the previous few years, the format of the edition was probably the crucial issue, rather than the linguistic alterations, although certainly these were not endearing to readers. In 1903 the Reverend
when the need of a fresh issue of the Bible for Māoris is compared with the needs of millions who have no scriptures at all, he thinks the Māoris should at least wait. They have the whole S[cripture]s accessible, and the dislike of the present issue is a matter of taste. Critics (in a good sense) are mosdy those who can easily consult the R. V, if they like. If a new ed[ition] were brought out, what would be done with die London stock? Of course, the longer the delay, the less will be the need-
Rev.
F. H. Spencer , responding to a letter ofH. A. Baynes , Australia, 17 July 1903; to a letter of BishopLeonard Williams , 22 December 1903; and Spencer to BFBS, 24 December 1903 (BFBS Archives, Editorial Committee, Index of Resolutions, meetings of 2 September 1903 and 24 February 1904, Cambridge University Library).
This dispute indicates how deeply the printed Bible affected the development of Māori culture, and contributed to the making of oral tradition. Although oral tradition has always been important in Māori society, after 1837 a written culture began to emerge, and the Christian contribution to that culture was decisive. Christian concepts deeply affected the 19th-century development of the marae. Hui: A study of Maori ceremonial gatherings
(Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1975).
The experience was not unique to New Zealand. Those with contact with other Pacific cultures have reported similar experiences. Consistently the language of the first translation gained a
See Bible translation and the spread of the church: The last 200 years, ed. by Philip C. Stine (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991).
In subsequent years there were two further revisions of the Bible. The 1952 edition, now in universal use, employed Māori (including Sir Apirana Ngata) among the translators and preserved the traditional verse format. Even for this version there is oral evidence to suggest that some Māori, particularly in the north, were irritated at the changes. All attempts at a contemporary translation have failed for want of support. Traditionalism inhibited the acceptance of new translations even in English for many years, so perhaps we should not be surprised that Māori preferred the scriptures to sound traditional.
Māori critics of the changes clearly resented the imposition of the text from outside, and Māori objections were more acute because the translators were suspected as imperialist. The 1952 edition preserved many of the 1887 reforms, but they were accepted because Māori had taken charge of the process. Greek and Hebrew scholars are bound to fault the 1952 edition for its retention of suspect readings based on the old Received Greek text, but in fact their decisions followed those of Maunsell, except for printing the trinitarian verses in 1 John 5:7-8 in italics. The new edition was acceptable primarily because Māori had approved it before publication.
The role of Māori books changed only very gradually between 1837 and 1952. In 1887 the translators assumed that the Māori Bible would be used in the manner in which Europeans used books. Māori in contrast viewed the printed text principally as a reference point for the memorised text. Meaning was found not by reading but by reciting. Even 65 years later this viewpoint remained influential. The book is useless if it is not appropriated, and Māori criteria for appropriation were very different from those of Europeans. These are deep issues, reflecting profoundly on the formation of the new Māori community and its willingness to appropriate European ways and Christian values in New Zealand.
Governor Sir The Cape Town Grey Collection (some 5200 books and manuscripts) is part of the South African Library. The Auckland Grey Collection (some 15,000 books and manuscripts, plus correspondence) is part of Special Collections, Auckland Central City Library. Unless otherwise indicated all location numbers in these references (including those of the illustrations) are to Auckland Central City Library collections. Biblia polyglotta Complutensis
(1514-7), Edmund Spenser's
Grey also obtained books and manuscripts from New Zealand sources, initially during his first term as governor (1845-53) and continuing throughout most of his life. This essay, part of a larger study on Grey as a book collector, focuses on his collecting activities in New Zealand and offers some insight into his local sources of supply, what some of the items were, whether they
This paper emanates from a yet to be completed doctoral study on Grey as a book collector. The New Zealand focus has been culled from various 'in progress' chapters. For more general information on Grey's life (1812-98) see Sir George Grey K.C.B., 1812-1898: A study in colonial government
(London: Cassell, 1961);
Grey's book collecting activities in New Zealand are only small compared with those in South Africa and England, but examining this particular aspect provides a greater understanding of Grey the collector. This focus also adds to our knowledge of the larger and richer picture of the history of book collecting in New Zealand, and enables a better understanding of those individuals who contributed much to New Zealand's intellectual and cultural history.
The earliest known reference to Grey purchasing books in New Zealand is found in an entry dated 21 November 1846 in Advertisement, 'Sale by auction', New Zealander, 21 November 1846, p.1, col.2.
[Dodson] had a very good collection of books, tho' very strange ones for a private individual to bring all the way to New Zealand. Mr Wood bought a great number for the Gov. — a good many classics eg. the Quarto Oxford Cicero, a beautiful uncut copy which went for 7/-a vol. . . . There was [also] a beautiful copy of Tyndale's New Testament with woodcuts from the Duke of Sussex library wh[ich] was also bought by the Gov. at £4/10s. And a Bible, a beautiful black letter folio £5/-/. I much coveted both these, especially the last,.. .
William Charles Cotton , [Journal of a residence in New Zealand from 6 June 1846 to 22 March 1847], vol.11, pp.119-20. Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, D.L. ref. MS 43 : CY 665-2. Dodson was Rev. James Dodson, and 'Wood' may have been Reader Gillson Wood (1821-95) who, as an architect, surveyor and later Colonial Treasurer, was certainly known to Grey. The Tyndale New Testament, printed byRichard Jugge , had been sold at the first sale of the Duke of Sussex's collection, 1 July 1844. See W. Y. Fletcher'sEnglish Book Collectors(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902), p.12. The black letter Bible is a Bishop's Bible, printed byChristopher Barker , 1585. See
Grey's purchase of these items at the auction is significant. It places him squarely in the traditional 'English' school of collecting with book collectors such as Earl Spencer, the Duke of Devonshire, and Richard Heber, and their collecting of medieval manuscripts, first editions, black letter books, classical works, and the like. The occasion also highlights the availability of such materials in the colony and a desire, at least by some, to purchase them.
The 1552 New Testament is now in the Cape Town Grey Collection. It has an inscription inside: 'The Bible is not dry enough for your Excellency to use at the earliest untill tomorrow', signed '
Poetical works (1794), a French language version of the Psalms of David (1729) and a work entided Mesmerist, or, the new school of arts (1845).
Further interest by Grey in book auctions is evident from the existence of three slim catalogues in the Auckland Grey Collection. These catalogues list hundreds of lots of books on consignment from Further details on Lumley can be found in Books for colonial readers: The nineteenth-century Australian experience
(Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand in association with the Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies,
Monash University, 1995), pp.39-58. No information is known on who held the auctions in Wellington. In addition, only the 1851 Lumley catalogue has imprint details: 'Stevens and Co., Printers, Bell Yard, Lincoln's Inn'.
There is no definite evidence that Grey attended auctions himself. The use of someone like Mr Wood was a practical one, especially considering the busy affairs of colonial administration. One auction at which Grey certainly purchased books was a New valuable, and most important books from Henry G. Bohn, 4, 5, 6, York Street, Covent Garden; which will be sold by auction by Messrs Bethune & Hunter, at the Exchange, on Monday, May 31, 1852, and following days ([Wellington]: Printed at the Spectator Office, [1852]).
Of the 859 lots offered Grey obtained 45, for which he paid £59 3s 2d, and the range of titles purchased reflects his wide interests. From the 'Poetry and Fiction' section he bought George Crabbe's Poetical works, Thomas Croker's Popular songs of Ireland
and Thomas Percy's
The items Grey purchased from a particular catalogue reflect something of his own taste. What he did not purchase is also of interest, but outside die scope of this paper.
Six months later Grey purchased books at the joint auction of the collections of lieutenant-governors A catalogue of books being the library of His Excellancy [sic] Lieutenant-Governor Eyre, with another collection added, the property of His Excellency Lieutenant-Governor Enderby which will be sold by auction at the Exchange, on Wednesday, November 17, 1852, by Messrs. Bethune & Hunter. ([Wellington]: Printed at the Office of the 'Wellington Independent', [1852]). Both Eyre and Enderby left New Zealand in 1853. Geographical memoirs on New South Wales
(1825), James Burney's
Grey left New Zealand on 31 December 1853 to become governor of the Cape Colony, South Africa. His biographer Sir George Grey K.C.B., 1812-1898: A study in colonial government
(London: Cassell, 1961), p.252.
A catalogue of valuable books; a portion of the library of His Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B., which will be sold by auction, at the Exchange, on Monday & Tuesday, September 26 & 27, 1853. ([Wellington]: Printed at the Spectator Office, [1853]). The original is in the Cape Town Grey Collection, location number G17a85.
The 'large quantity of valuable books' up for sale was not, however, Grey's entire library collection and there is evidence that he selected items, culling them into 'keep' and 'not to keep' piles. Significantly, of the 45 titles obtained by Grey from the Bohn catalogue in 1852, 27 are listed in the auction catalogue of September 1853. His ownership of these items, predominantly 19th-century publications, therefore lasted less than a year. A further 12 books obtained from Bohn's 1852 catalogue have been identified in the Cape Town Grey Collection. These include works such as the 1586 printing of Thomas Hyll's A profitable instruction of the perfite ordering of bees
, a 1488 Augsburg printing of
Other books, however, faced further decisions. Grey had also bought from the Bohn catalogue of 1852 Peter Schoeffer's printing of Croneken der Sassen
(1492), Aesop's
The only other evidence of Grey buying at auction is at the much later date of November 1893, not long before his final return to England. The Auckland firm of Samuel Cochrane produced a list of 451 lots, of which some of the books were from the 'Rocklands' library of Justice Thomas Bannatyne Gillies. Samuel Cochrane & Son, Catalogue ([Auckland, 1893]). An invoice dated 16 November 1893 is bound up with the catalogue.The naturalist's library (40 volumes, for £2), A complete collection of state-trials (6 volumes, bound in calf, published in 1730; at £1 5s 6d), Colonel Peter Warburton's Journey across the western interior of Australia
(5 s 3d), and James Froude's 12-volume
Grey's New Zealand correspondents number 600 with a total of some 1600 incoming letters. Many are book-related: individuals requesting information on books, and others who either presented him with their own writings or gave him books for inclusion in his library. This trend accelerated after he formally handed over his library to the citizens of Auckland on 26 March 1887.
On 5 December 1881, Rev. Rev. A restitution of decayed intelligence, and Neill continued, 'Though not very old, 1605,1 believe it is now a somewhat rare book. I brought it with me to Auckland intending to have it bound, but Mrs Neill when I told her, thought the old cover would be more in harmony with the torn book.' Thesaurus linguae Latinae
, and
This copy of the Babylonian Talamud [sic] is, I believe, the only one in New Zealand, and I give it at the suggestion of the Rev'd Rabbi Goldstein, in the hope that this storehouse of ancient lore perhaps without equal in the world, may be of interest to the Hebrew people in Auckland.'
Neill, letter to Grey, 24 November 1893 (GL:NZ N4(2)).
Grey's response is worth noting:
My dear Sir,
Your letter regarding the donations you wish to make to the Public Library of Auckland is a most important one and has caused me a good deal of reflection.
I am very grateful for your offer but I think so valuable a gift ought to be made by yourself direct to the Library, so that we may have your name on record as one who has conferred a great and substantial benefit on the Library.
If you choose to ask that the works that you propose to give to the Library should be placed in my collection, that I think would be unobjectionable because they properly belong there, and I shall have had a worthy co-partner in enriching a very valuable class of literature . . .
Grey , letter toNeill , 24 November 1893 (GL:NZ N4(2)a).
On 10 January 1889 Mr The Queen and the Premier
and
Knowing you take an interest in all matters pertaining to the colony, I am sending you a copy of my book & poems entitled '
Lilts and Lyrics of New Zealand '. The fact of the late Mr Ballance having favourably noticed some of my writings, gives me encouragement to introduce them to your notice.'Marie Randle, letter to Grey, 24 August 1893 (GL:NZ R1).
There were many others. Moral evils inherent in the war system., as well as works by the prominent mathematician and astronomer Augustus de Morgan.
In May 1865, Judge Ibid.
London examiner of 1820-1, issues that involved both Brown's father and
Mrs Dublin University magazine. The latter work is important when ascertaining Grey's total literary output. Grey makes a claim that while in Ireland he contributed to its first issues.
An undated note by
Some other people had a moral obligation to provide Grey with books. One was The taxes in New Zealand because Grey had acted as a guarantor towards the cost of printing it. Wakefield, from all accounts
I shall send copies for review to the Editors of the New Zealand Times, Evening Chronicle and Evening Post: but I do not know who the respective editors are, or the strings to be pulled in order to obtain a prominent notice . . . Can you give me a hint what string to pull, and how to pull it?
'
Edward Jerningham Wakefield , letter to Grey, 29 May 1878 (GL:NZ W6(2)).
That Grey understood the importance of building comprehensive collections is shown by his address to members of the New Zealand Society on 16 September 1851:
Facts which we may observe, and which appear to us to be of little value, or entirely uninteresting, may prove, to the learned of Europe, of the highest possible importance and interest. Combined with other facts previously observed and recorded, they may serve to fill up links which were the only ones wanting to furnish the true clue to some mystery of nature, or to establish some truth which may prove of the greatest usefulness to the human race.... It therefore is, I apprehend, our duty sedulously to collect and record facts and information in each department of science and human learning; carefully abstaining from that foolish pride which would lead us to reject as useless all that our ignorance can neither comprehend nor make use of.
Sir
George Grey ,Address . . . to the members of the New Zealand Society as their first president, September 26, 1851(Wellington: Printed by R. Stokes, 1851), pp.8-9.
Grey certainly applied the notion of comprehensive collecting to the field of languages, an area of study that held a lifelong interest. In fact, once his interest in this area was known, books and small pamphlets flowed in. Indeed, even before his presidential address he was collecting language materials relating to New Zealand and the Pacific. He obtained his Māori language materials from both Māori and Pākehā as well as through the natural process of acquisition as a government official. Missionaries, churchmen, and Māori and Pacific Islanders were instrumental in completing the task for him.
Rev.
For the books you were so kind as to send with the map of New Zealand I am much obliged. I have just looked into them, & much admire those on arithmetic. I hope Your Excellency will remember our wants in the matters of a Maori book of arithmetic, & geography, and maps if possible.
Robert Maunsell , letter toGrey , 27 April 1849 (GL:NZ M31(3)).
Maunsell ended: 'My only apology for this long letter is our common subjects of interest in which I am delighted to find that you are going farther than myself. . . .' Ibid.
In August 1863,
Dear Sir George,
I am very sorry indeed not to be able to do what you wish with regard to a copy of my translation of Wilberforce's allegory of 'The Little Wanderers'. I have not a copy myself nor have I any idea of where one would be likely to be procured. You will I suppose have searched
in the library at Bishop's Court? — and at St. John's College? All my little treasures in the book way & of that sort were scattered to the winds during the Waikato war. I went to England in 1861 & returned in 1867 to find a box I had left in Mr Ashwell's house till I should return — containing my books English & Native etc. was lost. The English books I heard had been distributed amongst the soldiers — & I only got back the 2nd vol. of Hannah More's Miscellaneous Works & the 1st vol. of Leighton's Works — and not one Maori book or pamphlet. It is possible that Mrs Selwyn (The Close, Lichfield) or Lady Martin or Mrs Abraham might have, or know where, a copy could be found. I will send you, in case you have not seen it — a copy of the translation of a tract 'The Man who killed his neighbours', and 'The Teachings of a bed-quilt'. I translated it in 1870 as far as I remember & Sir W[illia]m Martin a year or two later seeing it had it printed in the press at St. Stephen's Taurarua. I also enclose a copy of a translation of a portion of the Rev. Chas. Bridges' 'Scriptural Studies' translated by me at the Waikato & which were carefully & considerably revised & improved by Dr Maunsell & published in 1860. But probably you have them already. Perhaps Mrs Puckey, late of Kaitaia North, or Rev. Joseph Matthews may have a copy of The Little Wanderers as they were at St. John's when it was published & the late Rev. W[illiam] Puckey translated some of them.
Elizabeth Colenso , letter toGrey , 4 March 1883 (New Zealand Manuscript (NZMS) 942).
Other book-givers included Bishop Bishop
The names
In 1885 Grey tabulated the number of printed Māori language books and manuscripts he had collected: 524 books (13,216 leaves) and 223 manuscripts (5,045 leaves). Sir Polynesian mythology (Auckland: H. Brett, 1885), p.xv. A detailed survey of Grey's printed Māori language books was undertaken during 1997. The collection totals 374 books and 147 volumes of manuscript material (exceeding 9,800 pages. A Bibliography of Printed Maori to 1900 and Supplement. (Wellington: Government Printer, 1924 and 1928) lists 1010 titles, and provided a useful yardstick. The manuscript figure is given by Journal of the Polynesian Society
, 75 (1966), 177-88.
Collecting Pacific Islands language materials was a natural extension to Grey's collecting Māori language materials. It was also a consequence of his political notion that the Islanders were to become not only Christians but British Christians with a taste for British products. For a full explanation see Angus Ross, New Zealand aspirations in the Pacific in the
nineteenth century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), chapter titled 'Governor Grey's early Pacific schemes'.
As early as March 1848, Grey was lending 'Polynesian Books' to Bishop Selwyn. In the same transaction Selwyn not only asked for an extension of the lending period for 'The Feejee & Australian publications' so that he could compare them with New Caledonian and Hebridean dialects, but he also responded to what
Bishop
Others who responded to Grey in this early period included several missionaries — Report of a missionary tour in the New Hebrides. This work presented to Grey is dated 'Auckland, March 7th, 1851'.
In the Cape Town Grey Collection there is an item titled Books wanted in the library of His Excellency Sir George Grey. This twelve-page list, printed as early as 1855, formally identifies the foreign language materials Grey sought for that collection — both specific and general works in languages such as Efik, Yoruba, and Bullom are requested. Research so far in the Auckland Grey Collection has revealed no such equivalent formal 'want' list. In New Zealand Grey adopted a much more informal approach in obtaining language materials by either relying on word of mouth or by direct appeal in letters. He openly asked individuals for works in the various Pacific languages, even to the point of providing desiderata. The following three letters reflect something of the responses he received from his requests. On 18 October 1861 Sir
My dear Sir George,
I send what I can find. I am sorry that the specimens of New Caledonian speech are missing. It is possible they may have passed into the hands of Bp.
Patteson .I supply N0.3 of your list & part of N0.4. Also
interaliaa scrap which may have a value as a 'beginning' of a work viz the first page in the language of Lifu which was printed at the College Press.Sir
William Martin , letter toGrey , 18 October 1861 (GL:NZ M27(1)).
Twenty-five years later,
Dear Sir,
My colleague The Rev. Mr Webb informs me that you would be willing to include in your collection of South Sea literature any of the books published for the Wesleyan Mission in Fiji.
I have therefore great pleasure in forwarding a copy of each of our Books now in stock. I am sorry that some of them are not better bound, but beg your acceptance of them as they are.
Frederick Langham , letter toGrey , 15 April 1886 (GL:L3).
The inference drawn by Langham was that Grey was actively collecting in the area. Confirmation that this was the case is found in a similar response that same year from
A good indication of the language materials Grey collected are listed in the catalogues he produced with Dr Sir Philology. Vol. II, Australia and Polynesia. Part II, Papuan languages of the Loyalty Islands and New Hebrides, comprising those of the islands of Nengone, Lifu, Aneiteum, Tana, and others (Cape Town: Printed at G. J. Pike's Machine Printing Office; Sold by Triibner, London, and F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1858). Sir George Grey and W. H. I. Bleek, Philology. Vol.11 - Part III, Fiji Islands and Rotuma (with supplements to Part II, Papuan languages; and Pan I, Australia (London: Sold by Trübner; Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1859). Sir George Grey and W H. I. Bleek, Philology. Vol. II-Part IV, New Zealand, the Chatham Islands and Auckland Islands (London: Sold by Triibner; Leipzig: E A. Brockhaus, 1858). [Sir George Grey and W H. I. Bleek], Philology. Vol.11 - Pan IV, (Continuation) Polynesia and Borneo. (London: Sold by Triibner; Leipzig: E A. Brockhaus, 1859). There is also the later, but unreliable, T Hahn, An index of the Grey Collection in the South African Libraiy (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1884).Auckland Public Libraiy, general catalogue of Grey Collection [and] Free Public Libraiy (Auckland: H. Brett, 1888). The supplements carry no date but were printed during 1891-3. Grey initally gave the Māori and Polynesian language books and manuscripts to the Cape Town Grey Collection. Exchanges in 1870, 1923, 1985, and 1995 have occurred that have seen almost all of this material return to Auckland.
One of Grey's intentions was to establish a special library that would enable students to prepare themselves for examinations and for their future professions, with a focus on mathematics and classical literature. Grey relied on Professor Aldis and Professor The Wildman (and later, Lyell) invoices are found in GNZMSS 258. For a brief description of this Auckland firm, see Anna and The analogy of religion, natural and revealed (1860), the letters and invoices from the firm of Wildman are the only extant evidence of Grey purchasing books from a local bookdealer.Turning the pages: The story of bookselling in New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 1993), p.22.A treatise on hydrodynamics, while the lowest priced items included John B. Lock's Dynamics for beginners and Randal Nixon's Geometry and space at 3s 6d each. Less than a month later, Wildman supplied Grey with three more mathematics books at the cost of £3 10s 6d.
Two years later, Grey purchased 147 classical works, amounting to 215 volumes. These works ranged from Antoninus and Aristophanes to Virgil and Xenophon. This list, which cost Grey £54 3s 9d, contained some of those works suggested by Professor Pond. Before the books reached the shelves of the Public Library, Grey also had the entire lot bound in half-calf and cloth. This operation, handled through Wildman, cost an extra £23 8s 3d.
Wildman also supplied other books to Grey. In September 1889 Grey purchased 11 books on travel and seafaring which cost £3 12s 6d. These included Anderson's The Hawaiian Islands
, Walpole's
While American book prices current for 1994 lists various copies of the first edition of Moby Dick as selling between $4,500 and $66,000, Grey paid only 10s 6d for his copy. Almost a year later, Grey was invoiced by Wildman for a further £86 15s 10d. This time a number of periodicals were purchased: Punch, covering 1841 to 1886, 174 volumes of the Edinburgh review, and the Graphic, 1870-87. Other items purchased included a facsimile of William Caxton's printing of Raoul Le Fevre's The Destruction of Troy
and a 1688 printing of Garcilasso De La Vega's
Sources of supply that did not have these additional fees were those numerous individuals that plied Grey with letters, tantalising him with some book (or manuscript) that he ought to have in his library. And of course there was almost always a price!
A Mr
One offer that Grey did accept was from
A perusal of the Auckland Public Library (1888) catalogue or a wander through the collection will reveal very few books on America. Americana was outside Grey's collecting interests; he was far more attuned to the European tradition of collecting medieval manuscripts, incunabula, early English printed editions, as well as following his own bent in the fields of language, scriptural writings, and natural history.
On the pastedown of 68 books in the Auckland Grey Collection is inscribed: 'From George Church to Sir G. Grey.' Church lived in Haslett Street, Auckland, and the range of books Grey acquired from him indicates that he was a bookman of some taste. Some of the books Grey received from him were a copy of Cicero's Philosophicorum pars secunda et tenia
(1580),
Invoices dated 28 and 29 October 1891 (GNZMSS 258).
And finally to Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition
, a 5-volume set of Dampier's
Invoices for Grey-Shaw transactions are found in GNZMSS 258.
There was much contact between these two Auckland bibliophiles and, as expected, there are other books in the Auckland Grey Collection that contain evidence of once being owned by Shaw. These books include Nicholas Jenson's printing of Giovanni Tortelli's Orthographia
(1471), the Nuremberg printing of Henricusjerung's
During the 19th century England and the Continent were the major centres of the book market, and Grey purchased many more books and manuscripts from established connections in these recognised centres. Yet, as is revealed in this overview of Grey's book collecting activities in New Zealand, there was a surprising richness of book material available locally, and Grey took advantage of the situation. He bought when he could, whether through an auction, book dealers, or from individuals. These local purchases were convenient, cheaper than the prices asked for on the English market, and essential, if, like other book collectors, the book captured 'his eye, his mind or his imagination'.Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 1910), vol.4, p.224.
Sir George Grey's position afforded a good opportunity to collect. As governor he attracted more than the usual contacts, many of whom gave him books because of shared interests, or because they wanted to be associated with Grey, and the legacy of the 'governor's gift'. This term is from The governor's gift: The Auckland Public Library 1880-1980
(Auckland: Richards Publishing and Auckland City Council, 1980).
The Auckland Grey Collection is exceptional in scope, content, and condition, and is invaluable for those interested in diverse and specialised fields such as philology, art history, palaeography, early printing, early New Zealand history and literature, and Māori-tanga. That many items in the collection were obtained by Grey while in New Zealand is of particular significance, especially to those interested in the history of print culture in New Zealand, for which the collection provides rich opportunities for further study.
A New Zealand link with the English Arts and Crafts movement was established in the early years of the 20th century by a young Dunedin woman, Autographs, a volume collected and bound by Otago Witness
, 4 November 1908, 71.
Stones Otago & Southland commercial, municipal and general directory, 1884-1920.
Catalogues for
Catalogues for
Auckland Arts and Crafts Club, Catalogue (1912).
Otago Daily Times, 30 December 1955, 3.
Women in their time: 75 years of the Otago Women's Club 1914-1989
(Dunedin: Otago Women's Club, 1990).
My search for the work of Eleanor Joachim arose from an interest in her donation of two William Morris family embroideries to the Otago Museum in 1954. A friend who knew her during the 1930s and 1940s told me that Joachim was interested in the arts and crafts and did 'leatherwork'. On enquiry I was
Mary Eleanor Joachim was born in England, probably in 1874. For discussion see Bulletin of New Zealand art history
, 14 (1993), 9-14.
From Entry of Death (1920), Office of the District Registrar, Dunedin.
Obituary, Otago Daily Times, 2 March 1920.
Montgomery, 'The Wimperis Family'.
Eleanor Joachim was educated at home until the age of 17 when she spent two years at Otago Girls' High School. Archives, Otago Girls' High School. Private collection, Dunedin. Reed Collection, Dunedin Public LibraryOtago Daily Times, 30 December 1955, 3.
The revival of the craft of fine leather binding during the
Women artists of the arts and crafts movement 1870—1914
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p.187.
Arts and crafts essays (London: Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 1893; reprinted by Longman Green, 1903).
In contrast to the applied composite decoration of Victorian commercial binding, Cobden-Sanderson used a series of small individual tools to form organic patterns. The history of decorated book binding in England
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp.108-9.
Ibid.
Gold tooling and blind tooling were the two methods of decoration most used by Joachim. In gold tooling the designs were impressed into the leather with heated metal tools over a predrawn paper pattern marked with a code of numbers and letters corresponding to the tools used. Women bookbinders, 1880-1920
(Delaware: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 1996) pp.68-70.
In addition to the linear tools, Joachim had more than 30 decorative leaf and flower tools and five sizes of an alphabet of capital letters of a typeface closely related to the Golden type designed by William Morris for his Kelmscott Press. Anatomy of a typeface
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990) p.53. A number of foundries produced designs derived from the Golden type.
Eleanor Joachim's workbook, now in the Hocken Library, is a 44-page scrapbook containing a small number of drawings and a large collection of used paper patterns pasted on to cardboard leaves. The paper patterns show pencil lines with the tooling indentations coded where needed for complex designs. The work-
Of the paper patterns in the workbook, the largest measures 247 x 380 mm, but there is no indication of this book's title. Some of the patterns demonstrate freehand tooling of the leather, and one for a Communion service has 70 grape leaves free-tooled with notable consistency. A small pattern for a Hamlet is decorated with 20 free-tooled pansy flowers. Several other bindings were of books of English literature and poetry of the late Victorian period. The catalogue of the Otago Art Society's annual exhibition of 1910 listed six bound books for sale. Titles included The
Oxford book of verse at £4, The Pocket Robert Louis Stevenson at £1 2 s 6d, and Benvenuto Cellini at 1 guinea.
Of special interest are bindings for Joseph Hooker's Handbook of New Zealand flora
, and two for Laing and Blackwell's
The Triad, 16 no.9 (1 December 1908), 1.
Tidcombe, Women bookbinders, pp. 189-90.
A few years before her death in 1957, Eleanor Joachim made generous gifts to Dunedin institutions that have enriched public collections of English Arts and Crafts material. To the Flower book of Edward Burne-Jones and three fine bindings; and to the
Eleanor Joachim had no family descendants and on her death her collection of bindings was dispersed without record. Moreover, no record of her commissions has been found. As few libraries record details of bindings, tracing further examples of her work is difficult. I have examined the fifteen examples of her work currently known to be in various public and private collections, six of which are identified by the tooled initials 'M E J' on the lower margin of the inside back cover. Only occasionally was the date of the binding included. These fifteen bindings, however, when compared to the evidence of her workbook, clearly form only a fraction of her output.
However, as recently as 1996, a gold-tooled green leather binding of The Psalms and Lamentations
(1901) from Joachim's personal collection was offered for sale.
Author's collection.
The audior is indebted to
1. Arts and crafts essays, by members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society, with a preface by William Morris (1903 reprint). 170 x 105 mm. Full binding in brown morocco with gold tooling in formal leaf design. Signed 'M-EJ'. Reed Collection, Dunedin Public Library.
2. Paolo and Francesca. A tragedy in four acts
, by
3. Autographs, collected by
4. The Psalms and Lamentations
, ed. by
5. My memories and miscellanies, by the Countess of Munster (1904).
219 x 140 mm. Quarter-bound in red-brown morocco with gold tooled title on spine, no decoration. Private collection.
6. In a Devonshire carrier's van: Tales told in the Devon dialect, by 'Jan Stewer' (1912). 181 x 117 mm. Quarter-bound in brown morocco with gold tooled title and simple tooled leaf design in black. Private collection.
7. In der philester Land, by
8. Du mein Jena, by
9. Prometheus unbound
, by
10. The collector's handy book of algae, desmids, fungi, lichens, mosses, etc.
, by
11. Sketches (vol. 1), by
12. Sketches (vol. 2), by
13. Sketches (vol. 4), by
14. Binding for illuminated address presented to Womens Section catalogue. New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, 1925-26. 215 x 145 mm. Fully bound outer cover in light brown calfskin with tooled simple leaf design in black. Cover stitched to catalogue with leather thong. Signed 'M E J'. Private collection.
'Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world.' These words of
In New Zealand we are fortunate to have a very rare volume of early hydrographic charts. Recently I have conserved this volume for the The complete East India pilot, from London to any part of the Indian & China seas, Australia, Van Diemens Land & New Zealand
, published in London by J. W. Norie & Co. in 1827, with additions to 1829. It consists of 45 fold-out sheets with one chart on each of the sheets. The closed dimensions of the book are 660 mm (height) by 450 mm (width). A few of the sheets are single-fold, but most fold out into four to six sections. Their sizes vary but on average the fold-out sheets are about a metre and a half in length, with the longer sheets over two metres.
The Pilot went through five editions between 1816 and 1827 (with additions to 1829), each one differing from the others. The 1827 edition is significant because it contains a large map of New Zealand based on Cook's chart of 1769, and a sketch of the southern port in Stewart Island by William Stewart. It also contains a sketch of the Bay of Islands and Captain
The epitome of navigation
and
The charts for The complete East India pilot were mainly printed from engraved copper plates, although parts of the plates were
The copy to be conserved was acquired for the university from Dr See Historic charts & maps of New Zealand 1642-1875 (Auckland: Reed, 1996), and also his Early charts of New Zealand 1542-1851 (Wellington: Reed, 1969). Murihiku
, Maling was alerted to a footnote that referred to a hitherto unknown map of New Zealand printed by 'Nozie'. He kept this curious detail in mind and, when later perusing a second-hand book catalogue from Birmingham advertising the sale of
When I received the book it was in a very tattered condition. Many of the charts were completely detached from the binding and several had split along their fold lines. Some of those which are over two metres long are folded into four to six sections, but over the years they had become incorrectly folded and many were split into a number of pieces. In other areas the paper was weakened and almost macerated by repeated incorrect folding. Along the edges of the paper there were many losses where it had worn away or become torn through handling. The covers are typical 19th-century marbled paper over boards with a leather spine and corners. Over the cover were placed two outer covers of sailcloth carefully stitched in place. The inside cover was almost stiff with the dirt and patina of ship life, providing further evidence of heavy use on board ship.
Briefly, this is how the volume was conserved. After being completely disbound, the charts were dry-cleaned with a finely grated rubber. Care was taken not to erase any pencil annotations. There were literally hundreds of small tears and splits which were repaired with fine Japanese tissue and a wheat starch paste. The Japanese tissue is made from the bark of the mulberry tree and it is very light but with long fibres which give it considerable strength. Because the tissue is feathered into tiny strips about 5 mm wide the repairs can be almost invisible. Some charts, however, especially those pertaining to New Zealand, were so fragile and weak that it was found necessary to line them on the back with whole sheets of paper. In conservation this is always a last resort because here one is substantially, if subtly, interfering with the nature of the original sheet of paper. After some experimenting, a western paper rather than a Japanese one was chosen for this purpose, and Old Cleeve, an English wove from Griffen Mill, was used.
An inherent difficulty in a book of this kind lies in the folded format of the pages. Each sheet was washed in an alkaline water solution and flattened to remove creases. Tears and splits were held together with tiny strips of tissue, and with a diluted wheat starch paste the lining paper was attached to the back of the sheet by the
The time taken for this task was around nine months. It raises the question, of course, of whether the time and money spent on one book is justified. I think the answer lies in the fact that this is a unique item, with high artefactual value because of the significance of the New Zealand charts. With the vast number of books in public collections, increasingly tight budgets and the small number of conservators, emphasis is now on preventive conservation. This means preserving the most items for the least cost by putting into practice policies relating to environmental conditions, security, storage and handling. Conservation ethics, which concern interfering as little as possible with the structure of the book to be conserved, also enter the discussion at this point. Often with fragile books the best solution is to box them. Because of The East India pilot's unique nature, however, it was felt necessary to refold the charts and rebind the volume using all the original materials, so its structure as a working document could be retained. Before rebinding, a microfilm was made at the National Library of New Zealand and a set of high resolution 4x5 negatives were taken. In this way researchers can peruse its contents without jeopardising the original document itself, while the book can still be referred to and displayed so that we can experience the delight of being in contact with the intricacies of The East India pilot.
Thanks to Conservation Services, National Library of New Zealand for the photographs.
This essay is about an episode in the publishing history of one of New Zealand's most widely read fiction writers, outside the country, during the first half of the 20th century: the popular novelist and short story writer,
To the journalists who regularly wrote about Edith Lyttleton in the 1930s, when she was in her sixties and had begun to give interviews for the first time in her life, she seemed shy and retiring, a genteel lady of slight build who was deeply reticent about her achievements as a writer. The reality was somewhat more complex than that. She was a woman who fought long and hard for the
Edith Lyttleton, letter to Paul Wallace, 25 May 1933 (Paul Wallace Papers, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries; hereafter cited as Wallace Papers, PSUL). Ibid., 10 July 1933 (Wallace Papers, PSUL). Ibid., 11 August 1933 (Wallace Papers, PSUL).'Get it into your head that all publishers & agents are out for what they can get, & unless you are prepared to fight them you will get left.'
During the half dozen years 1932-8 she wrote many hundreds of business letters. First there were those to the principals of her American and British publishers: the Century Company, then Doubleday-Century, of New York, and the British firm of Allen & Unwin, whose prestigious imprints she wished to retain even as
is an evil.'
There were also many letters to the Australian publishing firms whose fitful efforts in the 1930s to break the long-entrenched monopoly of British publishers on what the latter had until quite recently called in their contracts 'colonies and dependencies' she supported, although she was under no illusions that Australian publishing practices were also urgently in need of reform. In 1937 she called publicly for such reform, seeking in Australia 'a modern pub. system operating with vision', adding that she 'did not mean philanthropists': 'I have had a very large experience of publishers in various parts of the world, & I should imagine that no hyphen was stout enough to hold those two words together. Nor would authors wish it.'Bulletin, which in 1933 set up a new press, the
Finally, there was a great deal of correspondence with the
The status of the New Zealand market in fact became a bone of contention quite early on in these protracted conflicts, when the
In Australia in recent years there have been a number of studies of the efforts to promote a more active and independent Australian publishing industry which occurred in the 1930s. These studies See, especially: The foundations of culture in Australia
(New South Wales: W. J. Miles, 1936);
When Stephensen informed Lyttleton in 1935 of the financial collapse of his third highly speculative publishing venture in as many years, cursing booksellers but 'still seeing the future as glorious & wonderful', she commented acidly to a friend, 'I wonder if his wife does.' Lyttleton, letter to Murray-Prior, 11 June 1935 (Roderick Papers, NLA).
Towards the end of 1932, when Edith Lyttleton's story begins, the first of these three novels, Pageant
, an epic of Tasmania's 19th century convict and settlement history, was in press and shortly to appear from one of the largest corporate publishing companies in the United States, the Century Company of New York. The second,
These three books in fact represented a new departure in Lyttleton's writing, an attempt to establish a second literary career after a period of eight years in which she had published almost nothing. Prior to that, in New Zealand until 1909 and in London until 1925, she had established herself as New Zealand's first successful professional fiction writer, contributing hundreds of short stories to New Zealand, Australian, British and American popular general magazines, and publishing eight novels in both England and the United States, three of which were made into Hollywood silent movies. Two of the novels of this second period, Pageant and Promenade, were the best books she ever wrote, alongside her last, Grand parade
, which appeared in 1943. The third,
Lyttleton's initial experience in Great Britain with the manuscript of Pageant, which she had completed in New Zealand in 1930 and for which she held high hopes, was one of disappointment. She was so unhappy with her English agent, the firm of
Locke (publishers of children's books and light, frothy romances), who knocked it back, that she withdrew it, sacked the agent, and took it with her to the United States, where in 1932 she gave it to her New York agent, Francis Arthur Jones. She was delighted when Jones placed it with the Century Company, whose enthusiasm about the manuscript quite won her over, although she later admitted to some qualms about the contract she was persuaded to sign. In a talk on publishing which she gave in Australia and New Zealand a few years later she contrasted the old-school-tie style of British family publishers ('stiff with tradition') with the hype of the American syndicates ('nebulous affairs like the Cornstalk Co., the Century Co., the Atlantic Co., [whose] business and literary managers are salaried men'). Though unspecified, the encounter she describes is based on her visit to the office of the Century Company in July 1932 to discuss the contract for Pageant:
You go to the publishing office and are shot up 12 or 15 stories to a large flat, all little cubicles with no doors, and from every cubicle an
interested typist peeps out to see who's coming. An apparently enraptured clerk who gives the impression that he has been waiting all day for you on the door-mat shows you to a comfortable chair, and next moment appears the literary manager, full of apologies for having kept you waiting. He takes you to his room . . . which is quite devoid of graces, sits down opposite you and says: I don't care what it costs. I'm going to have your book. He knows it is quite safe to say that since the business manager will be in to pulverize you directly. After compliments he calls the business manager . .. who arrives with such alacrity that you suspect him of listening at the door. With him come all the sub-managers, clerks and so on who can squeeze into the tiny room. They are all very young and keen and cheerful; they all shake hands and are pleased to meet you. Then the business manager sits on the corner of the desk and says: Well, now, what was the matter with that contract I sent you? So you proceed to argue it out, with the literary manager saying at intervals: I don't care what it costs. I'm going to have it. But that doesn't worry the business manager at all. He takes up the points patiently and courteously, pouring out a volume of explanations with everyone standing round listening like students at an operation.' Lyttleton, Address to the Penwomen's Literary Club.
Although Edith Lyttleton knew that the contract she signed soon afterwards (enthusiastically advised to do so by her agent Jones) was not especially good, it took only a few months — well before the book was published in fact — for her to begin to realise how thoroughly bad it was, and how the effects of its provisions were to deprive her of large proportions of royalty income, embroil her in the complications of the international publishing industry, and involve her in a struggle to support the establishment of an independent publishing industry in Australia and New Zealand.
According to the contract, the Century was given 'the exclusive right of publication throughout the world' and At a number of points in the text, marked by square brackets, monetary figures have been converted into 1998 New Zealand dollars in order to provide an approximate indication of the size of the sums involved, which were in fact very substantial. The conversions are based on an inflation rate, roughly, of 3,000 per cent since the 1930s (information provided by Statistics New Zealand) and on average exchange rates for the period gleaned from Lyttleton's Royalty Statements. As a rough guide, in die 1930s NZ£1 was equivalent to USS3.50 (and converts to NZ$60 in 1998).Pageant was to be published in February 1933 at a price of $2.50 per copy [approximately NZ$40 in 1998 values].
Shortly after this, in August, the Century sent Lyttleton a letter to sign, 'just to avoid any possible misunderstanding in the future',' Cutrice Hitchcock, letter to Lyttleton, 8 August 1932 (Private Papers).
By November, some of the implications of the contract began to become apparent. The Century informed Edith Lyttleton that the
In the meantime she had also been approached for work by Bulletin's newly established Pageant] I consider a great thing towards setting up real Australian publishing and getting authors free from a subordinate tacked-on position in London.'
However Lyttleton was dismayed to find that under her Century contract she was not free to come to a separate arrangement with the Endeavour Press to publish Pageant in Australia — and have it distributed from there in New Zealand as well — and that the Australian rights were now wholly owned by Allen & Unwin.
By November 1932 she had also completed the manuscript of her Yukon novel, The world is yours, and anxious to avoid the problems emerging for her with the Pageant contract, she left the new manuscript with Jones in New York. She instructed him to seek serial publication only and delay placing it as a book. Her aim was to use whatever publicity she got from its serial publication (if that could be achieved), as well as from Pageant after it appeared in February, to strengthen her negotiating position for a contract on the new book. She then set sail for England — where she had lived from 1910 to 1925 and established herself as a popular fiction writer — planning to return to New Zealand later in 1933 to begin her New Zealand novel,
Shortly after her arrival, however, she was again dismayed to discover that Jones had promptly taken the manuscript direct to the Century and was urging her to sign a contract he had arranged with the company — which was, as far as the disposal of rights was concerned, in every respect the same as the iniquitous Pageant
contract, although it offered a marginally improved royalty rate (10 per cent on the first 2,500 sales, 12
Francis Arthur Jones, letter to
She took the issue of Jones's commission to the The world is yours
to the Society of Authors for advice. They pronounced it 'far from satisfactory' and provided two pages of detailed amendments to no less than ten of the contract's sixteen clauses.
Kilham Roberts, letter to Lyttleton, 10 February 1933 (Private Papers).
She now approached Pageant
in Australia, since she was receiving increasingly importunate cables from Stephensen, offering very good terms for it. Unwin was sympathetic to her plight, and thought very highly of her novel, which he was at that time preparing for publication in England. He was aware that under her contract with the Century, Lyttleton would receive only half the royalty income on his English edition, the other half going to the Century. He was also embroiled in a dispute with the Century over the distribution of income from the sale of the translation rights of
Lyttleton liked and respected Stanley Unwin. He belonged to an old-school-tie family publishing tradition, which Lyttleton
You go to [an] old uncomfortable building . . . where none of the clerks, sitting on high stools, takes any notice of you for quite a long time. They are engaged in parcelling up books and rejected manuscripts ... & you are sure you see your own rejected manuscript being parcelled up over & over again ... A very long wait puts you in a sufficiently chastened condition to be ushered upstairs to the publisher's sanctum. Here a gracious gentleman in suitable surroundings subtly makes you feel that he is his own great grandfather ... & that you are his great grandfather's client back in the days when one paid to have books published .. . He talks of his holiday in Switzerland . .. of his brother's illness ... of the death of a friend ... of his neuritis .... Tea is brought in . . . cigarettes lit. . . there is more about his neuritis ... perhaps he will have his teeth out. By this time you are so sorry for him that you want to say: My dear sir, take my book as a gift if it will comfort you. But there has been no mention of books, & you begin to understand that he has not recognized you as a writer & apparently mistakes you for a long-lost friend .... Then, quite suddenly he throws himself back in his chair & says: Well. I have decided to take your book. It is so dramatic that you feel you should be dramatic too; but you don't quite know how, so you sit still & say Oh? .. . Presently you get up to go. But it seems that there should be more to it than that, so — quite aware of the vulgarity — you murmur something about contracts. He waves that aside. The business manager sees to all that. In time you will receive your contract from the business-manager. You never meet the business manager, & soon recognize that it is a clear case of David Copperfield's Spenlow & Jorkins. You may wheedle Spenlow as much as you like, but though he would love to do all he can he is helpless in the hands of the invisible & implacable Jorkins."
As mentioned above, Unwin was sympathetic to Edith Lyttleton's predicament. 'We dislike exceedingly being placed in such an awkward position Unwin, letter to Lyttleton, 27 July 1933 (Private Papers).vis a vis yourself, he wrote to her,Pageant scenario potentially
Unwin initially told Lyttleton that it was too late to arrange for an Australian publication of Pageant
, and that although he supported the idea of Australia publishing its own books, many local booksellers were opposed because the publishers there were also booksellers and monopolised the market. Presumably the main such publisher/bookseller he had in mind was the firm of
Pageant
was published in the United States in February 1933, in England in early March, and in Australia in mid-May. How well did it do, in these mid-depression months, when in the actual week it was published in the United States the banks were closed? In the circumstances, the answer is, astonishingly well. In the United States it topped the best-seller lists in numerous main cities for several months, where its main competitor was a new Sinclair Lewis novel,
Sun, 7 February 1933.
In England Pageant
received excellent reviews, and sold approximately 3000 copies in its first year. Lyttleton, however, was disappointed in these sales figures and thought it had been poorly promoted. She particularly disliked an advertisement she saw
In Australia and New Zealand, the Endeavour Press edition was, as in the United States, a remarkable success. Between May and December 1933, the first edition of 5000 copies sold out, and a second edition of 5000 copies largely sold out the following year. The book won the Gold Medal of the Pageant
, more than any other publication, had 'put [the
Stephensen's circular, no.2 (March 1934), 1.
If Edith Lyttleton had been able to make separate contracts for each of the three editions, her income in New Zealand pounds from the sale of those 60,000 copies (once Jones had received some £300 in commission) would have been of the order of £2,700, a very significant sum equivalent to NZ$ 160,000 in 1998. However, on English sales she was entitled to only half of her royalty income, the other half going to the Century; and on Australian and New Zealand sales, she was entitled to only a quarter of her royalty income (3d out of every 1s), since Allen & Unwin took half of it from the Endeavour Press, then sent the rest on to the Century, who took half of that before remitting the remainder to Jones, who took his bit before paying what was left to the author. On Pageant
those arrangements provided an extra £500 [NZ$30,000] to Allen & Unwin and the Century, at Lyttleton's expense, without any outlay at all on their own account. Almost certainly, also, the dispute between Allen & Unwin and the Century over the division of income from translation sales cost Lyttleton several other contracts (especially for French and
However, Lyttleton's financial situation was actually far worse than this. She discovered in mid-1933 — as the first royalty cheques came in — that as a New Zealand resident, her American earnings were subject to an 8 per cent American Aliens' tax, and that her British and Australian earnings were subject to cumulative taxes of 25 per cent in each country as they made their way to the Century in New York. Remarkably, these taxes applied to novels, but not to short stories or serials. In other words, on her British sales, 25 per cent tax was deducted before the remainder was sent to the Century, where it then attracted the 8 per cent Aliens' tax; and on her Australian earnings, 25 per cent tax was deducted by the Endeavour Press in Australia, and a further 8 per cent on what was left after Allen & Unwin had removed their 50 per cent of the royalties. Lyttleton estimated, not too inaccurately, that on her Australian and New Zealand sales these various depredations, together with the cost of the exchange transactions between each country, would reduce the 1s per copy she was due to receive to the princely sum of 1d; 'and all my friends out there,' she wrote bitterly to Unwin, 'think I am coining money.'
She did not object to being taxed once on royalty earnings in the various countries in which Pageant was sold, for example, to the 8 per cent Aliens' tax on her American sales. But she objected vehemently to the cumulative taxes which were a direct result of her being unable to make independent contracts in each country. She never saw the contract which Allen & Unwin made with the Century for the disposal of her work, and the contract for the Endeavour Press edition was between the Endeavour Press and Allen & Unwin: Lyttleton's name was not even mentioned in this contract; it simply referred to 'a book entitled Pageant by G. B. Lancaster', and all royalties and accountings for sales were sent directly to Allen & Unwin.
It was thus not only through direct contractual arrangements that colonial authors were exploited by international publishers, but also through the operations of the international taxation system. Stanley Unwin, still protesting sympathy, wanted to arrange to pay her share of royalties coming through his office directly to her bank account in London, so that she could avoid the 8 per cent American Aliens' tax on sales outside the United States, and claim
its British earnings under its contract with Allen & Unwin. The Century demurred, even though no loss of its own earnings was involved, believing that it would be liable for tax evasion.
In the midst of all this the hapless Jones half-offered to reduce his commission from 10 per cent to 7 per cent. It may have been that he was genuinely ignorant of the tax implications of the contract he had enthusiastically urged Lyttleton to sign, since he also lost commission on her reduced royalties, though he would not otherwise have had the agency of her non-American sales. By this act of self-denial, he implied, Lyttleton would then simply be in the same position as American writers whose 'normal' rate of commission was 15 per cent. Perhaps he was still smarting at the British Society of Authors' jibe that 'no reputable agent' in either the United States or England charged more than 10 per cent. He then suggested leaving his American commission at 10 per cent, but foregoing royalties on overseas sales. Perhaps this was a genuine offer, although the amount lost on the 3 per cent foregone in America would have been higher than the amount lost by foregoing overseas royalties entirely. Edith Lyttleton in the end ignored his efforts to shore up their relationship, commenting that on her part she had no wish to renege on agreements already made with him, for 10 per cent:
It may interest you to know that you have reduced me to such a state of nerves and exhaustion that I have had to give up writing altogether. I feel that I never want to write another book. My agents always make me bad contracts and then leave me to fight for what I can get... if anything. I wonder what you think I pay an agent for .... I shall take very good care that matters are different in future.
Lyttleton , letter toJones , 16 June 1933 (Private Papers).
At this point, in mid-1933, Edith Lyttleton turned her attention to the still unresolved contract for her next book, The world is yours, wishing to finalise American and British contracts for it before she left for New Zealand in September. In the meantime, Jones had managed to place it serially with the American journal, Good housekeeping, for US$6,000 [NZ$100,000], where it was due to run from July to December after the completion of a John Galsworthy serial. Given the success of Pageant, she believed she was well placed to make much better terms for the book, especially since
The world is yours. They eventually became the firm of Promenade (1938) and Grand parade
(1943).
Unfortunately the status of yet another of the late-inserted clauses in her original Pageant contract, pertaining to options on her next two books, was unclear, and in the end she agreed to stay with Doubleday-Century, this time reserving all rights other than the American and Canadian markets. However, in an astute bargaining move prior to signing the new contract, she also got Doubleday-Century to agree to allow Allen & Unwin to pay her overseas Pageant royalties in future direct through Doubleday-Century's London office. This enabled her to avoid the 8 per cent Aliens' tax on her non-American earnings, and to be able to claim a rebate of the 25 per cent British tax on her Australian and New Zealand earnings, and she also persuaded the company to forego all future claim on Australian royalties for Pageant.
She managed to preserve some of her Pageant royalties through this agreement, but by then she had lost most of them, since advance payments as well as royalties for the initial months of sales had already been transmitted to the New York office. Overall, she probably lost about a third of the actual royalty income the book earned — approximately £850 [NZ$50,000] — through being unable to make independent arrangements. It might be said that she nevertheless still did well, but not when it is remembered that Lyttleton's economic survival depended on her income as a professional writer, and that she had published very little for eight years.
Jones, her New York agent, was still complicating her life in mid-1933. The text of The world is yours
which appeared in
In the metaphorical melodrama invoked at the beginning of this essay, it is possible to read Jones as a kind of blundering comic fool or buffoon, innocent of deviousness and unaware of the havoc his many efforts to 'do his best' invariably created. He was given to using the phrase 'lapsis [sic] scribendi' (a mere drafting error, which 'of course would have been corrected in the official contract'),The world is yours, as pointed out to her by the British Society of Authors. It is also possible to see him as a consummate behind-the-scenes schemer, a new type of agent thrown up by the corporate jungle that the American publishing industry had become in the 1930s, aiming to survive by always being two or three steps ahead of everyone else. If so, he met his match in Edith Lyttleton, who insisted on calling his bluff. In her view he was simply a pawn in the hands of American publishers, who manipulated him to do their work of getting as much out of the author as possible. When she tried to sack him as her agent a year later, he refused to answer her letters of dismissal; eventually she got Doubleday-Century to hand-deliver a letter of dismissal, wait while he signed an acknowledgement of receipt, and then send the signed acknowledgement back to her. She always, thereafter, kept the receipt in a safe place.
Edith Lyttleton's adventures with the international publishing industry in the 1930s were by no means over. In fact her stiffest battle was yet to come, and it was to be with the formidable Stanley Unwin, now president of the BPA. This complication in the story corresponds to that moment in melodrama when the kindly mentor, listening to the heroine pour out her troubles to him in his study, suddenly pulls a gun out of the pocket of his morning jacket, and points it at her. . . .
Having satisfactorily resolved her contract on The world is yours with Doubleday-Century, Lyttleton now turned to the disposal of
Pageant — both the sales it was achieving in Australia and New Zealand, and the quality of its production. Moreover Stephensen, who had not yet left the Endeavour Press, was anxious to come to an agreement with her on The world is yours, and offering the same excellent terms. On the other hand she was not especially pleased with the British sales of the Allen & Unwin edition of Pageant, believed it had been very poorly promoted, and thought that the quality of its production was quite inferior to the Century and Endeavour Press editions. She decided to contract separately with the Endeavour Press, thereby avoiding the sub-contract arrangement on Pageant which had given Allen & Unwin half her Australasian royalties. She advised Audrey Heath, her new London agent chosen on the recommendation of the British Society of Authors, to see whether Allen & Unwin would offer improved terms on the British rights only for The world is yours, and agree to improve the quality of production and promotional arrangements. If they did not want the book or would not offer satisfactory terms the manuscript was to be tried with other British publishers, perhaps Heinemann or Macmillan. Stanley Unwin's response to Audrey Heath when she approached him seems to have been, to put it mildly, uncompromising, though its gist emerged only during several months of toing-and-froing between the parties, and some of the arguments were advanced not by Unwin himself but by his business manager at Allen & Unwin's, Mr Skinner, the man whom Lyttleton later saw as a suitable candidate for Dickens's 'invisible & implacable Jorkins'. The response went as follows: Edith Lyttleton was not at liberty to try other publishers in England {or Australia, for that matter) on her own account; Allen & Unwin wanted the book themselves, and under the terms of their contract with the Century for Pageant, they had full, exclusive rights to dispose of her next two books as they wished in Britain, on the Continent, and throughout the Empire; furthermore, Unwin was not in the least disposed, this time, to allow her to come to a separate arrangement with any Australian or New Zealand publisher; his agreement to do so in the case of Pageant had been a favour to her, because he had felt some sympathy with the predicament the Americans had put her in, and she ought now to feel under some personal obligation to him; when he allowed the Endeavour Press to publish
Pageant he had not realised how successful it would be; moreover the Endeavour Press had deliberately locked the Allen & Unwin edition out of the New Zealand market, by undercutting his price of 7s 6d and selling their edition at 6s 6d; what was more, the Sydney Bulletin, the Fellowship of Australian Writers, and others in Australia were even now openly boasting that the established British-controlled publishing system was about to collapse; he was determined to 'smash' the The world is yours
to do so; finally, Miss Heath should warn Miss Lyttleton that if she persisted in making an independent arrangement with any Australasian publisher, such was the strength of feeling in the British publishing industry that she would be permanently 'blacklisted' by British publishers and unable ever to publish a book in Great Britain again.
The arguments presented in summary form in this paragraph are extracted from numerous letters between Lyttleton, her agent
Lyttleton, letters to Heath, 12 August 1933 and 3 September 1933 (Private Papers).Pageant] will fully compensate him for his losses.''Prima facie, however . . . you have [no] reason to feel under any particular obligation to Mr Unwin for what he has done since it would seem to have been as much in his own interests as yours.'
Lyttleton also took steps to prepare the ground for a stand on the reservation of Australasian rights, writing to the British Society of Authors again to ask 'what steps, if any' it would take 'to recognize the Endeavour Press [and similar houses] as a separate entity': 'I do feel that it is quite time Australia had its own self-contained publications and distribution. Booksellers out there are very much afraid to order many copies of any book and try to put people off with what they have in hand.'
If the new Australian publishing house which the Sydney
Bulletinis backing proposes to operate on a fairly large scale and is prepared to offer fair and reasonable terms to authors, the Society will certainly recommend its members, in suitable cases, to withhold their Australasian rights when entering into contracts with English and American publishers.
Kilham Roberts , letter toLyttleton , 8 June 1933 (Private Papers).
Lyttleton then got Heath to draft up and send a contract to Allen & Unwin, embodying a range of protective provisions, including reservation of the Australasian rights on The world is yours. Allen & Unwin promptly returned it and enclosed their own standard contract. This required Lyttleton to grant to the publishers 'the sole right to publish the work . . . throughout the world excluding America and Canada', as well as 'the sole right to sell or assign the . . . Dominion, Colonial, Continental, translation, serial, broadcasting and anthology rights'. Unwin added, perhaps anticipating some kind of compromise, that the firm was 'most anxious to retain New Zealand', and that he wished to discuss this with Miss Lyttleton herself. Heath advised Lyttleton: 'Unless it would definitely conflict with your arrangement with your Australian publisher, I should myself feel disposed to allow Mr Unwin to have the New Zealand territory'.
Lyttleton replied promptly and sharply, 'Mr Unwin evidently wants the Dominions as a place to dump the copies he can't sell here, but I don't see why I should spoil my N.Z. sales on that account', Pageant in New Zealand during the period when the company had exclusive access to the market:
He had a month or six weeks clear field in both Aus. and N.Z. before the Australian ed. appeared . .. [and] I can quote you letters from my friends in the various N.Z. centres.
Christchurch.Only six copies for sale in the largest bookseller's; those sold at once and no suggestion of getting more. The bookseller said he would try and procure a copy from another town.Dunedin.None to be had.
Wellington, (the capital.) A friend wrote an amusing letter about the competition she had with her husband as to which could find a copy. After some weeks she discovered one 'in a tiny shop down a side-street' and rushed in and carried it home in triumph. She adds: 'Nowthe Australian ed. is out, and of course that is everywhere and everyone is now talking about Pageant.'
Lyttleton added,
[I]f [Mr Unwin] would authorize his [N.Z.] agent to submit me the number of N.Z. sales I could contrast with those of The Endeavour Press. If Mr Unwin's sales far outnumber those of the Aus. ed. I will give him all N.Z. If they do not I will leave it equal rights. Don't you think that is a fair proposition?
Ibid.
Heath insisted that she was 'not in the least disposed to take sides with the publisher', Ibid.except 'this disputed point of New Zealand.' Nevertheless she also represented to Lyttleton what were clearly arguments advanced to her by Unwin — that 'there might be some truth in his argument that the New Zealand trade is not altogether pleased at the Australian activity . . . [because of] the keen competition . . . between the two [countries]', and that Australian publishers were being 'unwise in their desire to secure a sort of monopoly of publishing and exclude books coming over from this side' and had 'greatly prejudiced the English publisher who might otherwise have been willing to give in with a more or less good grace in certain cases'.
Lyttleton had three final points to make. First, that it was quite untrue that New Zealand booksellers were hostile to being supplied from Australia — the contrary was the case. Second, that she had recently been cabled by the Endeavour Press that the price of their edition of Pageant was actually included in their contract with Allen & Unwin, so Unwin's argument that the Australian firm had acted deviously in undercutting the price of his edition was also quite untrue. And third: 'Now I know that Mr Unwin knew exactly what he was up against before he gave the concession I do not see what right he has to ask me to help smash them [the Endeavour Press] because they made use of it.'
These disputations took place over two months, August-September 1933, and remained unresolved when Lyttleton sailed for New Zealand from London at the end of September. Her final
Pageant contract did not allow that, Heath was to withdraw the book from the British market altogether. If Unwin's threat that she would be blacklisted were true, the novel would not find a publisher in England in any case. To an Australian friend she wrote at this time: 'I don't yet know what will happen except that I don't mean to let Australia down. [This] is another case where a woman gets the worst of it. They wouldn't have dared take that tone with a man.'
A month later, however, shortly before she was due to stop off in Sydney, Unwin capitulated. Lyttleton received a cable from Heath informing her that he had agreed to the exclusion of Australia from the contract and to New Zealand's becoming an open market for both editions, one month after the publication of the Allen & Unwin edition in February the following year. The British Society of Authors had monitored the agreement, approved it, and advised her to make sure that these provisions were also written into her contract with the Endeavour Press.
Why did Unwin back down? There were likely to have been a number of reasons. First of all, on the English market alone there
See Reid, 'Publishing, fiction-writers and periodicals in the 1930s', in Pageant was still best-selling in the United States. Lyttleton was thus in a much stronger bargaining position than other Australian writers who had found it very difficult to achieve British publication of books first published in Australia. Marjorie Barnard, for example, commented in 1935 to Vance Palmer, who had had this experience, 'Having had Australian publication first makes it much more difficult. I know that many publishers won't look at a book without the colonial rights.'Cross currents p.117.
Promenade. Furthermore he was astute enough to be likely to predict that when she reached Sydney, and later New Zealand, there would be very considerable publicity about her. No other New Zealand or Australian author had ever had a novel chosen as Book-of-the-Month by the
There was indeed a great deal of publicity; her two weeks in Sydney (and afterwards in Auckland) at the end of 1933 were a constant round of speaking engagements, newspaper and radio interviews, and receptions in her honour. The last thing either Unwin or the British publishing industry needed was the negative publicity of a cause celebre — headlines proclaiming that the author of Pageant had been locked out of the British market, or blacklisted — especially when feelings were running high in Australia about the birth of a new era of independent Australian publishing. He was also aware that the British Society of Authors was closely monitoring the situation. His strategy might best be seen as one of containment, a tactical withdrawal — aimed at avoiding a spread of infection.
The story does not quite end at this point. As Lyttleton had herself predicted, The world is yours was a much slighter novel than Pageant, did not have an Australasian setting, and did not do nearly so well. Its overall sales are likely to have been of the order of 12,000 copies, approximately 8000 of these in the United States. But she did receive all her royalty income, and Sons o' men. The volume was the first in what was intended to become a series of reprints of earlier Australian and New Zealand books under the title of the
Stanley Unwin might have been down — having lost his skirmish with Lyttleton over The world is yours — but he was certainly not out. He would no doubt have been pleased to learn that the Endeavour Press itself collapsed in 1935, though it had a brave record of publication during its three-year life. Despite the efforts of many, the publishing of Australia's best fiction writers in the 1930s and for much of the 1940s continued to be sporadic and uncertain. Angus & Robertson remained, but it had always survived mainly on popular non-fiction books (one of its biggest sellers was The life and works of Henry Ford), and where it did publish fiction these were mainly reprints of popular overseas authors (
In the later 1930s Angus & Robertson made an effort to improve the quality of its local list, and Lyttleton became embroiled yet again — this time over her New Zealand novel, Promenade, which after much effort she completed in 1937. In 1935 she had contracted the American edition to Reynal and Hitchcock (the ex-Century personnel who had set up on their own, and bid unsuccessfully for The world is yours two years before). They were pleased with the manuscript, when it eventually arrived, and anticipated a big success for it.
The problems arose, again, with Allen & Unwin — whose director, Stanley Unwin was now also a director of the firm of John Lane at the Bodley Head — and the trigger, again, was the prospect of a second lucrative Pageant by an author who insisted
Little of the business correspondence between the principals about Promenade has survived. Lyttleton evidently took it all with her for on-going reference when she left New Zealand — for what was to be the last time — in July 1938, and it was subsequently lost or destroyed. Nevertheless, something of the nature of the dispute can be pieced together from two or three of her letters to friends at the time. The sense of déjà vu, of an ongoing re-enactment of a familiar triangular conflict involving author, agent, and publisher, is inescapable — except that in this instance Jones's derelictions are replaced by Audrey Heath's, and the account presented here is a reading of Edith Lyttleton's point of view, without the independent verifications available for earlier parts of the story.
It appears that through her agent's 'stupidity — or perfidy', Unwin had been given an option on Promenade
without the author's knowledge, 'and he wants to exercise it':
I do not now give Australian rights, & as I didn't give them for the book whose contract contained the option [i.e.
The world is yours] I am sure I cannot be forced to. He threatened to have me put on the Black List of all Eng. publishers if I didn't give him Aus. rights last time. I said:Do it.So he climbed down & contented himself with Eng. rights only. Now he threatens to take the matter to court if I refuse them, & has apparently got my agent well & truly scared .... She has behaved worse than any former agent. Cabled & air-mailed me that Mr Unwin wants exclusive Eng. & N.Z. rights; that a court would certainly uphold him & I must cable my consent at once! Ordering me to sign a blank cheque, for she has never mentioned the terms of the contract. . . .
Lyttleton , letter toMurray-Prior , 8 January 1938 (Roderick Papers, NLA).
Edith Lyttleton went on to say in this letter that she had 'cabled and air-mailed back' that 'I utterly refuse to give Unwin Aus. or N.Z. rights on any terms whatever, so he can go to law if he likes — which of course he won't. No court could hold it legal to force me to accept a contract of which I did not know a single clause.' Furthermore, since Heath had refused to show the manuscript to other British publishers (although 'an option only means that a
It moved them to the extent of a long cable offering £94 advance royalty, 10% on the first 2,500 copies, 12 Ibid.1/2% up to 5,000 & 15% after. That works out at 9d, 11d & 1/2d . . . infinitely better than their first offer of 7d flat rate (and of the highest Eng. terms of Colonial eds — 3 1/2d). Being their first offer it is, of course, their lowest. I expect to get the 10% knocked off... . Anyway, I've broken the Aus. flat rate & made [Angus & Robertson] offer more (I'll bet) than they have ever done before.
Again Unwin was forced to back down on New Zealand rights, though Lyttleton remained most annoyed that her agent continued to ignore her instructions about the English edition: '[A]s my English agent ignores all my orders to submit the M.S. of [ Promenade
] to other publishers I'm afraid Allen & Unwin will get it, for I don't know if I can refuse to sign the contract if no one else bids higher. Unwin must be making it well worth her while . . .'
Ibid., 1 March 1938 (Roderick Papers, NLA).
The narrative of Edith Lyttleton's experiences with these three books is instructive because of the ways in which it illuminates key developments in the international and local publishing industries in the 1930s, and their intersections: the effects of the corpor-atisation of the American publishing industry, the loosening of British monopoly control of the publishing system throughout the Empire, and the beginnings of active movements towards publishing independence in former colonies, like Australia and New Zealand. Such developments did not suddenly happen, of course — they had been occurring, fitfully and unevenly, over several decades — nor did they achieve any decisive conclusion by the end of the decade. But it is possible to speculate that the effect of world-wide economic depression was to accelerate and concentrate the tendencies: forcing smaller American publishers to the wall, for example, as well as influencing mergers of some of the biggest, like the Century and Doubleday. In Australia, in a quite different way, the Depression produced a negative international exchange rate which had the effect of encouraging local publishing initiatives, since it increased the price of British books on the Australasian market from 6s to 7s 6d. This was an important factor, for example, in the Sydney Bulletin's decision to set up the Endeavour Press, and in P. R. Stephensen's effort to set up on his own.
The new developments of the 1930s also produced new kinds of tension between the contending industries — American, British and Australasian — as well as within each of them: a change in the dynamic of their external and internal relationships. The corp-oratisation of the American publishing industry posed a threat to the British industry, and the potential 'opening up' of the cosy British monopoly of the long-established Empire market raised the spectre that control of it might shift decisively to the United States, with the emergence of aggressive global marketing strategies operating from a much stronger capital base. Deprived of the profits provided by its colonial operations, the British industry faced the prospect of a gradually deteriorating capital base increasingly vulnerable to an invasion into its own heartland by the American industry. Already the Canadian market was largely controlled by the United States, and for all three of her books Edith Lyttleton received only half her American royalty rate from her American publishers on sales in Canada. Macmillan's in Canada wished to bid for an option on Promenade
, and Lyttleton received a curt query from the Century ('[T]hey say you are coming to them on a direct contract for the Canadian market. Is this statement correct?'),
In effect, the former colonies thus became a terrain on which a larger power struggle between competing giants was played out, and this is part of the explanation for the stubbornness with which Unwin resisted making any 'concessions' on the New Zealand market. In purely financial terms the New Zealand market could hardly have mattered much to the British publishing industry: its population was small, and it was over the other side of the world. It did matter, deeply, however as part of an imperial network that was beginning to show signs of instability, especially in Australia. Furthermore, if New Zealand was a tiny market in British terms, it was a very significant and accessible market for Australian publishing enterprise. British resistance to making New Zealand concessions — as
The new developments also changed the 'internal' relationships between publishers, agents and authors, which varied in each country. One of the dynamics of American corporatisation was to push royalty rates down — on the grounds (which Lyttle-ton accepted in her dealings with American publishers) that a much greater investment in advertising and promotion would produce many more sales, and thus more than compensate for higher royalties on smaller sales. The Century claimed to Edith Lyttleton, in justification of the low advance of $250 on 10 per cent royalties for Pageant, that they had invested $4,000 — a huge amount then — in advance publicity of the book. In earlier years she had been accustomed to receive from British publishers initial royalties as high as 20 per cent, rising to 25 per cent, and even throughout the 1930s her British royalties remained much higher than the American ones — on Promenade, at the end of the decade, beginning at 15 per cent and rising to 20 per cent, though on export sales the return was a mere 5 per cent.
In Australia and New Zealand the situation was different again, since under the imperial system of control authors' incomes from local sales were already artificially depressed, to a level far below even the lower rates occurring in the United States. Furthermore overseas distribution arrangements of British editions were often perfunctory, and authors' royalties on 'export sales' were based not on the retail price in the export market but on the wholesale price, which was often itself set lower than that on the British market. The 4 1/2d flat rate royalty which Lyttleton received from export sales of the British edition of Promenade was an example of this system, and represented one-third of the royalty she received on British sales. 'This was a hangover', The Oxford history of New Zealand literature in English
, 2nd ed., ed by Terry Sturm (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.631-94 (p.65 2).
The system functioned to thwart any local initiatives: it meant that local publishers could not compete with the low prices; it perpetuated the notion, for readers, that local writing was cheap and second-rate; and it ensured that, for New Zealand and Australian novelists, the only access to local readers was through British publication, and that the possibility of economic survival rested on British rather than local sales.
It is not surprising, also, in the light of the above, that few in Australia and New Zealand — including Lyttleton — ever stopped to think quite what 'freedom' and 'independence' from British control might mean, in relation to the larger international economic forces emerging in the publishing industry, especially from the United States. Canada might have offered at least some food for thought. In the short term, however, free market forces clearly meant, as Lyttleton exemplifies, the possibility of larger incomes for authors from sales in their local markets, and greater access to those markets through better local distribution arrangements. But even those local publishers and authors who saw that it was a 'freedom' to begin to compete in the international market, were unaware of the extent to which that market was changing, developing new kinds of mechanisms of competition and control. But that is another story, or many stories, ongoing into the present.
Edith Lyttleton wrote only one more novel, a fourth 'dominion-historical' family saga set in Nova Scotia, Canada, entitled Grand parade. She wrote it in England during the war, under conditions of great hardship, since she was too ill to travel back to New Zealand, and the completion of it triggered a physical collapse from which she never recovered. Reynal and Hitchcock published it in the United States in October 1943, with unauthorised editorial revisions which shocked and angered her; her British agent sent the manuscript, again, to Unwin and Allen Lane at the Bodley Head. To her sister-in-law she wrote, from a convalescent hospital in London: 'Lane (having read it) offers twice the Advance Royalty I got last time; some advance on ordinary royalties, & wants the Aus. & N.Z. rights .... which I am letting him have .... I feel in such a jumble that I simply say Blast the whole thing, & let it go.'
In an article on New Zealand writers, Wooden horse
, 1 no.4 (1950), 28.
In the sense that she was a prolific writer, Hyde's work appeared to be 'easily put on paper' compared to that of many of her contemporaries. She produced ten books in the ten years from 1929 until her death in 1939, including six novels published within four years. She was also a prolific journalist and freelance writer, an aspect of her work which was relatively neglected by her critics until the appearance of Disputed ground in 1991. Disputed ground: Robin Hyde, journalist
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991).
A strong financial imperative underlay much of this output. Hyde started on her career as a professional writer at the age of seventeen. She never lost the conviction that a writer's contribution to society was worthy of tangible recognition, and she worked hard and with considerable ingenuity to try to make a living from her writing.
But Hyde's prolific output was achieved at a high cost in terms of the toll it took on her energy and the strain it placed on her personal life. In this more profound sense her writing did not come easily. Her letters and notebooks frequently show her concern about how to find her own medium of expression. To
I don't altogether approve of myself, either — how can one approve of a writer who claims a love of verse foremost, but also writes novels and short stories and a journalistic hotchpotch? The novels and short stories mightn't be bad if I could write them as I wanted to — But the journalistic stuff, unless for an occasional thing written with a special purpose, I hate — and fear.
Robin Hyde , letter toJ. C. Andersen , 13 November 1938 (J. C. Andersen Papers, MS-148, folder 29, Alexander Turnbull Library, NLNZ).
That private self-doubt and struggle was seldom revealed outside her closest circle of friends, and even then was more often than not concealed by irony or indirection. The letters, notebooks and drafts of her work also provide evidence of how strongly Hyde held to her own views of what constituted good writing, even though these views seemed to align her with a literary position which was under attack as unfashionable and lacking in intellectual rigour.
This essay explores some aspects of what Hyde's manuscripts and papers tell us about her creative process. It looks at how the canon fits together and, finally, it suggests some of the factors which have influenced the critical estimation of her work.
The readership of Hyde's work has undergone a transformation over the last decade or so. Prior to that, many of her works were out of print and her critical reputation was low. She was regarded as a minor poet who was just breaking free of a stifling English Georgianism in her last work. As a novelist she was regarded as flawed and without clear direction; a writer who worked instinctively and who confused fiction and autobiography. At best her fiction was characterised as an impressionistic report on late colonial life and suburban depression. For post-war New Zealanders she had seemed rather too hung up on the 'colonial England hunger' for which she had had the fortune — or misfortune — to give us the cliche of the yearning quest of the godwit. Her life was short and tragic. She was regarded anec-dotally by many who recorded their impressions of her as capable
Penguin book of New Zealand verse
of 1960 encapsulated many of these elements:
Her way to print was through the byways of daily and weekly journalism, where there was enough taste to perceive her talent, and enough booksy vulgarity almost to destroy it... By incessant writing, incessant change, she fought to free her vision from its literary swathings — and in verse her worst enemy was the passionate crush on poetry with which she began. Her writing was near hysteria, more often than not, and she was incurably exhibitionistic.
Allen Curnow ,(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), Introduction, Section 12.The Penguin book of New Zealand verse If Curnow's assessment appears rather crushing, then it is worth recalling that Hyde had earlier described the young Curnow privately as 'quite a promising boy', but dismissed his preoccupation with literary theory as a '. . . solemn preposterous little code of who may do what, when and why. It's like learning to speak by deliberately teaching one's self first to stutter.'
Robin Hyde , letter toJ. C. Andersen , 17 March 1936 (J. C. Andersen Papers, MS-148, folder 29, Alexander Turnbull Library, NLNZ). The 'code' Hyde refers to was probably Curnow'sPoetry and language(Christchurch: Caxton Club Press, 1935).
Hyde did not fit the prescription by which Curnow and others were attempting to identify, or to create, an emerging New Zealand literature. She wrote too much. Her novels were expansive and florid when the taste was for small, highly crafted stories about tragic and lonely people whose response to a bleak universe was to 'crouch down and hold on tight'. She was a woman writer, when that was synonymous with being an amateur. She had let her 'passionate crush' on poetry lead her down the 'byways' of her craft. She was not wholeheartedly a New Zealander (she had published in England), but pined for the colonial's Home in Empire or yearned for a sentimentalised internationalism even as the world collapsed into the Second World War.
This view of Hyde virtually created her as the antithesis of the New Zealand writer, but it has become increasingly unsustainable as the literary history has been renovated and as her texts have been reprinted and reread. The opportunity to explore her manuscripts and papers and to place her works in the context of other texts that were previously unknown has also helped to identify other dimensions of her craft.
My own interest in Hyde's work began with seeking out some of these manuscripts and papers, and trying to piece together how
The godwits fly. I found that a large amount of draft material still existed. It was then — and still is, despite the efforts
The effort to focus on the creative process for one particular novel, The godwits fly
, proved to be impractical. Hyde, I began to discover, tended to write and rewrite whole drafts of novels and other large works with little detailed revision or reworking. It was often hard to tell drafts of one text from another, and the same incidents and images frequently recurred. This 'recycling' of material did not betray a limitation in her vision or experience, however. Instead it exhibited a characteristically 'complex inter-textuality'
Disputed ground
, p. 139.
Here was evidence of the deceptive simplicity of her writing; that it was indeed 'not easily put on paper'. It was a realisation which was, I think, first made by Hyde's friend and mentor of her early work, Press, 14 October 1939, 16. The godwits fly. One of the major challenges which she faced in reworking the novel through several drafts was to clarify its symbolic structure.
In the first version References to the various drafts of The godwits fly follow the classification described in my unpublished PhD thesis, ' Journal of 'New Zealand literature
, 4 (1986), 21-47.
As Hyde reworked the novel through successive drafts, more and more of the minor characters (school friends, workmates) and the incidents in which they figure disappear. The result is a strongly realised set of characters (as shown in Figure 1) arrayed around Eliza in such a way as to set up symmetrical tensions and patterns of conflict and resolution which define the compass-points by which to measure Eliza's progress on her 'journey'.
Family and the wider social groupings, older and younger generations, private and public lives: all reverberate with and reflect aspects of Eliza's journey. Augusta's point of the compass is the domestic, and its elements of motherhood, security and conformity find their doomed extreme in Carly. Simone's point of the compass is art, its elements of experimentation, style and temperament cast in strongest relief by her marriage to Toby which threatens to engulf her. Together these women reflect Eliza's exploration of the personal and introspective.
John Hannay's point of the compass is the political. Its elements of social organisation (the brotherhood of man) and communication are sentimentalised in Tom McGrath, the union boss, and comically parodied in the oafish Olaf. Timothy's point of the compass is the physical and sensual. Its elements of action, of experience and of sexuality are reflected in the various worlds he encounters: Birkett, Damaris Gayte, Shelagh and others. Together the men reflect Eliza's exploration of the social and sensual.
Stylistically, too, the novel was developing as it went through successive drafts. Long, authorially intrusive passages describing the economic malaise and spiritual poverty of New Zealand are removed. The impressionistic imagism of the separate chapters which mark the phases of Eliza's development are strengthened instead, into what Sargeson was later to call — describing his own stylistic direction — 'symbolic realism'. 'Conversation in a train and other critical writing, ed. by Kevin Cunningham (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press,
Interestingly, though, many of the passages cut from these drafts were not abandoned. Instead they reappear — in modified forms — elsewhere in Hyde's work. For example, the time-frame of The godwits fly was drastically shortened by the removal of several chapters describing Eliza as an established and successful journalist whose travels around New Zealand provide the opportunity for much analysis and commentary on its economic and social life. There are recognisable aspects of this more mature Eliza in the characterisation of Bede Collins and in the events of the later novel Nor the years condemn.
This brings us back to the earlier observation about the 'complex intertextuality' of Hyde's work which I would now like to explore in greater detail. The redrafting of The origins of the novel are described in the introduction to Robin Hyde, The godwits fly stand out from most of Hyde's other long works, which were written over relatively short time-frames, often in an intense burst of activity. This was most spectacularly the case with Passport to hell which was
Passport to hell
, ed. and introd. by D. I. B. Smith, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986).
Autobiography MS 412 (Iris Wilkinson Papers, NZMSS 412, Auckland Central City Library).
The novel itself is first referred to in a journal which dates from early 1935 and the first version took shape in two periods of writing during 1935. Hyde was dissatisfied with the result and put it aside for further reflection. She returned to it in 1936, redrafting some key passages in the relative tranquillity of
The main stages of writing The godwits fly
can be seen as releasing two significant bursts of creativity, the first of which was in 1935. In the middle of the first version, Hyde paused to write 'Bronze outlaw' (published as
Hyde also wrote another — still unpublished — novel called 'The unbelievers' at this time. If Passport to hell drew her towards realism, 'The unbelievers' plunged into fantasy, allowing Hyde to explore some of the complex relationship issues which the first version of The godwits fly had begun to confront. 'The unbelievers' gave rise to another 'fantasy' novel, Wednesday's children
, which was completed in early 1936 and submitted for eventual publication in
Check to your king
, originally written in late 1934 and submitted for a literary competition in America (in which it was commended but eventually unplaced), was also being rewritten at about this time. Again, the revisions more strongly stamp the historical narrative of Thierry's progress with Hyde's preoccupations with identity and relationships. In the original version of
Sovereign chief: A biography of Baron de Thieriy (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1977), p.335.
Hyde's interest in New Zealand's colonial history, which had begun with the discovery of Thierry in the Grey Collection (Auckland Public Library), prompted her to begin another novel called ' Check to your king. She did in fact negotiate with the trustees of the collection for use of
The journal was later published as a scholarly edition: New Zealand or recollections of it, ed. and introd. by E. H. McCormick, Alexander Turnbull Library monographs (Wellington: Government Print, 1963).
After 15. The godwits fly was completed, Hyde wrote the beautiful and moving autobiographical text A home in this world
, introd. by Derek Challis (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984).
The complex intertextuality of her work was therefore a means of progressing certain stylistic and thematic concerns in different texts and genres simultaneously. This characteristic of her work means, as I have begun to suggest, that patterns, motifs, incidents and even characters shift and recur from one text to another.
The second great burst of creativity which followed the completion of The godwits fly in 1936-7 provides ample evidence of this recycling technique that enabled Hyde to uncover deeper levels of experience and to intensify her treatment of key themes.
At about the same time that she wrote A home in this world she also completed The book of Nadath
, a prophetic prose-poem. To pick up on only one strand of this text, Hyde returns to the godwit image from
Another central motif in her work, the 'home' and issues of identity which accrete to it, recurs in the poem sequence 'Houses by the sea', on which Hyde was also working at this time, and which is regarded as amongst her finest poetry. At this time, in 1937 also, another unpublished work called ' Check to your king
, but in it the focus shifts from the baron himself to his family, and in particular to his daughter Isabel, whose characterisation draws heavily on Eliza from
The other major published work from this period is Nor the years condemn. In this novel, too, incidents and themes recur from the other works. The book is a sequel to
Issues of personality and gender have been examined frequendy enough in the past to explain the relatively poor or negative response her work has received. A factor which has been overlooked more often is the timing of publication of her work. Most of her major work, especially in prose, was published late in the 1930s, when Hyde herself was out of New Zealand and away from the notice of some key commentators. The views of several influential critics were evidently formed on the basis of her early work and did not change. For instance, Indirections
his association with Hyde in the last few months of her life, didn't really know her prose at all after
. . . her early verse in its jaunty facility, thick with the cliches of a literariness she was never able to strip away completely, was a form of journalism . . . [she was] slowly schooling herself to write more honestly and directly out of experience [but] . . . journalism that neglects its own virtues in trying to be literary usually succeeds only in being bad journalism.
Charles Brasch ,(Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1980), p.338.Indirections: A memoir 1909-1947
Hyde was also unlucky that her most mature work appeared when the more pressing political imperative of world war was on the horizon. Nor the years condemn
was in fact one of the early casualties of the war, as stocks of the novel were destroyed when the warehouse they were in was bombed.
Though Hyde was published in Europe and died there, her sympathies lay elsewhere. If any country other than New Zealand captured her heart it was China. But Dragon rampant
, the book about her experience in China, was simply neglected by an
These historical factors in the critical reception of her work can be — and have been — corrected to some extent by a longer perspective. Today more of Hyde's work is in print than ever before; the autobiographical A home in this world
appeared in 1984 and
The prescriptiveness of the literary-critical debate has also shifted somewhat. For Brasch's generation some genres were high art and some simply were not — and 'bad journalism' was all journalism. In the emerging high culture of New Zealand literature there was little regard for biography and autobiography, which were the ground on which Hyde built her art. More recently there has been less concern for formal purity and a greater readiness to engage with Hyde's hybrid forms — verse chronicle, prophetic prose poem, fictionalised autobiography — or at least a greater willingness to accept that she might have been deliberately hybridising, rather than simply being inept.
Hyde is now being carefully and intensely read and her work is being interpreted from a number of perspectives. Most importantly, her work itself is being reprinted and is widely available to readers. Much work remains to be done by careful and thorough editors, and Passport to hell
has pointed the way to new standards in this regard. But even more than good editors, writers need attentive readers.
No good writing is ever 'easily put on paper', but it is not altogether easily got off the paper either. It seems to me that the bargain Hyde struck with us as her readers was a fair one. She was prepared, as she wrote in one of her journals, to ' . . . write blotched attempts at poetry from a starved and strange body . . . [and to] practice poetic five-finger exercises hours a day until the fingers of (her) soul ache[d]'. Quoted by Gloria Rawlinson in introduction, Houses by the sea and the later poems of Robin Hyde, ed. and introd. by Gloria Rawlinson (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1952), p.18.
Since the moa, like all other birds, didn't actually have eye-teeth, that seems a suitably memorable and bizarre image to end
The story goes that during the 1920s and early 1930s something worthy of the title 'New Zealand poetry' emerged for the first time, and that it owed almost nothing to the poetry that preceded it. I am going to repeat this story as a detail of contemporaneous perceptions, and link it with another story — about typography, and how it was perceived at the same time. For economy, I am using the term 'typography' to stand in for all aspects of book production, and where I use it in the narrower sense of the disposition of typographic materials, that use will I hope be clear from its context. In a way, this essay might be seen as one of a number of possible footnotes to Buch and Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Fünftes Wolfenbütteler Symposium, 1977
, ed. by Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), pp.81-126.
McKenzie's phrase can usefully be distinguished from Marshall McLuhan's 'the medium is the message'. The medium that is the book certainly carries with it a good deal of historical, social, economic, political and cultural information. But it is the added data of each book's particulars, its physicality, its materials, its manufacture, its layouts and so on, that make McLuhan's thesis for the present purpose a short one, and McKenzie's thesis an expanding one. For McLuhan, the account of the book in New Zealand has already been written in the story of the origin of the
All stories can be made to intersect, but those of the poetry and its typography are not usually paired in local commentary. It is more usual to focus on the poetry and its criticism. Where typography is mentioned, and it is mentioned quite a lot, it is invariably as an adjunct, a matter of presentation, an 'appropriate' means that somehow matches but is not part of the merit, value, or meaning of the poetry. Nevertheless, the poetry of the 1930s will be under-read until it is located at a triangle of attentions whose points are poetry, criticism, typography.
The critical perception that the words 'New Zealand poetry' came to signify a working concept in the 1930s goes back at least to 1940 and 2. Letters and art in New Zealand.
Letters and art in New Zealand
(Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1940).
Ibid.,pp.182-8.
The writing of poetry has been for them not the random activity of inspired moments but a serious and exacting occupation. . . . They have brought critical intelligence to bear on their writing, and they have broken down barriers that divided New Zealand verse from some of the most vital interests of the New Zealand people.
Ibid., p.188.
Nineteen years later, his opinion is unchanged:
In a few agitated years a handful of men and women produced a body of work which, in an intimate and organic sense, belonged to the country as none of its previous writings had done. They created the nucleus of a literature where there had existed before only isolated achievement.
E. H. McCormick ,(London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.108.New Zealand literature: A survey
McCormick's view, first stated in 1940, became general throughout that decade, and still carries a determining force both for how to understand the poetry of the 1930s and for how to assess the
But what were others saying at that time? Creative writing in New Zealand: A brief critical history (1946) shared McCormick's position: 'In general, New Zealand poetry in the first quarter of this century did not reach that maturity which was promised in the work of W Pember Reeves and Jessie Mackay .... The past twenty five years have witnessed a great transformation in New Zealand verse'. Creative writing in New Zealand: A brief critical history
(Auckland: Printed for the author by Whitcombe & Tombs, 1946), p.21.
Poet Collected poems (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1950). Ursula Bethell: Collected poems
, ed. by Vincent O'Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.xii.
Letters and art in New Zealand
, p. 170.
Mary Ursula Bethell
(Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.43.
These comments by O'Sullivan and Holcroft attest to the endurance of the position outlined by McCormick and supported by others like Cresswell and Reid not long afterwards. A new, intelligent poetry had emerged, grounded in its place of origin, owing little or nothing to the New Zealand poetry that came
Phoenix in 1932. What is not referred to, and is one of the great aporias in our commentary, is that the poets of the 1930s in New Zealand were also readers of a new poetry, a post-Georgian British poetry in the hands of a new breed of poets who also had new things to say and new ways to say them. The list is Allen Curnow's, the date 1981: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender.Selected poems, introd. by Allen Curnow (Auckland: Penguin, 1981), p.xiv.
The next part of my triangle of attentions is the contemporaneous criticism of the day. Instead of discussing actual critical essays and reviews, I want merely to record perceptions of the critical climate, its milieu, what those present thought about it. Letters and art in New Zealand
, p. 199.
Ibid., p.201.
Reid, Creative writing in New Zealand
, p.87.
Curnow disagrees: 'The last fifteen years have seen the beginnings of a maturer, more exacting criticism in New Zealand, parallel with and in part a consequence of the appearance of a more hopeful verse', and cites McCormick as one of those more exacting critics. A book of New Zealand verse 1923-45
(Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945), p.14.
In general, local commentators tended to agree that there wasn't much good criticism at the time, but that which did
I have elsewhere elaborated a number of connections between typography in New Zealand under Glover and Lowry and book production as a then recently revived field of scholarship. Landfall
, ns 1 (1993), 137-51.
Begun at the end of the 19th century through the investigations of Emery Walker, William Morris and Edward Johnston in England, and D. B. Updike in America, a new impetus was given to the study of type, histories of type design, the development of letter forms, and other aspects of typography. Although interrupted by the First World War, this initial energy was picked up by Stanley Morison and others, and quickly translated into the particularities of contemporary book production. The Monotype Corporation's revival of historically based type manufacture, the work of such book designers as Updike, Bruce Rogers, and Francis Meynell, the magazines Colophon, Fleuron, Alphabet & image
, and the long running
The local typographers — Lowry, Glover, other than the one they themselves created on their own ground. It was clearly a conscious exercise, undertaken against a background that they knew only too well.
These days, successive editions of poets such as the late Selected poems 1940-1989. Within this book, the poet had decided not to keep to the chronological order of the poems' composition. At any point in the book the poem could have come from any time. The book and the life were discontiguous. In the downstairs part of the shop, while the selected poems and the selected guests were milling about upstairs, a small display of books, in a neat, strict chronological order, exhibited almost every single book that Curnow had published in his lifetime. That display, that row of books tracing a single line at a single height around the room, was a row of typographic and print production values on which a history of literary typography from the 1930s to 1990 could be written.
Allen Curnow, Selected poems ip^.o-i()8p (London: Viking, 1990).
To retrieve the typographic history we have to look again at the early books. They look different, feel different, behave differently in the hands, than current ones. We, in reply, respond differently to them. Yet without them, our usual condition, it is hard even to imagine that a typographic history is there to be written. But whatever we find in the looking, central to the discussion is also what we know — that the new printerly values of the 1930s were introduced by the poets themselves and their friends. The new poetic values, the new typographic values, were in the same hands.
Denis Glover, poet and printer, had a dual role in shaping the canon in the 1930s that is not yet to my knowledge written up large enough for us to see clearly. A February 1941 Caxton Press catalogue linked two of my triangle of coordinates, poetry and typography:
Two objects have been foremost in the policy of the Caxton Press: first, to make available as widely and therefore as reasonably as possible what prose and verse the directors of the Press have considered of interest and value. Second, to see that the work of printing
is as well carried out typographically and technically as has lain within our powers.' Caxton Press,
A catalogue of publications from the Caxton Press, Christchurch, up to February 1941(Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941), p.[7].
The critics took notice. Phoenix: '. . . it revealed an interest in typography rare in New Zealand up to that time'. And on the presses of Lowry and Glover: 'Besides the function they served in bringing out work beyond the range of established publishers, they were partly instrumental in raising New Zealand's deplorably low standards of book production.' Letters and art in New Zealand
, pp.171-2.
New Zealand literature
, p.i 10. The roles of Lowry and Glover were accordingly elevated from 'important' to 'vital' in the two editions.
Book, 8 (1946), p.[35-9] (p.[35])
The quotes given above on the merits of the new typography need to be seen as markers, more as evidence, as hints of a deeper pattern of behaviour than they are as final assessments (with which one might agree or not) of the work of the day. A particularly good clue comes (as does so much from the time) from Selected poems in 1981: 'Traces of the "thirties" here and there perhaps? When we all began reading Pound and Eliot, or shared our modernity with Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis or Spender?'Selected poems, p.xiii.
When New Zealand poets read Auden and his contemporaries, what books, what sorts of books, did they literally have in their hands? What were they looking at, one might say, while they were looking through the texts for meaning? During the 1930s Auden was published by Faber & Faber (several times), Oxford University Press, Michael Joseph, and in the United States, Random House; MacNeice was published by Faber; Day Lewis by Oxford, Jonathan Cape, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press; and Spender by Faber, Hogarth, Jonathan Cape, and Victor Gollancz. All these publishers had wide, positive and well-deserved reputations for the design and typography of their books as well as for the interest, value and merit of their texts. And it was precisely these books that became models, thereby, for Glover and Lowry in the printing of New Zealand literature. The prospect of being printed at Caxton to the same standards as Auden had been by Faber was as much a part of the achievement of publication for any poet as any other factor. And the family resemblances between the British book and the New Zealand book should not be any more lost on us than the family resemblances between the British and the New Zealand poem of the day. When McCormick, Reid, Curnow and others asserted a new poetry, a specifically New Zealand poetry (without, it is important to bear in mind, sliding into anything like a 'nationalist' poetry) in the 1930s, they tended to do so by stressing the local achievement, while eliding the international character of the move to a national verse.
Because we are able to discriminate between a text and the book we read it in, it does not follow that the distinction is absolute. For the latter assertion, we need other evidence. Yet, that the distinction is absolute, is as primary an assumption in New Zealand letters as any other. Book reviews, essays, academic articles, surveys and so on of New Zealand poetry are relentless in their focus on disembodied texts, except as some aspect of book design might draw attention to itself. But we are only able to engage with texts because we have bodies, and we are only able to
Nevertheless, the distinction can be supported. After all, a poem can appear in a number of contexts — a literary magazine, as a quotation in a review, in a book, in an anthology, in a selected poems or a collected works and so on. If in each case the text is unchanged in all its formal aspects (for example, line-breaks, punctuation, word sequence, spelling) then we do have some justification for saying that it is the 'same' text or poem, regardless of context. And, on one level, it is. I would not want to disallow the evidence presented to the seeing eye. But why should we read poems 'regardless of context', when context is what provides us with the world outside the poem which permits us to read it in the first place? And we have all, have we not, had occasion to complain that we have been quoted 'out of context'? It seems to me abundantly clear that a poem that appears in a 'selected poems' of a single author will be capable of very different readings from the appearance of the 'same' poem as it appeared between two pieces of unrelated prose in a magazine twenty years earlier. But this is not the only kind of complication we might have to deal with when we come to notions about the stability or instability of texts.
Textual editor
Every verbal text, whether spoken or written down, is an attempt to convey a work .... The act of preserving .. . documents . . . does not preserve works but only evidences of works .... Those texts, being reports of works, must always be suspect; and, no matter how many of them we have, we never have enough information to enable us to know with certainty what the works consist of.
G. Thomas Tanselle ,(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).A rationale of textual criticism
Here he locates a work of literature as being not only independent of the document it is written or printed on, but of any document whatsoever. There is never a definitive version or document that could ever tell us that the work could even be the 'same' as itself. For there is no identifiable template or paradigm that any other 'version', even an exact one to the seeing eye, could be compared with to establish 'sameness'. Printing scholar and typographer Stanley Morison, however, believed that a report on a work, the document that carries it, can certainly be reliable, if only the skills of the editor and the typesetter are reliably accurate. Tanselle's view, however one wants to argue with its neo-Platonic sense of
Another kind of question is raised by poet
Whenever I read
Walter Benjamin 's 'A Berlin Chronicle ', I experience the world of his childhood through my knowledge of what will happen to him in later life . . . Could I learn to read it in a more innocent way? Or will Benjamin's Berlin always be a ruin for me? But doesn't this also happen when I reread a novel or a poem and know how it ends? If the work ends tragically, then when I reread it, its end is always present for me in its beginning.
Susan Mitchell , in, ed. by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss (New York: W W Norton, 1995), pp.200-1.The poet's notebook: Excerpts from the notebooks of contemporary American poets
Context, as poet Robert Creeley said somewhere, is everything. And the book, as the text or the poem, are important certainly, but I want also to say that they are also part of the normal, everyday, non-esoteric, common or garden business of living with a single text in a single edition that is read and reread over a considerable period of time. Why do some of us only like to read this text in that edition? Reading it in another we are apt to say that it's just not the same thing. And when we do say that kind of thing, we generally mean it.
It might be thought, still, that the adoption of new standards in book production that accompanied new standards in New Zealand's poetry in the 1930s remains simply a coincidence: that the twin histories merely ran parallel, that the new poetry could easily have happened without the typographers. One could point out that the new British poetry of the 1930s also came with a new standard of book production, based very much on the technical and scholarly achievements of people like Stanley Morison and companies like the Monotype Corporation and Cambridge University Press which was the first major client of the Monotype historically based type revival of the 1920s. One could also point out that the poets and the enthusiasts for the new kind of book in New Zealand were the same people. At least as interesting, from
Freed, Edge, Frontiers, Cave. To compare the pages of
See Pipe dreams in Ponsonby
(Auckland: Association of Orientally Flavoured Syndics, 1972) and
Where the 1930s poets completely displaced their predecessors, the later shift had the effect of polarising the literary community, an effect that has lasted to the present, and which remains divisive. In a climate where approval or disapproval operates in a general sense, it is difficult I grant to see that the emergence of both sides of the divide might have been produced by the very same kind of historically contingent patterning. Why that might be valid in one case and not in the other has yet I think to be addressed.
The 'new men' of New Zealand literature who began publishing in the early and mid-1930s in Phoenix
and other University college publications, in
Short reflection on the present state of literature in this country
(Christchurch: Caxton Club Press, [1935]).
Glover's anger against the 'old men' probably went back at least to 1933, when Best poems, explaining that it was 'narrowly excluded ... at the last moment' because 'competition was unusually keen'. On the back of the envelope Glover wrote 'Charlie bloody Marris!'Canta and Marris, as Glover later recounted, 'crushingly retorted, "New Zealand poets have a right to be judged by their peers'". Angered by this man who was 'leading New Zealand's poetry along the daisied path of pallid good taste', printing 'leisurely-whimsy, feminine-mimsy stuff and being 'presumptuous enough to proclaim [it] "Best Poems'", Glover carried out the campaign to oppose him and to 'impart new vitality to New Zealand verse' in the pages of Tomorrow as well as in Caxton publications. Hot water sailor 1912-1962
and
Tomorrow, 2 no.1 (30 October 1935), 16-18 (pp.16, 17).
Tomorrow
, 2 no. 34 (28 October 1936), 20-23 (p.23).
Glover's major blow in his unilaterally declared war was 'The arraignment of Paris' in 1937, the period's liveliest literary satire. The narrative line, insofar as there is one, is of Paris (Marris) leading a group of his women poets on a literary picnic in the countryside, 'a sort of Scout and Girl Guide rally'. They are looking for an idealised Georgian pastoral countryside but find a world of mortgages, noisy tractors, dung, and the castration necessary 'to turn our little piggies into bacon'. Such things upset Paris, who sees them as 'lacking in poetic charm', although, as the narrator points out, castration should not bother him, for 'It's what he's done to literature for years'. At that point, Glover gives up the pretence of narrative, points out that there are 'poets in the land / whom Paris doesn't know or understand', who 'can leap a five-barred gate of rhyme / and still can keep on whistling all the time' (perhaps a tribute to Fairburn especially), and closes with an attack on Marris and the other journalist-critics as 'a kind of currant bun of journalese and poetry in one' and with an invitation to Marris to answer back in kind.Selected poems (Auckland: Penguin, 1981) pp.6-13.
Ibid., 29 December 1937 (Glover Papers, folder 18). A. R. D. Fairburn, letters to Glover, undated and 6 November 1937, in Tomorrow — with which Glover was associated as a committee-member — had read the satire in manuscript and wrote to Glover from Takapuna, urging him to print it, saying 'Marris' job is simply to hit back harder & better which of course he can't do'.The letters of A. R. D. Fairburn, ed. by Lauris Edmond (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.110-3. Volume hereafter cited as Letters.Press), but it was something else to 'actually eat mud — and like it':
I know an editor or demi-editor in Auckland who has tired of the flavour of mud and is content nowadays with nothing less than catshit. He keeps a regiment of tabbies in the Ladies Editorial Dept. and they produce a barrowload for him weekly. He dines on it every Thursday night and then vomits it all over the Saturday Supplement.
Fairburn , letter toAllen Curnow , 3 July 1936, inLetters, p.102.
However, his advice to Glover now was that, the libel laws being what they were, he might have to make a public apology to Marris.
In the event, Sargeson, letter to The conquerors
published in 1935, and she had dedicated the book to him. She had reviewed his anthology,
Disputed ground: Robin Hyde, journalist
, ed. by
15. ' Woman today', in
Disputed ground
, p.231; first published in
Selected poems, p.12.
Now in January 1938 she wrote a long letter in response to the printed version of ' Passport to hell
(which he seems to have shown to her before its publication in
Ibid., 16 January 1938 (Glover Papers, folder 22).
Disputed ground
, pp.205-10 (p.206); first published in
As with the attacks on the Georgians by Curnow and Glover, Glover, Fairburn and Sargeson had good reason to set up Marris as a literary enemy, but, as with the Georgians, the matter is more complex than their rhetoric allows for. Marris was certainly a figure aligned with traditions that the Phoenix and Caxton poets were repudiating, but he was scarcely a benighted and tyrannical representative of them and he was a man thoroughly committed to literature and to the development of younger writers. Born in 1875, Marris was late Victorian in his tastes. He had published much verse when he was younger, placing 25 poems in the Bulletin
between 1907 and 1911: graceful, traditional exercises with
Annals of New Zealand literature, being a preliminary list of New Zealand authors and their works with introductory essays and verses
(Wellington: New Zealand Authors' Week Committee, 1936), p. 18.
Confessions of a journalist with observations on some Australian & New Zealand writers
(Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1935), pp.153, 230.
The direction in which he wished to lead young writers is evident in the reviews that he printed and possibly sometimes wrote in 'Prester John', Art in New Zealand (usually signed 'Prester John'; 'John Dene' was one of the pseudonyms he used for his later poetry). In June 1933 'Prester John' found the Dunedin traditionalist Allen to be 'one of our most consistently thoughtful poets', while he found the 'politico-cum-social articles' in Phoenix to be 'mostly too pontifically rhetorical, intense and unsatisfying'. He also disliked the poetry, finding it lacked discipline and used 'indelicate epithets', apart from that of Art in New Zealand, 5 (June 1933), 231-3 (pp.232, 233).Twentieth century poetry (1929) as one in which 'the modern poet celebrates his escape from metrical requirements by ignoring the elementary demands of grammatical construction and insults our intelligence by verses lacking in common sense'. Eliot especially was the target of Murray's criticism because his poetry does not lift the reader 'out of the mundane into the dramatic or ideal'. Art in New Zealand
, 5 (June 1933), 234-7 (pp.234, 236).
'Prester John' viewed the Caxton publications similarly. New poems (1934) he found was for rebels, and rebels only' (again he excepted Fairburn), while Another Argo
(1935) really had Eliot as its Jason, and contained poetry of 'frustration and utter hopelessness'.
'Prester John', Art in New Zealand
, 7 (March 1935), 7; 8 (September 1936), 53.
'Prester John', Art in New Zealand
, 6 (March 1934), 150-2; 8 (September 1936), 53.
Marris's sense of the proper direction for poetry is of course most evident in his selections for the various works he edited. An in New Zealand is generally conservative and Georgian sentimental in its orientation. The best of the recurring poets are Hyde and Duggan. The annual poetry prize was usually won by Plumb
(the poet with the gauzy pre-Raphaelite clothing, the ethereal manner, and the very earthly taste for scones), and
Art in New Zealand, 6 (December 1933), 82.
Best poems, Glover's main target, drew mostly from the same stable, with many poems reprinted from Art in New Zealand, supplemented by poems from the Bulletin and the New Zealand mercury. The first year Marris reprinted work from the university magazines, with
Bulletin
, Red Page, 2 February 1938.
New Zealand best poems 1940
, p-38;
Perhaps the most significant gauge of Marris's taste and his concept of poetry was his anthology, Lyric poems 1928-1942, drawing on fifteen years of editing. There was some quality to the volume; it was certainly no
Lyric poems 1928-1942
, ed. by
Lyric poems
, p.46.
Lyric poems
, p.74; 'John Dene', '
Lyric poems
, pp.42-3.
Marris seemed to see his anthology as a rival to Curnow's, that was being compiled at the same time. He refused Curnow permission to use poems from the New Zealand best poems
volumes because he wanted them to be represented exclusively in his anthology, although in practice Curnow did use some of the same poems, but ones which had been printed elsewhere first. When Curnow's finally appeared in 1945, Fairburn wrote to him in triumph: 'Mother Marris's collection looks pretty pathetic now. His routed rabble will be streaming over the countryside like ants fleeing from boiling water.'
The Penguin book of New Zealand verse
, in
Glover's 'Schroder' is a less important literary construct, there in Short reflection perhaps as much for the metre as for his representative function — 'Andersen' would not have served as well metrically, although 'Lawlor' would have. The man Schroder stood behind nothing as important and vulnerable as New Zealand best poems
, but in the long run he probably had more power than Marris. Ten years younger, he worked under Marris for the Christchurch
Kowhai gold: An anthology of contemporary New Zealand verse
, ed. by Quentin Pope (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930), pp.143-4.
The street and other verses
(Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1962), p.27.
Remembering things
(Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs; London: Dent & Sons, 1938), p.202.
The third of Glover's triumvirate, 'Mulgan', was likewise of only secondary importance as a literary construct (and again metrically useful in the poem), but the man Alan Mulgan was, from a literary standpoint, quite important, one of the key figures of his generation. Like Marris and Schroder he was a significant literary editor, serving in that function (as well as others) for the Auckland Star from 1915 to 1935 such he was perceived as a conservative influence. Fairburn sometimes referred to him as a representative establishment figure, as when he wrote to Mason in 1931 that 'people like Mulgan' accuse D. H. Lawrence of 'being obsessed with sex' or when he quoted a satirical squib to Mason and said 'I suppose Mulgan will think that very naughty of me'.Letters, pp.62, 57.Star his first published poem in 1926 and continued to publish some of his poetry and prose through 1933. In 1927 Fairburn (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1984), p.61.He shall not rise (even if 'patronage did creep in'), the recognition of being 'under an obligation to him', and the admission of the corrupting power of bourgeois life which could touch him too: 'I don't dislike him: regret him, perhaps: and pity him — pity my future self mirrored in him'.Letters, p.76. Home: A New Zealander's adventure
(1927) as 'the one simple and true statement of the genuine emotion' of a love for England but went on to say that 'It is also a full-stop . . . the end of an era in New Zealand'.
Art in New Zealand
, 6 (June 1934), 213-8 (pp.213-4).
Letters, pp.89-90.
Tomorrow
, 4 no.2 (24 November 1937), 56; see
of Spur of morning to Man alone)
Landfall
, 32 (1978), 362-7.
In the glass case: Essays on New Zealand literature
(Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.67-98 (pp.73-74); first published in
I think that if you have believed in those things they have been true for you, but my generation can't accept them any longer. I think we are without standards . . . But the answer I think is to be sincere in one's reactions and emotions just as living and see what happens.
John Mulgan , letter toAlan Mulgan , June 1934, inPaul Day ,John Mulgan(New York: Twayne, 1968), p.86.
The echoes of Hemingway's experience-centred morality are obvious. John Mulgan clearly saw his father as a sincere representative of myths and values that he was to debunk by truth-telling, although he was relatively restrained in saying this to him. Thus, even to his son, Mulgan became something of a representative figure against which to define himself. And Alan Mulgan was very much a man of his time who accepted his society's myths and values and therefore could serve as a representative of them. His basically unquestioning acceptance of liberal bourgeois values is everywhere in Spur of morning and other writings. His acceptance of the pioneer myth and the concept of progress is there in his long poem, Golden wedding (1932). Home, his most popular book, is the archetypal statement of the Anglophilia of his generation, epitomised in his triumphant reversal of Macaulay's prophecy: ' . . . here was a New Zealander standing not on London Bridge and surveying the ruins of St. Paul's, but by Macaulay's own grave, in the London he loved, a London far greater than in his day, and far mightier than he would have believed possible'. Home: A New Zealander's adventure
(London: Longmans, Green, 1927). P.37.
The English of the line
(Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1925), p.27.
New Zealand new writing, 2 (1943), p.18.
Some of us love her best of all for the sea that whispers low, To the shining sands of the slumbering bays where the Christmas blossoms blow, Where you pluck the season's greetings between the deep and the sky, And the sea-foam kisses the crimson lips as the little waves go by.
Alan Mulgan , 'Auckland', in, p.39.The English of the line
Appropriately, Duggan wrote the introduction to his posthumously published selected poems and praised especially Golden wedding
because it 'glorifies the gnarled and homely virtues of the land'.
Golden wedding and other poems
(Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1964), pp.7-8.
Mulgan, then, could easily be seen as simply a representative of the Georgian literary and social values of his generation, but of course he was more than that. John Mulgan wrote to him in 1935 saying that he could imagine him writing 'a more personal book', one that set out his 'good liberal principles' and told the story of how much of those principles survived in 30 years of adult life in New Zealand, one that included as a background 'all the stories you have heard and the people you have met', the things that he knew from experience — a 'report on experience' such as John himself was to write ten years later. Journal of New Zealand literature
, 8(1990), 82.
Golden wedding and other poems
, pp.49-50.
The daughter
, in
In bringing together his diverse insights on New Zealand, Mulgan attempted, not entirely successfully, an ambitious cultural synthesis. The synthesis involves bringing together a faith in the liberal dreams of the Pastoral Paradise and the Just City, and a more critical and realistic view of the actual imperfect society in its present state. Basic to that synthesis is a combining of Anglophile values with New Zealand nationalism. Spur of morning implies such a synthesis in the bringing together of the two heroes, Mark Bryan, a strong New Zealand nationalist and an extroverted man of action, and Philip Armitage, introverted literary Anglophile. What unites them is 'nation-building', their hopes for New Zealand's future, the building of a just society in the best of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The making of a New Zealander is the story of such a synthesis in Mulgan's own life, perhaps most explicit in his attitude towards New Zealand literature:
New Zealanders must use, cherish, and pass on the magnificent body of English prose and verse, ancient, modern, and evergrowing, that is their joint possession, but it will not entirely suffice for their needs. In the imported soil of language and tradition, but in new sunshine, wind, and rain, we must grow our own prose and poetry.
Alan Mulgan ,(Wellington: A. H. & A. W Reed, 1958), p.127.The making of a New Zealander
A similar synthesising impulse can be seen in Mulgan's editing of the New Zealand section of the 1950 Oxford Book of Australian and New Zealand verse. There Mulgan did not rigidly exclude the
Ibid., p.131.
Occasional verses
(Wellington: Wai-te-ata Press, 1971), pp.26-7.
If by 1957 there was no longer a need to set up the pre-1932 generation as enemies (in fact the Phoenix and Caxton writers were by then being placed in that role themselves by the younger poets), the situation in the 1930s was very different, and it was not at all clear that the younger writers were going to establish themselves. The extent to which the generation of Marris, Mulgan, and Schroder dominated the New Zealand literary scene in those years can be seen in the symbolic occasion of Authors' Week in 1936. The younger writers were at best on the fringes, while the establishment represented by Glover's triumvirate was at the centre. The occasion was organised by clean dirt').Letters, pp.101-2.
But at
notime did Iever, by word of mouth, by written communication, by lifting my hand from my lap in a gesture of assent or toleration, or by placing my handle on the bar and raising my arm in the Nazi salute — at no time I repeat did I in any way have anything whatever to do with the PEN club.
Fairburn , letter toGlover , 23 June 1937, inLetters, p. 105.
Annals of New Zealand literature. Among the many speakers at the occasions held in each of the four main centres, only Hyde, Fairburn and Mason from the younger writers were featured (all at Auckland). Hyde, speaking on 'The writer and his audience', tried to make her talk a positive occasion, but it contains beneath the humour a heartfelt plea for a place for writers in New Zealand society, 'a new relationship between writers and the public':
That instead of being your freaks, your occasional light entertainment, we might become, as well as those things, the will of the people, the longing and the unspoken, dumb things that are ploughed into the earth? Instead of there being the eternal broken pieces, pandering to one another, mightn't we be the organ of the voice, given back to the body, which is the people?
That relationship should be economic as well as spiritual, and in this regard 'New Zealand's record is a bad one . . . the better the writer, the smaller, in many cases, has been the attention he received from the public'. Disputed ground
, pp.322-7 (pp.323, 327).
Fairburn, letter to Letters, p.100.
Art in New Zealand
, 9 (September 1936), 29-34(pp.30-1).
The Week provoked some critical comments about New Zealand writing as well as congratulations. One of the sharpest comments came from that much-maligned figure, Kowhai gold
, writing in the
Bulletin
, 8 July 1936, p.2.
Tomorrow, 2 no.2 2 (13 May 1936), 20-2 (pp.20, 22).
Answering him, Gillespie defended the Week as a necessary step in the awakening of the New Zealand public to the uses of literature, but surprisingly agreed with his diagnosis, asserting that the 'besetting sin' of New Zealand society was 'gentility', and that its 'literary faults lay largely in slavish imitation and a derivative laziness', and that it was a cause of worry that it had needed a depression to 'awaken some depth of feeling in our writers'. Tomorrow, 2 no.23 (27 May 1936), 21-2
See Journal of New Zealand literature
, 10 (1992), 99-114.
The Phoenix . . . was literally an astounding thing, the writers showing a mastery of strange forms of verse and prose and also of sociological problems which their predecessors seldom bothered about. In Christchurch there was Allan [sic] Curnow's group of young writers which was carrying on the same type of movement as was Auden, Day Lewis and Stephen Spender in England.
R. G. C. McNab , reported inOtago daily times, 4 May 1936, 2.
In 1936, then, New Zealand literature was still identified mostly with the generation represented by Marris, Mulgan, and Schroder, but there were rumblings beneath the surface, especially in Christchurch and Auckland. From a perspective 60 years on, we can see that it was probably politically and psychologically necessary for Glover and his contemporaries to make a literary construct 'Mulgan, Marris, and Schroder' to attack, and that such a construct was necessarily unfair to the actual accomplishments of the triumvirate. If what Glover and his contemporaries were engaged in was not quite the 'literary gang warfare' of which Robin Hyde complained, Disputed ground
, pp.347-58 (p-357); first published in
I would like to acknowledge financial assistance from the Auckland College of Education Research Committee, and help and advice from
Unlike his close friend and fellow-printer Hot water sailor
(Wellington: Reed, 1962), p.190.
By the time he set up See my ' Turnbull Library record
, 22 (1989), 5-31.
At Auckland University College, Lowry's printing of anti-establishment and radical material and his financial management of the press were viewed with increasing alarm by student leaders and College authorities. They determined to rein him in. Their hostility, together with the pressures of printing and of his own academic programme, proved too much and in the middle of machining Valley of decision
in September 1933, Lowry decamped. 'If there's any chance of a job', he wrote to
of Phoenix, Allen Curnow had written: 'The book: it's a fascinating suggestion, but the catch is in the guarantee. As my pater observed, one must not only write, but underwrite',
Early in 1934 he returned to Auckland and lived with Beta plus (Memoirs I) (Auckland: Griffin Press, 1992), p.239. No new thing
(1934) under the
A Spearhead Publishers prospectus for No new thing announces it as 'their first publication' (see R. W. Lowry Papers, MS A-194, Box 1, Auckland University Library; hereafter cited as Lowry Papers). Another prospectus in the Hocken Library makes the same claim for The material basis of culture; containing the substance of a lecture delivered to the Auckland Institute, 23rd July, 1934. A draft letter of Mason's adds 'it will be of about 30 pages with paper cover printed in two colours. It will retail at 1/-', but evidently it was not completed (R. A. K. Mason Papers, MS 990/6, Wo new thing suppressed notes' and 'They should be slaves', Hocken Library, University of Otago).
Lowry was married by this time and with his wife Irene and daughter he moved to Northland to teach primary schoolchildren, but by 1939 they were again back in Auckland where Lowry gained access to yet another press. Under the imprint of the Pit poems
and Fairburn's
Manuka 1941, 98. The 'cubby hole' description is from 'Pat Dobbie's story', a transcript in the possession of
Wartime service, too, provided an opportunity to print. Following a brief posting to artillery in 1942, Lowry was attached to the Kiwi news
, the newspaper of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Pacific.
When he returned from the war in July 1944 Lowry was 31 years old. He and Irene had three young daughters and it was imperative that he earn a steady income. So he returned to Advertisement for Pelorus Press on broadside for Seddonian 1945, 43.Here & now (Lowry Papers, Box 2).
Lowry installed his press in a shed in his backyard where he undertook jobbing work: 'Archery Club, £4; Family Planning Assn, £1/4/0; Douglas Robb, £5/0/0'. Figures are derived from a Ledger book, 1945-7, in the possession of Vanya Lowry. They are based on a calendar year. Lowry did not appear to draw wages from the press.Jefferson v. Jacobs or, A matter of conscience
Whims of a WAAF
printed in December. The most notable publication in this first year was
Kendrick Smithyman, letter to Lowry, 25 March 1945 (Lowry Papers, Box 14, folder 2).
In 1946 the Pelorus came to national attention with Lowry's publishing of Fairburn's How to ride a bicycle in seventeen lovely colours; This little book (the first of a series!) was wholly written, designed, set up, imposed, proof-read, corrected, printed, folded, collated, knocked-up, stapled, trimmed, packed & invoiced at the Pelorus Press . . . in New Zealand, by New Zealanders, for New Zealanders. Well made New Zealand!
This is the story of
Sales to Caxton Press complicate the picture. Thirty-six copies seem to have been at trade rates, eight at retail rates. An advertisement for How to ride a bicycle ... appears in the January 1952 issue of Here & now with the statement 'just reissued'. Perhaps pages were gathered and issued between new boards.
During 1947 Lowry was satisfied that full-time printing was possible. By mid-year he optimistically wrote to Blackwood and The rehab proposal is in Lowry Papers, Box 2, folder 6; the capital account summary of 31 July 1948 in a General ledger, 1949-55, in the Pelorus Press Archives (MS 98/105, Box 3, folder 21, Auckland Institute and Museum Library; hereafter cited as Pelorus Press Archives). Pelorus Press Ltd, 10 years of progress [broadsheet] [1957] (Lowry Papers, Box 2, folder 3).
Once in the partnership Lowry settled down to help consolidate a commercial jobbing printery. He gained the accounts of the Community Arts Service, Workers' Educational Association (WEA), Auckland Society of Arts and, for a time, Auckland University College for their Bulletin series. Taylor brought in customers from Business Printing Works and Trigg, the Boys' Brigade. Even the auditor, Christian pacifist
that he edited. Between 1947 and 1952 the number of regular accounts built up: the Auckland Public Library (for binding); Arthur Yates (overprinting the prices on seed packets); Christopher Bede studios; Ilotts; the
Sales summaries are extracted from the General ledger, 1949-55 (Pelorus Press Archives).
Landfall
, 7 (1953), 78-80 (p.80).
Pelorus Press Ltd, Sales journal, 1949-55 (Pelorus Press Archives, Box 3, folder 25).
Ibid. Figures for 1949 are based on a nine-month year; for 1953, a ten-month year.
The latter part of 1949 occupied Lowry in other ways. He became involved in a pivotal new venture, the magazine Here & now.
This had a major effect on the partnership, not least because Pelorus Press contracted to print it. Lowry was also responsible for its design, was one of six on the original editorial committee and had very definite ideas about its content. Irene was also very involved. She acted as general secretary to the committee, a task that involved hours of work. Between them the Lowrys were to spend years holding
Circular for Here & now, [August 1949?] (Lowry Papers, Box 2).
Here & now
number one appeared in October, number two in November. Each had 36 pages and was printed on art paper by Jenkins in Auckland (not the Pelorus Press as the colophon states). The text pages were well-designed and contained line blocks, halftones and three-column text, with 3-line initials. But after the second issue the money ran out, and the editorial committee spent the best part of 1950 determining how production could continue. To raise the money necessary, a private company, Here & Now Limited, was established with nominal shareholders — 'legal scapegoats' as one contemporary called them — who held shares in trust on behalf of those who gave donations.
From March 1951 Here & now was increased to 40 pages. By October 1952 it was also distributed from 38 bookshops; thirteen in Auckland; eight in Wellington; three in Christchurch; two in Dunedin and from twelve shops in other towns.
The printing contract made a considerable impact on the Pelorus accounts. There were increases in purchases made on credit and in the volume and value of cash purchases and sales that inflated the accounts each month prior to printing. In September and October 1949, for example, the value of materials purchased was 50 per cent higher than in August, purchases that were matched later by income when subscription moneys were banked in November. The immediate beneficiaries were local linotyping firms, photo-engravers, ink and paper suppliers, and
Here & now was carefully managed. In the 1951 financial year, sales of Here & now represented 14 per cent of total press sales on credit. This percentage was exactly the same during the first six months of the 1952 financial year, and for the period from July 1952 until when Lowry left Pelorus Press the percentage dropped to 10 per cent, a figure confirmed by the more detailed Analysis book. It was a healthy state of affairs, for it meant that the partners were not dependent on Here & now for their income.
But for Lowry Figures extracted from typescript headed 16 March 1951, in possession of Vanya Lowry. This lists financial, production and subscription details for some of the 1950-1 issues and was probably tabled at the April meeting of the shareholders. See also Here & now must have been a constant headache as, even in its heyday when it appeared regularly, it did not generate sufficient income from sales to match production costs. In the period April 1951 to March 1952 eleven issues were published, but each lost about £25. These losses were met by drawing down the capital reserves of Here & Now Limited and made Lowry take short cuts to attempt to stay within budget. By combining the January-February 1951 issue, for example, he saved 30 per cent in costs by producing 25 per cent fewer pages (the 48-page issue cost £175).
The responsibility for the success of Circular, Here & now rested with the editorial committee. They determined the magazine's content which, if popular, would result in high sales and a healthy balance sheet. But editorial focus was never a strength, a factor that worried Here & now was founded on a belief that 'There is a desperate need for fresh air ... it will be as good as you [the reader] can make it'.Here & now, [October?] 1949. This circular uses the cover design of issue one and is printed in two colours (Lowry Papers, Box 3, Folder 5).
For the partnership at Pelorus, Here & now had a corrosive effect in other ways. Trigg and Taylor believed that Lowry spent too much time on the magazine and that it took up too much machine time. There was often a great deal of hand-setting to do, particularly for the advertisements. There was, remembers Here & now irked the partners because it dragged down, or limited the opportunities for, profitability. Their experience with Lowry over Here & now may explain why, in August 1950, the partnership was translated into a limited liability company. It was a form of protection against Lowry's excesses.
As well as the jobbing printing, and the printing of Here & now, the Pelorus Press published four substantial works during Lowry's time: Shadow of the flame
(1949),
Witheford's Shadow of the flame
was announced in October 1949: With this, the Press feels that it gains new status as printers, bookbinders and publishers of the first flight'.
Outside back cover, Here & now
, 1 (1949). The colophon states 'First published in March 1950'. The same advertisement announces
Glover, letter to John Reece Cole, 10 August 1949 (J. R. Cole Papers, MS 4647-07, Alexander Turnbull Library, NLNZ) and Brasch, letter to Janet Paul, 15 May 1949 (Brasch Papers, MS 996/21).
New Zealand listener
, 23 no.585 (1950), 13, and
Sales book and records (Lowry Papers, Box 2, folder 14).
Landfall
, 6 (1952), 330-1 (p.331) and
The press, most likely at Lowry's insistence, had published four works: a volume of poetry, a children's book, essays and a playscript. None was successful and the message was plain: if the press stuck to job printing there was minimal risk and sufficient profit. But if it attempted publishing, profitability could be threatened. Most jobbing accounts, for example, passed through the Analysis book and Sales journal without incident in a matter of months. Difficulties cropped up as a result of venturing into publishing — or larger-scale printing — and in this, Lowry's hand was always evident. The fourth work published by Pelorus, The forest, provides detailed evidence of this.
Lowry first heard of The forest
in 1950 when Cresswell gave a reading at
The letters of D'Arcy Cresswell
, ed. by
Prospectus for The forest, May-June [1950?] (Lowry Papers, Box 1, folder 8).
would be printed later from the galleys on lighter, machine-finished paper with one engraving and issued in a board cover with a lap-over dust jacket. Advertisement in Here & now
, July 1952, 13.
There are two sources for the Cresswell accounts: the General ledger, 1949-55 has a 'Cresswell account' summary diat covers the financial years 1951-3 and is annotated with die auditor's comments. Additional sales records are taken from the Sales journal, 1949-55, in which sales are listed for the period May 1952-October 1953. Built into the June 1952 figure is £255 'ex sales' that represented the cost of production to that date.
Ibid., 3 October 1951 (Brasch Papers, MS 996/23).
Late in 1951 or early 1952 The forest was finally printed on the new Glockner vertical cylinder. It had taken over two years to produce. There are no records of any income before May 1952 but between May and June £85 came in. After that, income tailed off dramatically and, until The forest was written off in March 1953, only £16 more was added to the account. Of the £101 income from sales, 60 per cent had come from booksellers (£57 as against £44 for individual subscribers) and once the initial flurry passed, there were few individual subscribers at all for the 'ordinary' edition. What hurt the partners most were the losses of £124 10s 7d — by the end of March 1953, sales had recouped only half of the costs of production. Lowry had gambled on subscription income matching production costs but had miscalculated badly. To make matters even worse, the job was flawed. The forest was 'important', 'authentic' and 'profoundly serious', Landfall, 6 (1952), 328-30 (p.329), and New Zealand listener
, 27 no.691 (1952), p.12.
But the examples of That is, subtracting expenses from sales then dividing the resulting net profit (or loss) by sales and multiplying by 100 to give a percentage profit (or loss). End of year closing stock and work-in-progress first need to be subtracted from expenses. The figures for the Press partnership and company are recorded in the General ledger, 1949-55. Sales figures are derived from the 'Work done' summary,
pp.50-2; expenses from the profit and loss account summaries, pp. 152-6. Figures for the period July 1952-October 1953 are supplemented by an Analysis book that lists monthly cash receipts and payments (Pelorus Press Archives, Box 4, folder 31). This is an invaluable check against the Sales journal and Purchases journal that list, respectively, sales and purchases on credit. All figures are for financial years ending 31 March.Here & now and Cresswell's The forest ought not distort the overall financial performance of Pelorus Press. It was a viable commercial concern and there are a number of indicators that confirm its profitability: for example, estimates of annual profit before tax, the partners' equity in plant, and the number of staff the partnership employed. Annual profit before tax can be estimated by analysing sales and expenses.
Throughout the period the Pelorus partners added plant and equipment to their business. They bought a Wharfedale 20 x 30 handfed press and a Furnival cylinder press. In 1949 they bought their first modern automatic, a 10 x 15 Thompson, and in 1952 an 18 x 13 Pelorus Press Ltd, 1/2 Glockner, an East German vertical cylinder. A list of plant compiled in 1950 includes £767 worth of type and £800 worth of binding equipment, with a £250 guillotine, a folding machine and a stitching machine. By 1952 the Severn Street premises were too small to accommodate the company: 'Every inch of space was utilised, a mezzanine floor had been built for paper storage — even the upper part of an old oven was cleaned out to provide much-needed space . . . carrying stock and printing formes up and down stairs, added to production costs.' 10 years of progress
[broadsheet] [1957].
In terms of staff the partnership began very much as a family affair. Trigg was the full-time machinist, Lowry the compositor and Taylor the binder. Anew industrial Award in 1947 granted an increase of 10s iod a week in the wages 'of all journeymen, bringing the rate for compositors to £6/10/0 and that for linotype operators to £6/17/6'. See Printers news
, 5 no.2 (May 1947).
Extracted from Staff earning records books, October 1947-November 1953 (Pelorus Press Archives, Box 4, folder 34).
Throughout 1953 Lowry's relationship with his partners deteriorated and in October Taylor and Trigg bought him out. Lowry took £1700 from the company, some plant, equipment, and Here & now: 'We all more or less decided that the time had come to let Here & now die a quick rather than a painful death tho' Bob insisted on keeping it going', wrote The letters of D'Arcy Cresswell
, p. 194. His necessity to draw down reserves and consequent lack of working capital played havoc with the regular production of
Here & now advertisement, July 1954, 24. He bought in new fonts of Perpetua roman and italic, which became his standard faces.
Lowry ran Pilgrim for seven years until February 1961 when it went into receivership. It was his last established press and his best productions there show an assured printer at work. These include Immanuel's land
(1957) — with its superb title-page and a device lifted straight from the Linotype Pilgrim prospectus,
Bob Lowry's importance to New Zealand printing history has not before been fully acknowledged and since his death in 1963 he has been remembered more for his lifestyle than his work. Glover's statement that what he 'actually did [was] not nearly as important as the fact that he existed' came to epitomise the way Lowry has been remembered. Auckland star
, 12 December 1963.
In a way, Lowry's work has been remembered in the same way as his life. His 'typographical excesses' — in works such as those produced for Fairburn, for example — have been lauded as Lowry's contribution to New Zealand printing, whereas his other,
Lowry's repeated shortcoming was printing and publishing without sufficient working capital. He knew it: 'Life is a bastard for the undercapitalised' he wrote to Glover when Pilgrim Press was in financial strife.
His involvement with the
In 1949 Lowry said of Glover's Landfall
, 3 (1949), 182-5 (p.186). He was reviewing the Caxton Press publication
It was Swagger Jack
, enthusing 'Your neo-sonnet 10-line form is, apart from often brilliant expression, artfully and beautifully turned to theme'.
Landfall. He held this position until 1972 before going on to found the rival journal
Swagger Jack: A station tale, Landfall
, 20 (1951), 315-6.
Although it had never been my intention to dissect the 'stranded whale' of New Zealand humour, it was a pleasant surprise to discover, in Bob Gormack's endeavours, an author and publisher committed to a native literature, but infused with a genuinely comic spirit. For it would seem that flocks of students of New Zealand literature have never doubted that their particular subject was to be taken seriously, both because of the solemnity of what was published and the way in which it was published. Gormack, by contrast, chooses to good-humouredly flout these conventions, and although he happily occupies the role of literary outsider because of it, his form and durability would suggest that his achievements are due further recognition.
Gormack's The private press
, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983), p.xv.
For Gormack's career began in Christchurch at about the same time as, and in some ways in response to, the emergence of the Areopagitica in symbolic protest against wartime censorship, Gormack was learning the basics of his trade printing illegal anti-conscription pamphlets for the No More War movement. While Caxton's efforts could be disregarded by state authorities as a mere printing exercise — the reproduction of an historic document — those of the pacifist movement were considered more of a direct threat which, ultimately, led to the confiscation of their printing press. Nevertheless, this temporary setback to Gormack's distinctly unofficial apprenticeship was to have a happy outcome. For, by a fortuitous and circuitous route befitting the author of what The centennial history of Barnego Flat, he was reunited with this very same press in 1964 and it became the workhorse for his own revivified
However, the first incarnation of this press took place some 20 years earlier, when, in 1944, Gormack enjoyed a brief rivalry with the Caxton Press. His more conventionally titled Raven Press derived the bulk of its income from the production of graph papers and gummed labels. Betting slips, Gormack was at pains to point out, were 'never printed in any shape or form'.The Nag's Head Press: An outline history and descriptive checklist of publications to June 1992 (Christchurch: Nag's Head Press, 1992), p.20.
Bookie: A new miscellany
appeared in March 1948 and, despite its title, was not an early
Ibid., p.23.
This idea of a Caxton clique was exploited in an extended parody in [Bookie entitled 'Specimen days in New Zealand: A continuous extract from the unpublished journals of James Flaxbush'. Bookie: A new miscellany
(Christchurch: Nag's Head Press, 1948), pp.51-97.
The deepening stream
(1940),
[ Bookie: A new miscellany
, p.62.
Writers and essayists were not the only subject of Gormack's entertaining satire. Typography — inextricable as it was from the 'Caxton poets' — also came in for similar treatment.Bookie entitled 'Speaking for ourselves' after the Caxton-published collection of short stories edited by Frank
Bookie: A new miscellany
, p.8.
Ibid., p.86.
Ibid., p.58.
Bookie: A new miscellany
, pp.44-8.
As I worked on this job I could not help thinking, with some pride, of the humble contribution I was making to New Zealand literature. Such things are worth-while! I am a representative of the working class and I can say so without, I hope, any trace of sentimentality. There can be no comparison between doing work of this kind and ordinary, commercial printing jobs. Work of this nature makes one feel an individual, a craftsman. One becomes conscious of one's soul.
Ibid., p.48.
In further mockery, Ibid., p.4.Bookie itself was stated as having been 'limited to 200 numbered copies', when in actual fact there were something more like 500 copies — unnumbered.
Bookie
also provided an opportunity for Gormack (through his fictional personae) to mount something of a rearguard action in support of the much-maligned 'Georgian' poets. In the introductory remarks, 'The ballad of Kaka Thompson' was cited as an example of 19th-century ballad-making that provided 'a most satisfactory answer to the many contemporary New Zealand writers — particularly those of the modern Caxton Press school — who still maintain, either directly or by provocative innuendo, that their native land has no poetical and literary traditions worth following or worth investigating'.
Ibid., p. 18.
Gormack himself admitted to enjoying the Georgian poets and, when interviewed in 1992, he still had on hand an anthology of their verse, New paths on Helicon
edited by Henry Newbolt, which he recalled as being particularly popular at the time. Ironically, this collection included both Pound and Eliot, whom
The literary journal Phoenix
, published by the Literary Society of Auckland University College, appeared for four issues between 1932 and 1933.
The sale of Gormack Graph Papers in 1955 to the Caxton Press raised enough money for a trip to England, where Gormack followed in something of Glover's footsteps some ten years previously. He visited the Bookie No. 4, which he described to Glover in the following terms:
It is only part of a bigger scheme ... With your taste for clear, incisive prose, it is hard to ask you to be patient with my long-winded stuff, but how else can one indulge one's love for Joyce and Rabelais? . . .
The general idea was to take my Nag's Head Club members back among their lusty New Zealand pioneers — satire on the ridiculous in modern pioneer-worship. There should be good fun in it for those that can penetrate the wordage. Ibid.
Although this fourth number never eventuated, the description is a virtual blueprint for the long-running Barnego Flat series that Gormack began in 1964.
The actual acquisition of a press on which to print the Barnego Flat series occurred in the mixture of chance and coincidence that seemed to be a feature of many Christchurch publishing arrangements. Gormack was offered a dismantled Harrild treadle press that had lain unused in a woman's garage for over 20 years. This turned out to be the same press on which he had learnt his trade, sheet-feeding anti-conscription notices at the beginning of the war! After two key brackets had been made up to replace the ones
The first book to appear from the now permanently located Nag's Head Press was part one of 23. Hereafter, this series of books is referred to as The progressive piecemeal printing of the centennial history of Barnego Flat.
Barnego Flat.
The Nag's Head Press, p.45.
It is not particularly surprising, then, that, as both Caxton and Pegasus were sought after by historical groups for the quality of their presentation, as well as the prestige value that attached to their imprints, Gormack should find this a potentially fertile subject for satire.
Comprising ten parts to date, the rambling fictional narrative of Barnego Flat
traces events in the lives of the pioneer ancestors of the Nag's Head subscribers and, like its title, utilises a style familiar to readers of
The wholly original and delightful spirit in which the Flat was altogether pioneered; the warm, glowing, richly human light which, almost without exception, irradiates and suffuses the recorded events of the district's history; above all, the stalwart, rambunctious, enterprising, forthright, courageous, dedicated, resolute, rorty, forward-looking, bold, formidable, vociferous, uproarious, powerfully operative, incorrigible, unflinching, somewhat Rabelaisian and Falstaffian nature of the first settlers on Barnego.
E. Dadds [R. S. Gormack],The centennial history of Barnego Flat: Part 1, Christchurch: Nag's Head Press, 1964, p.21.
In fact (or fiction in this case), the entire cast derived from the original Nag's Head subscribers of the first issue of Bookie, and was extended to include the Barnego Flat Balladeers' Club and Horse-followers' Guild, as well as the First Four Bullock Wagons. As these titles suggest, the strong parochial strain that is particularly evident in Canterbury was treated with a spirit of comic irreverence. However, the attention to detail and characterisation, and accuracy of representation would suggest that Barnego Flat is more than a parodying pastiche. It could equally be taken as a tribute to a comic spirit as necessary to the pioneer as their wagons and ploughs, but which is often overlooked by over-earnest researchers and amateur historians.
The 'editor' Dadds's description of Ibid., p.19.Barnego Flat as '[a] true-to-type district history' Barnego Flat
was 'worked at as prose'.
The result of the piecemeal printing of Barnego Flat was a collection of stories worthy of a West Coast publican, but with a considerably broader and more appreciative audience. Such was
Australian book review, devoted an entire article in praise of the work of the Barnego Flat series. Australian book review
(September 1970), 316.
With his retirement from
in the 1980s. The fact that the number of books printed or published each year did not greatly increase was perhaps more an indication of Gormack's extraordinary effort while holding down a full-time editing job. With the aid of his son, Nick, he introduced some more contemporary poets to the Nag's Head list, and continued to revisit his own youth in the form of his student diaries. More than a record of turbulent times, these provided a kind of rare literary record of an aspiring litterateur, someone who wrote candidly of his influences and ambitions, and who thereby provided a most interesting contrast with the figure of 'The New Zealand Author', as promulgated by the Caxton school. With a mixture of youthful vanity and honesty, the young Bob Gormack revealed his own literary heritage in which the Romantic and Georgian traditions played an important and active part, as well as figures like Lawrence, Joyce and Proust.
Gormack's achievement as a publisher is perhaps best summarised by Matrix: A review for printers and bibliophiles
, 5 (1985), 139-42 (p. 142).
Certainly, in terms of continuity and consistency of output, Gormack has no peers in New Zealand, where private, or even small press printing is characterised only by being consistently transient. Even by comparison with considerably larger publishing operations, the Nag's Head form — in terms of overseas sales, production of local literature and success in a niche market — is impressive.
Despite this, Gormack's literary endeavours tend to have been dismissed, the absence of seriousness in effect confused with intent. True, his material derives from the comedy of language and life, and his writing style is discursive, more in the nature of a sophisticated pub yarn, yet it contains sufficient elements of satire and literary allusion, particularly French, to lift it above simple comedy. It is something of an axiom that the ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of maturity, and when one considers the seriousness with which a young New Zealand literature was taken in the 1930s and 1940s, it can, in retrospect, appear to be somewhat over-earnest. It is not difficult to imagine Gormack reacting against such a formative literary climate of high seriousness, but it is an even healthier sign for literature when it can recognise and accept such reactions.
Bob Gormack provides a unique example of someone actively participating in the literary process, whose work was not judged to be 'successful' by the standards of the day, but who, thereby, provides a unique insight into just how those standards operated. It could certainly be argued that Gormack's Entwhistle has as much claim to representation of the 'Kiwi joker' as Mulgan's Johnson, Sargeson's Jack, or even Keri Hulme's Kerewin. Johnson was 'man alone' in John Mulgan's book of that name. 'The hole that jack dug' was a celebrated story by Frank Sargeson, while Kerewin was the central protagonist in Keri Hulme's the bone people
The French poet
A Book of Hours, too, must be mine Where subtle workmanship will shine, Of gold and azure, rich and smart, Arranged and painted with great art, Covered with fine brocade of gold; And there must be, so as to hold The pages closed, two golden clasps. Quoted in
Erwin Panofsky ,, 2 vols (Harper & Row, New York, 1971), v.1, p.68 (translated in footnote 3 to p.68, pp.387-8); from Eustache Deschamps,Early Netherlandish painting , ed. byOeuvres complètes A. Queux de Saint Hilaire andG. Reynaud , 11 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873-1903), v.o, p.45 (quoted in O. Cartellieri,(New York, 1929), p.211).The court of Burgundy
Books of Hours, with their delicate illuminations, were to an extent 'fashionable' as an increasingly desirable accessory for the aspiring 14th- and 15th-century middle-class woman. But the crucial role of these personalised manuscript prayer books in the fostering of a more literate society should not be overlooked. As well as proudly displaying her book, praising the Lord from it, and acquiring that ineffable, essential product 'wisdom' from meditation on its contents, she also learned to read from it. The famous miniature of Mary of Burgundy, holding her book open with a mannered arch of the little finger, celebrates just such a book 'arranged and painted with great art', as does the more
Books of Hours: Notes on two illuminated manuscripts in the Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection
(Dunedin: Dunedin Public Library, 1970), p.54; and
Over that period, the increasing number of such books commissioned by women is testimony to the growing cultural importance of women as patrons as well as their role in increasing literacy. Recent research has posited links between this phenomenon and the new (from the 14th century) insistence on the representation of the book within Annunciation iconography, and further important links with the overall iconography of a whole new subject emerging in the 14th century that is featured in our Dunedin book: St Anne teaching the Virgin to read.Signs, 7 no.4 (1982), 742-68; Gesta, 32 no. 1 (1993), 69-80.
Like the multimedia PCs for today's aspiring middle classes, every home had to have its Book of Hours, through which knowledge was obtained — spiritual wisdom, that is, rather than informational secular knowledge. Towards the end of the chapter, crossing cultures from the 15th to the late 20th century, from manuscript to cyber, I investigate whether there are any continuities between the picturing of the role of the book in learning situations in 15th century representations and the picturing of the role of the computer in learning situations in a strand of contemporary representations in computer magazines. Does St Anne, who taught the Virgin to read in the Dunedin Book of Hours and in countless others of the period, still have the same role to play
The particular representation I am focusing on is in an histori-ated initial — an initial housing an Margery Fitzherbert is shown with her unnamed husband in another illumination in the volume (folio 83 verso); for details of provenance see Manion, Vines and de Hamel, istoria, or story — in a book known as the Hours of Margery Fitzherbert of Derbyshire. This Book of Hours is also known to have been passed to another woman who married into the family, Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in New Zealand collections
, p.85.
St Anne teaches the Virgin to read on folio 9 recto within a delightfully dainty, decorative 'D' — a little damp-stained — in a style associated with the so-called International Gothic of around 1400, and more particularly with that of the illuminator within the book itself, has peculiar resonance for us now, as we embark on an era when (it has been suggested) we will visit institutions such as the new British Library not so much to read a text but 'to experience the book as artefact'. Independent on Sunday
, 24 July 1994, 'Sunday Review', p.7.
Although the dimensions of the picture in the Margery Fitzherbert Book of Hours may be minute (the volume itself is only 180 x 125 mm), the image of the book within it is clearly given prominence, not only through its central positioning but also through its large scale. In common with other versions over this period of this new narrative of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, it forms the dominant motif in a subject which spells out the absolute centrality of the book as the vehicle of literacy, as well as, by extension, the acquiring of piety. Probably the best known of the many illuminated versions of this new story occurs in the Bedford Hours (ca 1423, British Library). Here the association of a female patron with the scene is emphasised: she is directly involved in the narrative which has St Anne teaching the Virgin from a book, and the Virgin in turn teaching the Christ-Child, who raises his hand in the teaching gesture towards the patron, Anne, Duchess of Bedford. She kneels at a prie-dieu, with a book,
Interestingly, the subject of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read only evolved as a subject when the new emphasis on the book or books in Annunciation iconography superseded the standard accessory for the Virgin prior to this period, the spindle. This occurred in northern Europe in the 14th century and increased in importance in the 15th century. Its origins are usually located in England, with appearances in a wide range of media throughout Europe, but it featured especially in Books of Hours — and in Books of Hours for women. Bell, 'Medieval women book owners', p.762.
As has been pointed out, there is no specific biblical or related textual basis for this subject, although the notion that Mary was Sheingorn, 'The Wise Mother', p.69.wise is articulated in the Pseudo-Matthew: 'No one could be found who was better instructed than she [Mary] in wisdom and in the Law of God . . . ' and also in
Other factors, however, may be worth considering. The popularity, for instance, of such texts as Nicholas Love's translation into the vernacular of the 13th-century Ibid.Meditationes vitae Christi is one.
As art historians of the period will be aware, the Meditationes vitae Christi text states that not only was the Virgin reading when the angel arrived but — most conveniently for the pattern of Redemption narrative — she was at that very instant reading the Old Testament page featuring Isaiah's prophecy (7:14), 'Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son . . .'. Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, to see St Anne herself pictured with her daughter Mary in a related scene, and with a book, given its status in this influential text.
In the Dunedin Book of Hours the significance of this scene is heightened, I would argue, because it appears on an inserted
Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry that was later inserted opposite the Annunciation, in order to provide a pairing of the key episodes in the grand scheme of the Redemption in a double-page spread. Les Très riches heures du Duc de Berry
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), commentary to folio 25 verso.
In the Dunedin Book of Hours, the leaf in question is the last in a sequence of nine leaves, at the end of the opening calendar sequence, and it is the first illumination in the volume. The text it accompanies is also the first of the most important sequence of devotions in a Book of Hours, the Matins prayers from the Hours of the Virgin, 'Domine labia mea aperies', 'O Lord open my lips ... so that I may sing Thy praises' — praises which have a particular relevance to the theme of learning to read. Matins is the first of the sequence of Hours to be attended to in the daily routine of devotions programmed in Books of Hours — the medieval spiritual antecedent of the Filofax/laptop/notebook. Significantly, the middle section of this volume, with the main textual and illumination components, lacks the important Matins text, so its later addition would also seem to show a conscious desire to compensate for this lack.
The title of this essay includes the words 'reading art, looking at books . . . ', an obvious play on the impact of semiotics on the now not quite so 'new' art history, involving the notion of a close
One kind of observation, for instance, which relates to the placement of this historiated initial, might note the nice analogy that is suggested between the double-page format of the open book — one object, two connected but separate units — and the two representatives in this scene of one family, connected but separate, mother and daughter.
Another might address ideas around the notion of teaching reading in a literal, practical sense; an approach to the generation of meaning in the Dunedin representation which is strengthened by reference to such works as the early 14th-century Psalter illumination of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read from an Alphabet Book. Here the role of such books in the mechanics of the teaching process is made abundantly clear through the large-scale depiction of the six letters 'DOMINE'.
While reading the classics was not deemed appropriate for women — their access to Ovid's Ars amoris
('the art of love') was perceived as particularly risky — documentation over this period does reveal that women were increasingly owners of books. These were mostly religious works and if a woman owned only one book this was likely to be a Book of Hours. The connections between the acquiring of literacy, and so piety, via devotional texts was of prime import for a middle- or upper-class woman. In this Psalter it is clearly important that the child learns to read so that she can learn about the Lord, about 'Domine': be spiritual. And, tellingly, it is within the 'D' of 'Domine' that the Dunedin illumination is situated. Reading meant she could then involve herself fully in the requirements of the daily routine of approximately three-hourly devotions laid out in Books of Hours, starting at dawn with Matins and finishing up with Compline at sunset or late evening.
Attending to other details within this tiny painting can also connect with and impact on the meanings generated by the representation of the book within it. The sprig held by St Anne is one such detail, and a most unusual aspect of the iconography of this subject. That it functions as a sign of spring, of regeneration and renewal, and so is appropriate to the theme of the renewal of
literacy as it is transferred from mother to daughter is possible, with memories lingering on within Christian iconography of the Demeter-Persephone relationship. Certainly the links with spring are supported by the colour which St Anne generally wears: green, which symbolised spring. (Unusually, and unhelpfully, she is not depicted in this colour in the Dunedin version.) The rather ritualistically held sprig may also be understood as functioning as a symbol of the Sheingorn, 'The Wise Mother', p.69.gift of literacy in this representation, of the notion of growth via knowledge as it is handed down from one generation to the next. In relation to this, the notion of the child (the Virgin herself) as a gift is another aspect worth considering. The proto-Evangelium of James, for instance, has St Anne say, 'As the Lord my God lives, if I bear a child ... I will bring it as a gift to the Lord my God . . .'(4:i).
The significations of related motifs such as the flowers, often lilies, held by the Angel Gabriel in Annunciation scenes, symbolising the purity of the Virgin (or, if with three blooms, the Trinity) — or the Old Testament Jesse's twig, shoot or tree, referring to Isaiah's prophesies regarding the birth of Christ (Isaiah 11:1-3) — inevitably slide across (with a pre-modernist frame of mind like mine) to this context. This kind of transference is discussed by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson in relation to what they call the textual character of inter-textual allusion, 'which involves the carry-over of meaning, or intersection of a prior discourse, into a different context', so complicating or enriching its meanings. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, 'Semiotics and art history', Art bulletin, 73 (1991), 174-208 (p.207).
Such sliding across of significations is supported in this instance by the Dunedin illumination's incorporation of an unusual setting for this interaction between St Anne and the Virgin: a garden. In relation to a scene involving the Virgin, this immediately suggests the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden of the Virgin's virginal state, frequently depicted in Annunciation scenes. In the Dunedin version of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, this garden provides a habitat for the reading of the sprig as the Word made flesh at the moment of the conception of Christ, the second person of the Trinity. It can also be seen as a sprig or shoot of Jesse, and so as the 'sprog' Jesus. Egrediatur virga de radice Jesse (a shoot shall grow from the stock of Jesse), the text stimulating medieval minds to much linguistic play around the similarities between virga (the shoot) and virgo (the Virgin), from whom the shoot, Christ, emerges.
Continuing with such medieval — and post-structuralist? — thought patterns, one could read the all-encompassing, dominating structure of the letter 'D' of 'Domine' in this historiated initial as suggesting (as does the sprig/twig) not only the all-encompassing presence of the Lord ('Domine') but also his worldly manifestation in the person of Christ.
It is also important to consider the links between femininity and piety in relation to the Dunedin work, with its focus on a mother teaching a female child from a book that is probably, self-referentially, a Book of Hours. The Virgin was the major role model for women, as is made abundantly clear in the illumination of Mary of Guelders as the Virgin in her own Book of Hours (the Hours of Mary of Guelders). In the Annunciation scene Mary of Guelders is shown as the Virgin, holding her Book of Hours. The depiction conflates portrait and role model.
It is also worth bearing in mind that Mary herself could be cast, as it were, The book, when held by the Virgin with the Christ Child, is the Book of Wisdom, hence the title 'Mater Sapientiae', the Mother of Wisdom, for the Virgin. She is the 'The Wise Mother' (refer Sheingorn, 'The Wise Mother'), she is the book.as a book, as the book in which God wrote the Incarnation, an idea familiar to the medieval world and with a long history reaching back to the 4th century.'The sound of music's Leisel, 'sixteen going on seventeen', for whom Rolf sings, 'You little girl are an empty page which men will want to write on . . .'.
The relatively common image of women with small closed books in Renaissance portraiture relates directly to the mode of piety thought suitable for women of these classes, providing the notion of femininity with a distinctly 'devout' component. Bronzino, Sheingorn, 'The Wise Mother', p.75, quoting M. T. Clanchy, Girl with book (ca 1540), Uffizi Gallery, Florence, is one example, where the young woman is shown clasping the virtuous accessory of the small, closed, devotional book to her chest. From memory to written record: England 1066-1307
(London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p.263.
The self-referential aspect of the representation of books within books, noted above in relation to the Dunedin illumination, is a frequent and significant component of manuscript books, hardly surprising in a culture in which each book was unique, the dominant religion was embodied in a book (the Bible) and symbolised by a book. And also unsurprising for a culture in which, as Ivan Illich has it in his Ivan Illich, Hugh of St Victor, See the 6th-century Byzantine dome mosaics in the Orthodox Baptistery, Ravenna, for the representation of the Bible on altars. For the book in Visitation scenes, see the Visitation (folio 38 verso) in Longnon and Cazelles, In the vineyard of the text, the book was the 'root-metaphor' of the age.'In the vineyard of the text, A commentary to Hugh's 'Didascalicon' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.3. A more recent publication that explores many ramifications of medieval women and books and the significance generally of the book in the medieval period is Women and the book: Assessing the visual evidence, ed. by Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).Erudit didascalicon, Book 7, Chapter 4, in J.-P Migne (ed.) Patrologiae cursus completus, vol.176, col. 814. Quoted in Emile Màle, The Gothic image, trans. by Dora Nussey (London: Collins, 1961), p.29.Les Très riches heures du Duc de Berry.
Among later variations on the theme of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, Etienne de la Tour's beautiful The education of the Virgin
(Frick Collection, New York) expands the traditional iconography to include the addition of a candle. The proximity of the candle to the book provides not only practical illumination for the Virgin's lessons but spiritual illumination as well, considering the candle's long history within representation as symbolic of Christ and of the Divine. The presence of God is clearly indicated. Coupled here with the motif of the book, certainly a prayer book like a Book of Hours, there is evidently a symbiotic signifying relationship at play, operating to intensify meaning as it flows from and oscillates between the two objects.
And the computer? Our new God? The idea has become commonplace, of course, has become a trope. We have moved, across
Independent on Sunday
, 31 March 1996, 50.
How are contemporary notions of the transmission of culture via the pixeled screen pictured? Do mothers ('St Annes') continue to have a dominant role to play? Which kinds of family structures, ethnic identities and genders, ages and classes are represented? A sampling of images from computer magazines and a British Sunday paper provide the basis for my — not altogether serious — sociological survey and analysis. Given the speed of change within cyber-culture, a quite different narrative could quite easily be constructed, I am sure. However, my istoria, my story, concludes
Personal computer world, March 1995, 448.
A number of home PC advertisements have computer-buff Dad (not St Anne/Mum) in casually authoritative role, interacting matily with their sons. However, particularly relevant for this essay, one example of a contemporary St Anne super-mum interacting with her daughter sees our traditional iconography
and instructing the girl on a home PC from CMP Technology.Windows, October 1994, 298.
More subtle messages, and messages which also challenge the durability of the conventional nuclear family, together with the accepted notions of the direction and authority of the transmission of culture from the older generation to the younger, are conveyed by Microsoft advertisements in some of the Independent's Sunday Reviews. Independent on Sunday
, 28 May 1995, 24-5.
Or can we see this as a return to the ancient idea of children as gods, of being taught by the innocence and wisdom of children? Christian iconography provides antecedents (though not in St Anne teaching the Virgin to read) in the role of and picturing of Christ as a child miraculously teaching adults in the temple; and also as a super-babe-in-arms, as in Botticelli's Madonna of the Book
(Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan), where that chubby little hand is really guiding his mother's. You can see the vestiges, the traces, of
In an advertisement featuring an Internet home page, the computer will not provide a substitute for that peculiarly physical, intimate setting for mother-daughter tutorials we have seen in the scene of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, and in Christ teaching his Mum. Internet
, April, 1995, 22-3.
Finally, in the advertisement for Microsoft Encarta 96, Byte
, April 1995, inside front cover.
Microsoft Encarta 96 encyclopedia
(Redmond, WA, USA: Microsoft, c. 1993-5) [on 1 CD-ROM], wording on packaging.
St Anne taught the Virgin to read so that, as the Matins text reads, she could 'open her lips' and 'sing Thy praises'. The role of the Book of Hours as a tool in the further glorification of 'Domine', God, of developing spirituality and wisdom in young women, was critical. It had its highly significant practical uses, too, regarding literacy, as I have outlined. But its primary function up to the 15th century was in engendering virtue, in instructing how, in a spiritual sense, that literacy be used: how to love ... to love God and all that that implied.
Whose praises will this child sing? I think we know. As a child of the Harry Potter generation (which my text predates), this child may now of course enjoy multiple allegiances!
Permission has been sought from all institutions holding material illustrated in this chapter. Not all had replied at the time of going to print. The author would like to acknowledge in advance and apologise to any that were unable to reply.
School textbooks published in New Zealand to 1960
(Palmerston North: Dunmore Press; Wellington: Gondwanaland Press, 1992) provides an invaluable account of school textbooks published in New Zealand and a fully annotated bibliography of reading books.
In May 1950 I turned five and started school at
I had seen a camel at the zoo; but it was to be 30 years before I saw a real squirrel, in Regent's Park — and then it was a grey one. My life in Primer One set a pattern for my schooling which was to last until the seventh form. I had been an only child until I was nearly five, and had little experience of other children. I enjoyed most of what went on in the classroom, but I dreaded playtime and lunchtime. The noisy hordes in the playground terrified me, and I had no strategies for making friends. Going to the toilet was a major ordeal. There were no inside latches on the primer toilet doors — apparently so that little children could not trap themselves inside. A strange custom had developed of mercilessly teasing any child who was shy enough to close the door. Groups of kids, mainly boys, would stand round outside the cubicle chanting 'Baby! Baby!' and trying to push the door open, as I desperately tried to get my pants down and up again while holding the door shut.
After six months of the easy life, scholastically speaking, in Primer One, I 'skipped' Primer Two — much to my relief, as it was taught by an elderly woman who was very free with the strap, and was rumoured to be a witch — and went straight to Primer Three. There I met Janet and John and learnt to read.
Janet and John started school in New Zealand the same year as I did — 1950. Their migration here from Britain had its origins in the enormously influential New Education Fellowship Conference of 1937. Dr Beeby's autobiography recalls that conference and the discourse it was part of. Biography of an idea: Beeby on education
(Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1992), pp.i03ff.
Biography, p. 106.
He cites the strong sense of professional isolation felt by New Zealand educators then; this had been exacerbated by the Depression, when even books about education became scarce. But he also stresses the 'abiding sense of guilt towards the young, who had suffered in both war and times of want. . . here were experts offering us ways of making reparation to the next generation'. Ibid.
The political context was encouraging for reformers: 'we had the knowledge that the new Labour Government was pledged to social reform, and that its minister of education [ Ibid.
How was reparation to be made? In sum, education was to reject what Beeby calls its first great myth, survival of the fittest, and embrace the second two: education of the whole child, and equality of opportunity. The creed was encapsulated in the famous statement written by Beeby for Peter Fraser in 1939, although, as he points out, it does not actually mention equality at all:
The Government's objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his powers.
Beeby ,Biography, p. 124.
Linked with this shift was a new approach to the curriculum. Under Beeby as assistant director-general from 1938, and as
Janet and John arrived as part of this reform.
Before the Janet and John series appeared, most New Zealand children had been faced with the formidable Progressive readers. They were home-grown: the author/editor was Hilda Freeman, and Whitcombe and Tombs first published them in 1928. By 1940 they had overtaken all other reading series in New Zealand and were widely used in Australia too.
Like Janet and John, the Progressive readers centred on a family — Pat, May, Mother, Father and Baby — but before long they leapt off into a confusing mishmash of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Altogether, 47 new words were introduced in the First Primer, including 'jig', 'jog', 'pig' and 'hog', 'roast beef (this was a pre-vegetarian age), 'Elfland', 'cupboard', and — ominously, perhaps — 'market'.
Beeby's Syllabus Revision Committee on Reading in the Primary School listed the ideal characteristics of a reading series. The stories should have a sequence of thoughts, and be based on a controlled vocabulary. The books should be suitably graded, attractive, and interesting, with a helpful layout. See Repport of the Syllabus Revision Committee on reading in the primary school (Wellington: Department of Education, 1953).
Obviously, the Progressive readers did not measure up. But what was to replace them? In a 1985 interviewJanet and John was the eventual choice of the Syllabus Committee.
By the time they reached New Zealand Janet and John had a complex genealogy. They had started out in the United States in 1936 as Alice and Jerry. In 1949 two women,
For information on the history of Janet and John, see Price, School textbooks,
pp.162-3;
The version specially published for New Zealand by Nisbet that same year had seven books instead of four, and introduced
Once upon a time. The word 'Maori' did not appear until that last book.
Eighty thousand copies of each book were printed and distributed free to New Zealand schools from 1950 on. By 1956 stocks were low, so
Also available to support the basic books were several series of little reading books, though schools had to buy these. To give an idea of the numbers involved, three books published by Whitcombe and Tombs for the Family series — Family fun
(1951),
As Department of Education, 'Primary and post-primary education' in its School textbooks, p. 160; Price interview (1995)-Progressive readers and Janet and John. Right up until at least 1961, Whitcombe and Tombs continued to print the Progressive readers, obviously to meet a demand, in large runs of 10,000-20,000 at a time. However, the department's annual report for 1950 noted with satisfaction that six of the seven Janet and John titles had been sent out to schools. It commented: 'Already these books, through the use of carefully graded text and attractive illustrations in full colour, are having a beneficial effect on the teaching of reading in the early stages.'Annual report for 1950, AJHR 1951, E.2, p.3.
With Janet and John's help, I learnt to read quickly and painlessly. This was partly due to my mother, who read Little Golden Books to me every night — Counting rhymes, The shy little kitten, The saggy baggy elephant. So I was definitely 'reading ready'. But there was another factor at work too. Apart from the fact that we lived in a flat over a shop, rather than a pretty suburban house surrounded by lawns, the central themes of the Janet and John series were entirely consistent with those of my own home life.
Long before Book 3 it is clear that Janet and John live in far more affluent circumstances than their predecessors Pat and May had done. Baby has disappeared, and Janet and John are so close in age that they could be twins. Unlike Pat and May, who ran errands and entertained Baby, Janet and John are never shown helping their parents or 'working' in any way, except for one trip to the local shop. What they mainly do is play.
Pat and May had of course played too. They played houses, pretended to be rabbits, dogs and horses, and made a row of chairs into a train. Nothing so wildly imaginative occurs to Janet and John. They seem unable to amuse themselves without a menagerie of pets and a cornucopia of expensive shop-bought props. By the end of Book 1, Here we go, they have played not only with a puppy and some kittens, but also with a swing, some boats, a toy plane, a hoop, a ball and an inflatable rubber horse.
The only make-believe roles they take on are those of customer and shopkeeper. In Book 3, Out and about, John sets up a shop where Janet and her friend can get toys. In fact, although the sordid topic of money is never mentioned, Book 3 is based around shopping, both imaginary and real. The nearest approach to a plot centres on an incident where Mother and Father both buy John a new cap. He resolves this problem by giving one of them to Janet. In Book 4, the children move calmly and confidently among the
Shopping had figured in the Progressive readers too — but of a very different kind. In the First progressive primer
, published in 1929, Mother told Pat, 'I am too poor to let you buy a roast of beef... but buy a big rabbit. Buy a bone too, so that we can make broth.'
First progressive primer
(Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1929) [Price 25/90], p.14. This title was the most widely distributed, selling about 200,000 copies by 1941 (Price,
John Berger, Janet and John were part of what Ways of seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p.129. Ways of seeing
, p. 130.
Berger, Ways of seeing, comments that 'Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the spectator-owner.'
From the start, the images were designed, as Berger puts it, to 'propagate society's belief in itself', Ways of seeing
, p. 131.
There had always been plenty of advice to the poor — or rather to poor women — on how to manage their children and their households. (Much of this advice was delivered via compulsory schooling; indeed, Mother's quoted instructions to Pat about eschewing roast beef in favour of thrifty rabbit and soup bones may well be thinly disguised advice.) But never before had the
New Zealand woman's weekly. They all looked much the same — mother, father, two closely spaced children — and they all carried the same message: this is the only right way to live.
It was in part the increasingly obvious gap between those images of happy conformity and the realities of New Zealand society that paved the way for the radical shifts of the 1980s. Something had clearly gone wrong somewhere. But had the family, and the economy, been fatally weakened by too much state welfare, as the neo-liberals insisted' For one of the most strident New Zealand exampples, see Ruth Richardson, Making a difference (Auckland: Shoal Bay Press, 1995).
Yet Janet and John can be read another way. Their images and their presence in our hands, like the Bertie Germ posters and the polio vaccines, or even the revolting school milk and the dental nurses in their feared 'murder house', were all of a piece. They sent children a consistent message which can perhaps best be summed up by the word 'entitlement'.
... the reality of our childhood experience was that these good things (education, health care) were our birthright. We took them for granted, just as we took for granted our right to be in the world. Along with ... the malt supplement and the free school milk, we may also have absorbed a certain sense of our own worth and the sense of a future that would get better and better, as if history were on our side.
, ed. byTruth, dare or promise: Girls growing up in the fifties Liz Heron (London: Virago, 1985), p.6.
In New Zealand, as Margaret Tennant has shown, the welfare state programme and the focus on families worked for children at the most basic level. By 1954 the average 15-year-old boy was 100 mm taller and 12 kg heavier than in 1934. Though girls made less dramatic gains, they were taller by 40 mm and heavier by 7.5 kg. School medical inspections showed that malnutrition had
Children's health, the nation's wealth: A history of children's health camps
(Wellington: Bridget Williams Books and Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1994), pp.200-1.
As for education, primary classrooms were transformed by the approaches derided by critics as 'the play way'. Secondary schooling changed too, though less dramatically. In 1942 over 25 per cent of pupils had not gone on to full-time post-primary education, and another 50 per cent had left in their first or second year. That year the Thomas Committee was set up to look at the curriculum and the examination system. In 1944 the school leaving age was raised to fifteen, and in 1946 School Certificate was introduced as a qualification for those who were not going on to university. And all these reforms were being put in place at a time when school rolls were soaring. Between 1943 and 1950 primary rolls rose by 10,000 children a year; over the next five years the increase doubled to 20,000 a year. The total primary roll had been 280,000 in 1943; by 1955 it was 453,000. See Department of Education, Annual reports, AJHR, 1946-55, E.2.
In hindsight, the achievement is remarkable. But it fell far short of its creators' intentions. The driving force behind all the innovations was equality of opportunity — the right of every citizen to an equal chance in life. However, equality was narrowly defined. By and large, those at the top and the bottom of the socio-economic tree were believed to be there because of their respective levels of ability.
As Dr Beeby later explained, he, like virtually all other educators at that time, thought of differences in native ability as the prime cause of differences in achievement, and believed that high intelligence, like truth, would out. See Biography, also Moving targets: Six essays on educational policy
(Wellington: NZCER, 1986).
Report of the Syllabus Revision Committee on reading in the primary school
(Wellington: Department of Education, 1953), p.13. 23. Berger,
The boys in the Standards classes at Mount Eden Primary certainly made sure that any signs of superiority in bright girls were quickly stamped out — though they cut uppity boys down to size, too. Boys and girls were frequently pitted against each other in spelling or mental arithmetic contests. As a successful female speller who wore glasses, I was dealt with at playtime by
But until relatively recently, the complex ways in which schooling reflected and perpetuated systematic discrimination and disadvantage along lines of gender, race and class were not even visible, let alone understood. And just as they were beginning to be understood, the political pendulum started its long swing back to the right. 'Money is life', says Berger. 'The power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless. Those who have the power become lovable.' Berger, Ways of seeing, p.143.Janet and John and the bright magazines became dominant, as the metaphor of the shop spread to encompass more and more of our social landscape.
Ironically, one of the few places where New Zealand's growing ranks of faceless children can now see themselves positively reflected is in the pages of their reading books — including those which continue to be supplied by the state. But in virtually every other area of their lives, the message is no longer one of entitlement or equality of opportunity. Once again, it is survival of the fittest.
A few weeks before the 1995 Auckland conference on the history of the book, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the first publication of the Straits Times
, which started publication in Singapore in July 1845. Though threatened by rivals at different times since then, the newspaper has served Singapore well, and is now in a position in which no rival seems likely to supplant it — provided it and the government of Singapore remain on reasonable terms.
That they are on reasonable terms in the 1990s was clear from the celebrations. The occasion was marked by the publication of an excellent history C. M. Turnbull, Dateline Singapore: 150 years of the 'Straits Times' (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 1995).New Zealand Herald, or other New Zealand newspapers which have a respectably long record of publication, this newspaper is now more than a newspaper, more than part of the regional print culture alone. The Straits Times today is one of the media, its parent company obtaining and repackaging information, and
We are still as far away from 'the death of the book' as we have ever been. So how is the history of printing to be regarded? We might say, following the boast sometimes seen in old type specimens 'With twenty-six soldiers of lead ... I will conquer the world'; or, if inclined to classical quotation, go to a phrase used in the earliest days of printing: Typographica, ars omnium artium conservatrix — which if scarcely less boastful can more readily be justified.
Because thought about the function of typography and what printing history ought to be was powerfully affected in New Zealand by the writings of Stanley Morison or Oliver Simon in the Fleuron
, and by the publicity so skilfully prepared for the Monotype Corporation by Beatrice Warde, these boasts might be more immediately accepted in New Zealand. But these descriptions of printing tend to be regarded as good and true when looked at from the perspective of those already enthralled by printing history. Even the leaders of Singaporean industry and opinion who were at the
In any other circumstances, the credibility gap would be too great. Every occupational group, politicians and prostitutes, medics and media moguls, authors and academics, has its own egocentric approach to life and society. 'With twenty-six soldiers of lead' is a fine and memorable phrase, but it is no more to be taken as the way people (other than those in the book trade) will regard the history of printing and of the book, than the boast of the blacksmith that 'By hammer and hand / All work doth stand'. I doubt whether many of us would actually concede that to be a complete statement of the truth.
The first point I wish to make, then, is that if the history of the book in New Zealand is to be regarded as part of mainstream history of the country (and not just a harmless but low-value hobby occupation like, say, some of the genealogical research so frequently seen), it has precisely the value, the weight, that will be given to it by educated New Zealanders as a whole. No more than that. If the average New Zealander attaches no importance at all to the typographic manifestations of the history of this country,
As an enthusiast for the subject, I would personally much prefer to see detailed specialist studies which will augment my own knowledge with fine detail, though I will readily admit that there is force to the argument that good generalised historical accounts can be prepared only when the detail is known and understood, in the way the French school of printing history has shown so well. (The volumes in the Elibank Press series 'Sources for the History of Print Culture in New Zealand' provide exactly the sort of thing needed.) Government printing in New Zealand, 1840-1843
(Wellington: Elibank Press, 1995) did much to correct errors in the pioneering book by
In saying this, I am preaching what I have not practised. Although some of my work on fine printing has been an attempt at the general overview, much of my time has been spent in exploring dusty byways of book trade history which nobody else thought of much use. There are plenty of examples in my collection Printing and the book trade in the West Indies
(London: Pindar Press, 1987).
This is not to deny the importance of picking up fragments and looking to see whether they can be fitted in to a larger jigsaw. When the late Rollo Silver told the infant American Printing History Association that the works they published should contain 'all the footnotes fit to print', Writing the history of American printing
(New York: American Printing History Association, 1977).
The second point I wish to emphasise — and I write as a former sojourner in New Zealand, fond of the country and its peoples — is that the history of the book in New Zealand is not a history of authorship, publishing and printing and bookselling, and of those who practised the crafts in these islands since 1840. Of course these topics are part of the history of the book in New Zealand, but they are a much more minor part than most New Zealanders seem to recognise. To be insular, to concentrate only on what happened in the land of the long white cloud, will be an unhelpful and ultimately untruthful course to follow. Recent work by Bill Bell (of the History of the Book in Scotland) on the print culture as part of the Scottish emigrant experience,
About 25 years ago, I was present at an international library conference being held in Jamaica, whose theme was 'the challenge of change'. At one of the sessions the speaker, a very bright and able librarian from one of the Commonwealth Caribbean countries, was addressing the difficulties faced by one large research library whose stock of 17th, 18th and 19th century 'West
The paper is included in Libraries and the challenge of change: Papers of the international library conference held in Kingston, Jamaica 24—29 April
1972, ed. by
His proposition was not accepted. Hard-pressed though they were then (and are even more today) West Indian librarians accepted that it was their responsibility to preserve such material from the time before 'Massa day done' for the historian's use. They accepted that these books were and are part of the intellectual history of those islands, just as books printed in or imported into the North American colonies, or the craftsmen and people who created and traded in them are part of the intellectual history of the United States. Books and magazines and newspapers imported from Britain (or elsewhere) into India, or Australia, or New Zealand, are similarly part of the intellectual history of those countries, in the same way that today one would have to pay regard to the influence of Hollywood on the minds and thoughts of young people across the globe.
The recent fashion in the writing of book histories has been to concentrate on individual countries — the book in America, in Australia, in Britain, and more recently in Canada. To adopt the same approach for New Zealand will be tempting. What happened in reading, printing and publishing in New Zealand in the 19th century was of course in some ways different from anywhere else in the world; and the temptation for the writer of book history here will be to strive for novelty, by emphasising the distinctively New Zealand features.
Nevertheless, what happened here was only one manifestation of what was happening all over the world in the places to which
This shows where there are two serious problems with the current approach to the history of the book. By concentrating on nations as they exist today, we are forced to play down or even leave out the international connections and international trade. Concentrating on individual nations and their differences, we discourage the study of commonalities. One can see this easily enough by looking at histories of the book which have been published in the past: because the history of the book in Britain is so extensive it has been tempting (and so much easier) for researchers to think only about the British Isles and not of the 'Greater Britain' which was supplied from London.
Even in Britain, much writing on the book has been the writing of metropolitan history, and the history of the book in provincial England and in Wales was neglected far too long. The work of The provincial book trade in eighteenth century England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) were beacons lighting the way to better understanding of the importance (and largely independent history) of the book trade in provincial centres.
Just as Americans dwell on their own patch, there is a natural tendency for New Zealanders to dwell on what was novel or different about the history of printing in these islands. Nowhere else in the world was there a Māori community, and the human interest in the story of the early mission presses is very great. But it needs to be recognised printing in Māori for and by the Māori
Of course it is interesting to study why the mission presses failed so badly. To do this effectively cannot be achieved by looking at them as a specifically New Zealand phenomenon, through strained comparisons with other printing and publishing ventures in New Zealand. It demands comparison with the successes and failures of missionary printing in other societies. There were plenty of such ventures at the time in other Polynesian cultures and elsewhere in the Pacific, so to look sideways at book trade history in Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji is desirable anyway, irrespective of the common mission press background. Less obvious, but potentially much more fruitful and illuminating for the mindsets of Yate, Colenso, the Catholic mission printers and their backers in Britain and France, would be studies of mission printing in Madagascar or some of the Chinese missions, since these are more likely to reveal what they thought they were about.
What printers, booksellers, bookbinders and others actually did to make a living, once they were in New Zealand is obviously of interest. Having myself roamed from one Commonwealth country to another rather as many an unsuccessful printer or newspaperman did in the 19th century, I am perhaps particularly alert to peripatetic printers, and inclined to think that this was a very common thing. Movement among members of the book trade ('going on the tramp') was certainly common enough a century ago within the United States or the British Isles. We don't know yet how common it was within the British Empire; but what we do know is that for a great part of the 19th century and beyond, practically every compositor or pressman or journalist or bookseller who worked in New Zealand came from outside. He The gender is deliberate — but what about the female compositors from New Zealand who were a cause of concern to print union officials in the Australian colonies in the 1890s? Where and how they were trained would be good to know.
Giving this attention is not at all easy. In the days I was preoccupied by the West Indian book trade, I became interested in
Today, the ease of e-mail contact facilitates collaboration over large distances, but there can still be difficulties in 'foreign' research, as a New Zealand example shows. Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 19 (1995), 15-29.
Hamblyn has fulfilled one of the historian's tasks admirably: he has interested the reader. I now want to know more about Stone. But it's now necessary (if the interest is to be satisfied) for somebody to look closely at Stone and his career in Kent and at that of one of his business associates, that very interesting character Crosby Lockwood, whose name crops up over and over again when one is looking at certain aspects of the book trade.
Whether Stone was typical or unusual is worth knowing. One can probably assume that in the long run his business in Kent was
Landfall 185 (April 1993), 137-51.
The historian of the book who is based in New Zealand needs friends abroad who will assist with such enquiries, but it is not a one-way matter. In Singapore (to return for a moment to Mary Turnbull's history of the Straits Times) personnel from New Zealand played a significant role in press history 40 or 50 years ago; important from the Singaporean perspective, but also of New Zealand interest since their work in Asia was (one would guess) often incidental to careers which later took these people back to New Zealand. Similarly, in my own work on the history of the Golden Cockerel Press (that quintessentially English private press run by Irishmen), quite apart from the indirect influences which worked on it through the artist John Buckland Wright, there were several instances of direct New Zealand influences which came as a surprise to me. No doubt I noticed these because of my own sojourn in New Zealand, and my years spent in Wellington certainly provided me with friends and professional colleagues to whom I can turn for assistance. Getting the information was not a real problem.
But who is likely to explore English or American or other repositories with an eye to interesting New Zealand connections? Unless a method is developed for linking together the teams preparing formal histories of the book in the different English-
As stated above, it is important for large countries to help preserve the records of smaller ones. My personal experience of this came in the context of the West Indies and the triangular trade, but there are implications for New Zealand, a de facto colonial or neo-colonial power as far as many of its neighbours are concerned. New Zealanders have often played a crucial role in the history of the book in the South Pacific nations, and who is to collect the material and write that history if it is not done in New Zealand? For the 1995 Auckland conference I prepared a little keepsake on aspects of printing in Western Samoa; Apia nights: Memories of printing in Samoa
(Singapore: privately published, 1995), 13pp. [Copies were distributed to delegates at the conference.]
Book & print in New Zealand: A guide to print culture in Aotearoa
, ed. by
[Found by chance while I was looking among the uncatalogued Eric Gill manuscripts in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. According to the Clark Library's records, this was formerly laid into the copy of Fantastica which Glover sent to Gill, and which is also now in the Gill collection at the Clark.]
I should have thanked you before this for the book you sent me, Three Type Faces. It interested me greatly. Joanna is new to me. I haven't quite made myself accustomed to the 'feel' of it yet. Certainly when looking it over I gained the impression that it was medieval rather than modern, as you claimed. But I wouldn't like to say anything further without actually handling it.
If there is any catalogue of works from your press, please let me have one. It is not always possible to keep as closely in touch with English work as we would like.
I recently sent you two books from our Press — Fantastica & Dominion. If you can spare a line to let us know what you think of them I'd be very pleased. No doubt there are plenty of drawings in that style in England, but Bensemann is certainly the first New Zealander to try illustration on this scale. He is twenty-five — there should be great improvement yet. As for Dominion — it's only linotyped, & I know you won't like the big headings. But we haven't the range of type to make our choice as often as we'd like. The poem should interest you, however, quite apart from the typography.
Again, thanking you for Three Type Faces.
Margery Blackman
is Honorary Curator of Ethnographic Textiles and Costume at
Roderick Cave is an Englishman who is a long-time enthusiast for the history of printing, and author of
Jocelyn Cuming
is National Preservation Officer at the
Elizabeth Eastmond
lectures in Art History at the
Anne Else
co-founded
Penny Griffith
, a former librarian, is a freelance editor who was one of three compiler-editors of
Peter Hughes
, whose main research interest is New Zealand small press publishing, is Librarian at the
Lawrence Jones
recently retired as a Professor of English at the
Danny Keenan
was born in New Plymouth and is of
Donald Kerr
is the Printed Collections Librarian at
Peter Lineham
has an MA from the University of Canterbury, a BD from Otago, and a PhD from the University of Sussex. His writings
Alan Loney
convened the 1995 conference on the History of the Book in New Zealand at the University of Auckland. He has published articles on typography and literature, and has recently retired from fine press printing at The
Jane McRae
is a lecturer in Māori oral literature at the Māori Studies Department of the
Patrick Sandbrook
is currently Director, National Student Relations, at
Terry Sturm
taught at the University of Sydney before becoming Professor of English at the
Noel Waite
completed his PhD thesis,
Allen & Unwin, 103-12
Angus & Robertson, 109-11
Art in New Zealand, 148—51
Arts and crafts essays (1903), 70
Arts and Crafts movement, 68-9
Auckland Public Library, see Grey Collection (Auckland)
authors
creative process, 121-8
dealings with publishers, 90-112
organisations, see British Society of Authors; PEN
promotion of, 159-62
Authors' Week (1936), 159-62
authorship, 3-4
Autographs (E. Joachim), 75
Bedford Hours, 206-7
207 Beeby, Clarence E., 226-7, 232
Bible, see Māori, and the Bible; Māori Bible
book collecting, see also Grey, Sir George; Grey Collection (Auckland); Grey Collection (Cape Town)
Māori and Pacific languages, 55-60
book history, vii, ix, 235-44
book in iconography, 207-9, 212—5
book production, 140—1, see also
printing; publishing; typography
Māori participation in, 4-6
bookbinding, 68-75
Books of Hours, 203-15, see also Bedford Hours, Hours of. . .
Bookselling
auctions, 48-52
private, 52-5
Botticelli, 219
British and Foreign Bible Society, 30, 33, 40, 41
British Publishers' Association, 89, 102
British Society of Authors, 88, 95, 100, 102, 104-5, 107, 108
Broughton, Ruka, 13—14
Buck, Sir Peter, see Te Rangi Hīroa
Caxton Press, 136-7, 138, 189-90
The centennial history of Barnego Flat, 194-8
Century Company, 91-102
Church Missionary Society, 33, 39, see also mission presses
Cobden-Sanderson, T.J., 69-70
Colenso, Elizabeth, 56-7
computers and family, 216-21, 216-8, 220—1
conservation, 82-4
Cresswell, D'Arcy, 133, 179, 180-1
Crucifixion (Romanum Missale), 61
Curnow, Allen, 134, 136, 152-3
Dunedin Public Libraries, Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection, see Hours of Margery Fitzherbeit of Derbyshire; Joachim, Eleanor
East India pilot (1827), 78, 79-84, 80-3
editorial influence, 143-65
The education of the Virgin, 215, 215
educational publishing, 226-33
electronic media and printing, ix-xii
Endeavour Press, 88, 94, 95, 98, 103-4, 107,109
ethnographies, 8
Fairburn, A.R.D., 145-6, 154-5, 170-2,/
Glover, Denis, 136-7
and Bob Lowry, 174-5
and Charles Marris, 144-8
The godwits fly, 120-8
Grey, Sir George, 3-4, 46, 47-67, 51
Grey Collection (Auckland), 49, 52-3, 57, 60-5
Grey Collection (Cape Town), 48, 50, 51-2, 59
Grove, Neil, 12
Here we go (Janet and John series), 224
Hours of Margery Fitzherbert of Derbyshire, 202, 205, 206, 209-12
Hours of Mary of Burgundy, 204
Hours of Mary of Guelders, 213
How to ride a bicycle . . ., 170-2
Hyde, Robin, 118-30, 146-8, 160
hydrographic charts, 79-81
I went walking (Janet and John series), 228
iconography, 204-15
illuminated manuscripts, 61, 203-15
Janet and John, 224, 227-33, 228
Joachim, Eleanor, 68-77
Ko te Katikihama III, 58
Lancaster, G.B., see Lyttleton, Edith
Lawlor, Pat, 159
Lawry, Henry, 33-4, 37, 38, 39, 41
libraries, see Grey Collection (Auckland); Grey Collection (Cape Town); Dunedin Public Libraries, Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection
literacy
and orality, 18—21
and reading, 227—31
and women, 204, 210-11
literary criticism, 134—5
Madonna of the Book, 219
Māori, see also mission presses; Taranaki land claims; Treaty of Waitangi and the Bible, 4, 5, 6, 9 (see also Māori Bible)
and Christianity, 31-2, 41-2
genealogies, 20
and land legislation, 22-7
language, 36-9
literacy, 6-10, 18-19, 29-30
manuscripts, 5-6
oral traditions, 1-3, 5-13
and conflict with written word, 18-21
publishing, 4-6, 10-14
Māori Bible, 29-42
Marris, Charles, 144-53
and Denis Glover, 144-8
and Robin Hyde, 146-8
Mason, R.A.K., 143-4
Maunsell, George, 40
Maunsell, Robert, 31-2, 33-5, 36-8, 56
McCormick, E.H., 132-3, 134, 137
McKenzie, D.F., 6, 7,17-20, 131-2
McLuhan, Marshall, 131-2
Mead, Hirini Moko, 12
mission presses, 30-2, 240-1, see also
British and Foreign Bible Society;
Church Missionary Society
Monotype Corporation, 135, 140
Morison, Stanley, 135, 139, 140
Mulgan, Alan, 154-9
and John Mulgan, 155-6, 157
Nag's Head Press, 189-200
New Zealand official yearbook, x—xi
Norie, John, 80-2
Pageant, 92-102
Paola and Francesca (1903), 70, 71, 72
Pelorus Press, 169-82
PEN, 159-60
periodicals
An in New Zealand, 148-51
Bookie, 190-1, 192-5
Here &now, 175-8, 182-3
Phoenix, 133-4
Tomorrow, 144-7
Pilgrim Press, 182-3
Plants of New Zealand (1908), 74
poetry, 132-4
as books, 137-41
editorial influence, 143-65
printing, see also mission presses, and names of individual presses: Caxton; Nag's Head; Pelorus; Pilgrim; Unicorn
and electronic media, ix-xii
economics, 166-87
printing history, xi, 236—44
international perspective, 238-44
private presses, see Nag's Head Press
Progressive readers, 227, 229, 230
Psalter, 210,211
publishers
American, 91-102
Australian, 89, 97, 98, 103-13
British, 89, 102, 103—12
New Zealand, see Whitcombe and Tombs, and names of individual presses: Caxton; Nag's Head; Pelorus; Pilgrim; Unicorn
publishing, 85-115
economics, 166-87
editorial influence 143-65
educational, 226-33
international, 112-5
New Zealand market, 89, 113—5
royalties and taxation, 99-100
readers, see educational publishing
reading and literacy, ix, 227-31, see also Māori literacy, women and literacy
Reedy, Anaru, 12—13
Reid,J.C, 133-4
Reilly, Michael, 5
royalties and taxation, 99-100
Sargeson, Frank, 145, 148, 155
Schroder, John, 153-4
Shaw, Henry, 63-4
Smith, S. Percy, 5
St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, 202, 205, 204—15, 211
Stephensen, P.R., 94, 95, 98, 108-9
Taranaki land claims, 21-7
Te Hurinui Jones, Pei, 11, 12, 19-20
Te Rangi Hiroa, 19
Te Rangikaheke, Wiremu Maihi, 3-4, 7, 8, 10, 13
Thornton, Agathe, 13
Tour, Etienne de la, 215
Treaty of Waitangi, 18-21
typography, viii-ix, 135-7, 167-8, 178, 179, 183-4, 192-5, 195, 197
Unicorn Press, 168-9
Unwin, Stanley, 89, 95-7, 102-13
Wakefield, Edward Jemingham, 54-5
Whitcombe and Tombs, 227-30
White, John, 4-5
Wldman, William, 60, 61-2