A delightful find in the second hand bookshop: the 26 November 1960 issue of the
Observer (published in Sydney), including the Christmas books supplement. It includes pieces on the hard choice facing Australian publishers: whether or not to take the dangerous plunge into paperbacks? and a loudly iconoclastic piece by the head honcho of Angus and Robertson called "Books as Merchandise?":
Books are merchandise just like soap or cereals. The purists will no doubt be shocked at this concept, but I believe from my experience in other fields that the merchandising approach is the key to success in this field. The analogy with food stuffs is an apt one. Books and food stuffs tend to go stale quickly (with exceptions, of course). Some foods provide enjoyment, some nourishment. Some foods are a luxury, others a necessity. The same can be said of books...
... This tendency among book-men to restrict their contacts to their own trade breeds a smugness and conservatism that makes book publishing and book-selling a potential bonanza for those who can break with tradition, broaden their horizons and treat books for what they are - merchandise to be manufactured and sold as quickly as possible...
... The institutional publisher is case in the role of a missionary or social uplifter, catering chiefly for an intellectual minority, but occasionally providing the masses with what he considers they should read rather than with what they want...
... Low price, high turnover is basic... The public wants a satisfactory product at a reasonable price...
... I was shocked to find that some 150 Australian authors have banded together in London and are feeding the English publishing houses with a continuous flow of their best manuscripts. Scarcely any professional authors are able to subsist in Australia by allowing Australian publishers to handle their works in hard covers at high prices...Another piece laments the general dearth of books published Down Under, describes A&R's massive selloff off highbrow titles and "the mighty US paperback invasion and the revolution in wholesaling techniques that has accompanied it" - the invention of sale or return. Yet another frets that literary magazine
Meanjin may not reach its twentieth anniversary. (It did.) A review of Fred Hoyle's
The Black Cloud damns it (and SF generally) with faint praise.
(Cheers to
icons_osi for the Asimov quote ikon!)