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Angus and Robertson, Publishers, 1888-1900
Jennifer Alison
This paper is on three aspects of Angus and Robertson's publishing between
1888, the year the first book was issued, and the end of 1900. These aspects
are, first the more important titles published during this period, then
the methods A&R used to merchandise their books and, lastly, those
books which were successful and those which were not.
Between 1888 and 1900, a period of thirteen years, A&R issued about
140 separate titles - an average of eleven a year. These publications included
books, pamphlets, serials, a wall map, poems set to music and architectural
drawings. A&R used four main methods of publishing. These were:
- ON COMMISSION: where the author paid publishing costs and the publisher housed, advertised, distributed and sold the book and kept accounts for it.
- The ROYALTY SYSTEM: where A&R bore all publications costs and paid the author a royalty, usually 10% on all copies sold.
- HALF PROFIT SHARE: where A&R bore all publication costs and, when these had been recouped, the author and the publisher took an equal share of the profit.
- OUTRIGHT PURCHASE: of the copyright of the work for a sum of money.
Most of the books published on commission don't concern us as they were mainly pamphlets and mainly published in the early years. A&R's serious publishing may be said to have begun in 1894/95 - even though they had published twenty books before this time. The publishing partner in the business was George Robertson.
Figures 1-3 ( Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3) list the more important literary, educational and general works published by Angus & Robertson during the period.
The A&R books fall into several styles physically according to their subject matter or intended audience. The least attractive were the low priced schoolbooks, such as the Copy Books and the Australian School Series. They were printed on cheap paper, with lots of text on each page and not always a lot of care in the printing. They had paper covers which were often stapled on. They were probably not meant to last. The textbooks were produced in a sturdy fashion with good paper, clearly set out text, stitched binding, plain but strong covers, and had lots of illustrations, diagrams, maps etc.
The literary titles received a lot of care and attention to their physical appearance. They were printed on good paper, often handmade, with careful setting and printing, lots of white space on the page, good cloth binding with gold lettering, top edges gilt and the other edges untrimmed. They were very pleasant octavo volumes. They radiated quality. The paper and cloth were imported but Robertson was anxious that the books be as Australian as possible so the printing and binding were done locally. This presented some difficulties as local printers and binders were unused to book work on a large scale. The printers had only enough type to allow one book at a time to be set. The binders had difficulty keeping up with the quantities and speed required by A&R. There was no satisfactory local expertise in the printing of photographic plates and these had to be made and printed overseas.
MARKETING
A&R developed a whole array of stratagems for bringing their books
to the notice of the public, the book trade and the school community. For
the public generally they used advertising in capital city daily papers
and magazines such as the Bulletin, the Catholic Record,
the Educational Gazette, the Review of Reviews. They tended
to advertise more at Christmas. However they grudged the money spent on
paid advertising and this was the least used method.
They made use of flyers and circulars about new titles, printed specimen
pages and prospectuses for mailing out and they issued catalogues of the
firm's publications. Most A&R books had a 16 or 32 page section bound
in at the back and this section was a complete listing of the firm's publications,
together with prices and some information about the book. They printed
display cards and show cards for booksellers to put up in their shops.
Robertson however placed most faith in securing reviews of the publications.
A review or a notice in print was an advertisement that only cost the production
price of the book. In addition, pithy statements from reviews could be
quoted to all and sundry and used in the firm's advertising material and
catalogues. To this end hundreds and hundreds of review copies were sent
out to hundreds of publications throughout country and city Australia and
New Zealand, and to many British publications as well. A record of all
the review copies was kept and missing reviews were chased up. All the
reviews received were pasted up in Review Books. They are now housed in
twenty-seven archive boxes in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
Some examples of numbers of copies sent for review:
214 Rhymes from the mines
64 Emigrant's home letters
212 Teens
211 Kingswood cookery book
140 Girls together
222 History of Australian bushranging
195 Australian lettering book
155 The mutineer
A&R used a network of contacts in the book trade, asking for help
in getting a book reviewed or to get the right reviewer, even suggesting
information that might be put in the review. Editors were sometimes made
an exclusive offer of a block to illustrate their review and sometimes
sent early page proofs.
Complimentary copies of the books were also distributed - routinely
to the firm's partners, to Archibald and McLeod at the Bulletin,
to David Scott Mitchell, to the Colony's Governor. Snowy River was
sent to the critics Andrew Lang and Richard Le Gallienne in England and
they both reviewed it favourably. Robertson also sent a copy to Rudyard
Kipling which resulted in quite a kind letter back from Kipling. This was
not used in advertising but people were told of it and selected people,
like the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, were allowed to read
it.
In marketing to the book trade Robertson wrote a host of letters each
time a new title was to appear. The firm solicited orders for particular
titles, they praised their authors and talked up the books saying how well
they were selling or they referred booksellers to favourable reviews. They
castigated booksellers for small orders. They offered inducements - discounts
for quantity orders or deferred payment terms or the bookseller's imprint
on the book for a really large order, 500 or 1000 copies. They also engaged
in inertial selling - sending booksellers more copies than they had ordered
or even books that hadn't been ordered at all.
Robertson sent twenty-four unordered copies of The Coming Commonwealth
to a bookseller saying: 'The time during which it has any chance of sale
will be brief. It is a very good book indeed and ought to sell.' A bookseller
ordering 35 copies of Snowy River was sent 50 and 50 copies of Teens,
'lest you run short during the Christmas rush.' An order for a copy of
At dawn and dusk resulted in six being despatched: 'we think you
can easily do with the number sent.' When sending a shipment to Adelaide,
A&R said 'in order to fill the case we put in three and a half gross
of Copy Books and hope this will meet with your approval. You will no doubt
require them before long.' To another Adelaide Bookseller: 'We found space
at the top which we thought might as well be filled and to save expenses
of another shipment and have therefore sent 62 Kingswood more than
ordered.'
The schoolbooks and text books required different strategies because
they were not usually distributed through the book trade but needed a teacher
or some authority to approve of them. So they sought to get the books adopted
by the various colonial education departments either as approved books
for particular examinations or to be listed on departmental reading lists.
A lot of effort was devoted to this. A&R also sent their books for
display wherever there was an Education Exhibition or a Conference of Teachers.
They organised and ran a writing competition for school pupils in association
with the Copy Books. This was held from 1896 to 1908 and involved mountains
of correspondence. They offered gold and silver medals in a number of age
groups and book prizes to be selected from stock in the shop. In 1897 there
were 324 prizes worth £50. There was an elaborate printed report
issued each year on the results of the Writing Competition with photographs
of the winners, a specimen of their handwriting and an adjudicator's report.
They also exhibited the winning entries in the shop which would have brought
them in some extra potential customers.
Also, they tried using a traveller in metropolitan Sydney, country NSW and Queensland. He was seconded from the bookshop staff and his mission was to talk to schoolteachers and show them the firm's educational books and to organise local booksellers to keep stocks of them. He also was to report back any useful information on schools and school teachers and local conditions etc. A&R kept up to date mailing lists and information on the size and population of various country towns and their educational institutions, names of school inspectors, names of editors of local papers.
RESULTS OF ALL THIS
In response to the review copies distributed came hundreds and hundreds
of reviews from publications covering a very widespread area and these
were just as likely to be from papers in the country as the city.
Some numbers of reviews received:
100 Coming Commonwealth
136 Kingswood cookery book
143 History of Australian bushranging
51 Simple tests for minerals
27 English grammar
151 The man from Snowy River
265 While the billy boils
104 Teens
12 Spirit of the bushfire
118 At dawn and dusk
A really surprising number of reviewers commented on the physical appearance of the books. Some remarked that the firm deserved praise - 'pluck' and 'enterprise' were words often mentioned - for trying to publish locally and for proving that books could be successfully published in Australia instead of the authors having to go to an English publisher. 'If Australian writers do not become famous', said one, 'it will not be the fault of their publishers.' A few sensed something extra, that Angus and Robertson was laying the foundation of an Australian national literature.
WHAT SOLD WELL
The first printing of The man from Snowy River was for 1250 copies
of which 500 were meant for London so 750 was the allocation for Australasia.
This was far too modest and all the first edition had sold before the publication
date of 19 October, 1895. The sales required that successive impressions
be set in train so that, by the end of the following year, not quite fifteen
months after publication, 11,140 copies were in print. And the book continued
to sell well - it had reached 48,000 by 1917. Robertson called it 'a regular
mountain pony for staying power.'
The two Lawson titles published in the year after Snowy River also sold
well but not as well as the Paterson book. The first impression of In
the days when the world was wide was for 3000 copies, a step up from
the 1250 of Snowy River. The book sold steadily but took seven years
to reach the 11,000 copy mark that had taken Snowy River fifteen
months. While the billy boils was also issued in a first impression
of 3000 copies. It also sold well and steadily and took just three years
to reach Snowy River's 11,000 copies in print.
The sales of Snowy River and the two Lawson books can be compared
with Rhymes from the mines which took nine years to sell 2000 copies.
3000 copies of At dawn and dusk were issued and sold slowly. The
remaining copies were sold off to the Bulletin four years after
publication. The Australian progressive songster took four years
to show a profit. Causeries familières was approaching solvency
three years after publication. There were two other very successful sellers
: the Australian School Series and the Copy Books. The Australian School
series sold 70,000 copies in the first five months - but these were low
priced books and needed to sell in large quantities. The next reprint of
the School Series was for 170,000 copies. The School series was a consistent
good seller for many years. For the eleven years from 1899 to 1910 the
author of the School Series, Taylor, made £880 (or 80 pounds a year)
and Angus and Robertson £1760 or 160 pounds a year, which was a useful
profit. NB profit share one third: two thirds.
The other good seller was the Copy Books. This series was begun in 1896
and from 1897 to 1901, 1.7 million individual parts were sold. This was
an average annual return of £1686 - it's hard to say what the profit
was but perhaps between two and three hundred pounds a year. Conway's English
grammar also had good sales. A&R owned the copyright of this book
which they had bought from the author. However, twice Robertson sent Conway
a bonus cheque saying that the book had done better than expected. Jose's
History of Australasia sold 72,500 copies up to 1927. Other
books such as the Kingswood cookery book, Simple tests for minerals,
The geology of Sydney and the Blue Mountains sold modestly but continuously
and made small but regular additions to the profits. The history of
Australian bushranging sold very well initially. There are no sales
figures for the paper covered books in the Commonwealth series but large
numbers were printed and as they were popular authors, mostly books by
Lawson, they probably did quite well.
There is not much information in the A&R files about unsuccessful books. They tried very hard not to have losses. Certainly A&R lost about twenty pounds on An emigrant's home letters. The spirit of the bushfire dragged on in its second thousand to about 1910. The mutineer was not a success, nor, for some reason, was For the term of his natural life. Sales of Where the dead men lie went well for the first thousand but then just collapsed. More than half the copies of Why federate remained unsold when returned to the author.
Figure
4 shows a reconstructed pricing for The man from Snowy River.
The publishing, right from the start, made a substantial, if fluctuating, contribution to the firm's overall profit. Figure 5 shows the profit relationship of the various A&R departments.
SOME OBSERVATIONS
Angus and Robertson's reputation was as literary publishers and the
educational publishing appears to have been more or less invisible. However,
it was crucial to the viability of the publishing program as a whole.
Initially the publishing was supported by the amazing sales of Snowy
River and, to a lesser extent, the two Lawson titles. As sales of these
books dropped off the educational publishing became the chief support of
the publishing program.
In the early years A&R developed a successful formula, a pattern
of literary publishing plus educational publishing with some very selective
general publishing and this pattern was followed for many years.
Also, from these early years, the firm developed a most satisfactory backlist - the Copy Books and the School Series just kept on selling. The man from Snowy River is still in print and so are Lawson's titles. The Australian lettering book, first published in 1898, is still listed in the A&R catalogue.
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Last Updated : 29 September 1998