A ripple in the vast, soundless mud

Wednesday, 6th May 2009

One Sydney novelist is proposing a subscription model to alleviate our perpetual publishing crisis, says Ross Fitzgerald

They say there’s a publishing crisis in Australia, but that’s nothing new. Publishing has always been in crisis in Australia because, for a start, the population has never been large enough to fully support a local industry: not for quality literary titles, anyway. The book trade has always been dominated by imports, initially from British companies, then American, now joined by German- and French-based multinationals.

Writers in Australia are often a desperate bunch, struggling for a slice of a relatively small pie. Truth to tell, most authors fail to make much impact. As Vance Palmer once said: ‘Writing a book in Australia is like throwing a rock into vast, soundless mud.’

Back in the 1860s, Marcus Clarke tried to publish quality literary journals — the Melbourne-based Colonial Monthly and a weekly comic journal Humbug. He went bankrupt. Adam Lindsay Gordon tried subsidy publishing and, deeply depressed when he couldn’t pay the printers’ bill of £70 for his last book Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, shot himself in June 1870 by Melbourne’s Brighton Beach. In 1881, Henry Kendall chose subscription publishing, on the advice of the NSW attorney general Robert Wisdom. Leading Australian politician (and future father of Federation) Sir Henry Parkes subscribed for 50 copies of Kendall’s collection of 35 poems, Songs from the Mountains. Kendall sold a thousand copies and made a modest profit.

Subscription publishing dates from 1617 when an English lexicographer, John Minsheu, issued his dictionary by that method, which thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries. The novelist, memoirist and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson Fanny Burney (1752-1840) used it successfully for her novel Camilla, as did Alexander Pope for his translation of the Iliad, Dr Johnson for his Shakespeare edition and Robert Burns for his poems.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page