A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  At the back of the ground floor shallow wooden steps led up to a mezzanine level where the cashiers sat, intercepting the metal cylinders on a pulley system that whizzed money and dockets up from the shop floor and sent them down again with change. Above the mezzanine were more wooden stairs to the first floor, with the accounts department and publishing offices, and beyond that was a staircase that led to a few cupboard-like spare rooms known as the attic.

  Beatrice would certainly have been told the bookshop’s folklore. Some employees remembered the day in April 1895 when a sallow, beaky solicitor in his thirties came in with a sheaf of verses he had written for the Bulletin under the name of ‘The Banjo’. The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses became A&R’s first great publishing success and Andrew Barton Paterson, who took his pseudonym from the name of a horse, Australia’s best-selling poet. Paterson’s friendly rival Henry Lawson, who died in 1922, was the subject of many stories. Tall, with a mop of dark hair, a hook nose and brilliant, lively dark eyes, Lawson was usually the worse for wine. One day a disgusted woman customer in the art book section asked who ‘that dreadful man’ was. When told, she approached Lawson for his autograph. With a flourish, he picked up the nearest ten-guinea art book, ripped out the title page, signed it and handed it to the customer. After that, according to legend, Lawson was paid ten shillings a week to keep out of the bookshop.

  The black-bearded, genial and autocratic ghost of George Robertson, who had died four years before Beatrice joined the company, presided over the whole of Angus and Robertson. Some of the older hands, men who had started working in the bookshop as boys, still remembered his partner David Mackenzie Angus, the pale, red-headed Scot with troublesome lungs who had seen the bookshop prosper and the publishing company get on its feet, only to die in his forties fifteen years later, in 1901.

  Robertson, always known within the company as G.R., was a combination of hardheaded bookseller, fastidious connoisseur and pirate; he even looked like a buccaneer. The son of a Scots clergyman who came to Australia from England at the age of twenty-two and who named Halstead Press for his Essex birthplace, George Robertson developed a passion for Australiana and collected rare and valuable books, pamphlets, prints, maritime charts, explorers’ journals, early watercolours, and grammars of Aboriginal, Maori and Pacific Island languages. His friend and chief rival was David Scott Mitchell, a reclusive figure who used his inherited wealth to indulge his taste for rare books, maps and manuscripts. At Robertson’s suggestion, Mitchell offered his collection to the New South Wales state government, who – predictably – dithered about whether to accept it. An exasperated Robertson managed to persuade the government to house Mitchell’s collection in a separate wing of the new library they were building in Macquarie Street, and it became known as the Mitchell Library.

  Robertson always considered that his ‘boss business’ was selling books, old or new. But he was a restless man and found the idea of publishing his own books immensely appealing. In the late 1880s he chanced his arm with two volumes of poetry – A Crown of Wattle by H. Peden Steel and Sun and Cloud on River and Sea by ‘Ishmael Dare’, the pseudonym of the writer and reviewer Arthur W. Jose. The results encouraged him to continue, though he still thought of publishing as a sideline. Then came the huge success in 1895 of A.B. Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses and Henry Lawson’s book of verse In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses, and his short-story collection While the Billy Boils, both published in 1896. They convinced Robertson that books about the bush could make money.

  The bush verse of Barcroft Boake, ‘John O’Brien’ (the pseudonym of Father Patrick Hartigan) and Will Ogilvie swelled the A&R coffers, but Robertson also published more innovative poetry. One of the ‘modern’ poets he encouraged almost became part of the firm. Christopher Brennan edited manuscripts for A&R when he needed the money, though even in dire financial straits he retained an air of noblesse oblige. He would go to the second-hand books counter, choose several volumes, drop them into his capacious bag and say, ‘Charge them to me.’ He did not have an account at the bookshop, but the staff knew he was under G.R.’s protection.

  In A&R’s early years poetry was a strong and steady seller. Songs of a Campaign (1917), war verse by Gallipoli veteran Leon Gellert, sold 7000 copies in its first printing; Zora Cross’s passionate Songs of Love and Life (1917) went through several editions. (When asked to illustrate it, Norman Lindsay, seldom a sound man on the subject of sex, declined, saying that women couldn’t write love poetry because ‘All love poetry comes from the connection of the spinal column and the productive apparatus, and it is a notorious fact that God did not connect the two in women.’) But the real runaway success, second only to The Man from Snowy River, was C.J. Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke (1916). Not only did it sell 125 000 copies very quickly, but it was adapted for the stage and in 1919 became a famous silent movie, directed by Raymond Longford and starring Arthur Tauchert and Lottie Lyell.

  A&R also published novels, starting with the very popular Teens: A Story of Australian Schoolgirls (1897) by Bulletin journalist Louise Mack. But one novel G.R. wanted to publish escaped him. In 1899 a nineteen-year-old girl sent him a manuscript she described as ‘merely a few pictures of Australian life’. The author – whose style scarcely changed throughout the rest of her long writing life – was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, and she called her novel My Brilliant(?) Career. A&R turned the novel down; it was published, with a recommendation from Henry Lawson and without the question mark, by Blackwoods of London, and it made Miles Franklin’s name. Robertson blamed its rejection on an underling who was running the publishing department during the boss’s absence. G.R. and Miles Franklin later became good friends, though he mourned the loss of My Brilliant Career ever afterwards.

  Robertson did have a priggish streak: once Norman Lindsay, irritated because A&R turned down his proposal for a book of pen drawings of female nudes, described him as ‘a black Calvinist’. Katharine Susannah Prichard might have agreed. In 1928 Robertson rejected her novel Coonardoo, the first in which a relationship between an Aboriginal girl and a white man was presented as more than physical, on the grounds that A&R had done their fair share of showing the world the hardships and ‘sordidness’ of Australian life. A whiff of Caledonian puritanism continued to permeate A&R even after G.R.’s departure.

  Publishing books for children presented none of these problems. In 1916 Norman Lindsay told G.R. he was writing and illustrating one featuring ‘a good feed’. G.R. wanted it to be about ‘native bears’, but Lindsay protested that drawing nothing but koalas was boring. He compromised with one named Bunyip Bluegum, added a lot of other characters, including a crotchety pudding, and the result was The Magic Pudding, published in 1918. The same year came May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. An astute businesswoman, Gibbs parlayed her drawings and stories of the Australian bush into comic strips, baby books and bookmarks. She and A&R did very well out of her gumnut babies.

  Despite such classics, George Robertson’s greatest legacy as a publisher was probably his non-fiction. Here his pursuit of the profit motive was less keen: he believed that if a particular book was needed, it should be published, regardless of its money-making potential. It was a view – bound up with a need to put something back, to contribute to Australian culture – that became a cornerstone of A&R’s publishing ethos. In 1912 G.R. decided to publish Australia’s first encyclopedia. The first volume, edited by Arthur W. Jose, was delayed by the war and other factors and did not appear until 1925; the second volume came out the following year. The whole thing, originally budgeted at about £7000, finally cost £30 000.

  Undaunted, Robertson continued to publish monumental Australian works. The twelve-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, under the general editorship of C.E.W. Bean, began appearing in 1921. The entire project, into which Angus and Robertson sank thousands of pounds, was not finished until 1942, and it was the first comprehensive
and official history of Australians at war. Bean’s descriptions of the Gallipoli campaign helped to articulate the Anzac legend.

  A&R’s early books of social history and observation proved enduringly popular, including Bean’s two classics On the Wool Track (1910) and The ‘Dreadnought’ of the Darling (1911), and Mary Gilmore’s Old Days, Old Ways (1934), which reinstated women to the outback where Bean had ignored them. Natural history also sold well, one of the best-known titles being What Bird Is That? by Neville Cayley, first published in 1931 and in print for many years.

  G.R. took a keen interest in the editing of A&R’s books; he and his deputy Fred Shenstone did much of the detailed work. In 1918 he wrote C.J. Dennis a twelve-page letter with suggestions for altering his book of verse Backblock Ballads and Other Verses, and he read every proof of The Australian Encyclopedia, worked through each of the three thousand columns of print with Arthur Jose and made many last-minute corrections. But G.R. also used an editorial machete when it suited. In 1916 he sent Jose the galleys for Banjo Paterson’s short-story collection Three Elephant Power and Other Stories, advising the editor to ‘Hack it about just as if its author was dead, instead of being in Egypt. I’ll say I did it.’1 Paterson wasn’t the only author to be given this treatment: Robertson, Jose and David McKee Wright all happily tinkered with Henry Lawson’s verse. Indeed, ‘improving’ Lawson became something of an A&R sport for a while. If Lawson complained, G.R. took out a sovereign and put it on the desk between them. For the sake of having the coin change pockets, Lawson gave in.2

  G.R.’s chief outside literary and editorial adviser was Thomas G. Tucker, emeritus professor of classical and comparative philology at the University of Melbourne. Robertson called his work ‘tuckering’, which makes it sound like a form of stonemasonry. Tucker was a champion of clear, basic English, a man who disapproved of fanciness in any form. Good writing was still considered inseparable from standard English; several A&R editors strongly disliked what they considered excessive Australianness. Fred Shenstone wanted the characters in The Sentimental Bloke to have all their aspirates and final ‘g’s neatly in place, but C.J. Dennis patiently pointed out that they were not educated people: ‘I might mention that towards the end the Bloke’s grammar improves a little on account of better associations,’ he added.3

  Some writers objected to other aspects of A&R’s editing: Banjo Paterson, normally a fairly compliant author, complained about Jose’s habit of scattering punctuation about the landscape of his manuscripts. Jose does seem to have been an over-enthusiastic user of brackets and dashes: H.B. Gullett objected to their use in his volume of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18. A London cartoon by David Low shows Robertson at the top of a tower hauling up a rope ladder while a group of authors below shake fists and sticks at him. Perhaps they were protesting about the work of Jose, Tucker, et al.

  George Robertson died in August 1933, aged seventy-three. In his Sydney Morning Herald obituary published on 29 August, C.E.W. Bean said that Robertson had wanted to give Australian books an honoured place on the shelves of every great library in the world. He was also determined that every book he produced would be ‘fit to stand beside works of the sort produced by any country in the world – in style, matter and appearance, inside and out, reading, printing and binding’. Being a Scot with a reverence for learning, Robertson believed that producing and selling books was crucial to a civilised society. A bookshop, he said, should be the centre of culture for every town in the nation. Bean thought it a pity that Australia had not awarded Robertson any particular recognition of his efforts on behalf of Australian literature, education and culture.

  Robertson was survived by his second wife, Eva Ducat, and two daughters and a son by his first marriage.4 Importantly for the future of Angus and Robertson, his daughter married John Alexander Ferguson (1881–1969), who as Mr Justice Ferguson compiled the massive Bibliography of Australia. Their son, George Adie Ferguson, who joined A&R as a young man, played a leading role in the firm’s story in years to come.

  ‘That Woman’

  From the time Beatrice arrived at Angus and Robertson she must have heard a great deal about G.R. from those who had known him personally. The publishing director, Walter Cousins, had been at A&R since 1901; A.A. Ritchie, later chairman of directors, started in 1909. Bill Kirwan, head of Halstead Press and Beatrice’s first employer, had joined A&R as a boy, probably about the turn of the century; Ernie Williams, who ran the bookshop, in 1914. The record for the longest unbroken service belonged to Sid McCure, who came in 1892 and retired sixty-two years later, in 1954. All revered the memory of their former boss. Robertson had been dead four years when Beatrice joined, but at times of uncertainty or crisis, the question was still: What would G.R. have done?

  Beatrice’s first job in the bookshop meant coming to terms with Hedley Jeffries, the chief buyer of fiction and general. Jeffries, who guarded his department jealously, had joined the company as a young man in the 1920s and bookselling was his life. Rather pink and fond of eau de cologne, he had a huge and admiring fan club consisting mostly of older women; the writer and actor Dulcie Deamer and her friends would sweep into the shop, make a beeline for him and hang on his every word. He often quoted G.R.’s dictum that you didn’t simply sell a customer the book they requested, you always tried them with several others, and he was expert at sending customers away with three books when they thought they had only wanted one. So brilliant a salesman was he that his orders for the bookshop often influenced print runs for some British publishers. Beatrice always had a healthy respect for Jeffries’s expertise as a bookseller, though she found his swishy, supercilious style not much to her taste.

  From behind her counter Beatrice must have seen many of G.R.’s authors cross the bookshop on their way to visit Walter Cousins on the first floor. Banjo Paterson, now an old man (he would die in 1941) was one; another was Mary Gilmore, one of Angus and Robertson’s great supporters. Hugh McCrae, Norman Lindsay, May Gibbs and Louise Mack were all greeted by the staff as old friends. Ion Idriess (always called Jack) had used A&R’s premises as his office for years. His tales of wild Australia had been extremely successful ever since Madman’s Island in 1927, and he felt entitled to the privilege. A&R’s publicity portrayed him as a romantic adventurer out of Rider Haggard: ‘He has crisscrossed the continent from east to west, from north to south, while his tracks among the wild places of Cape York Peninsula on the east coast are legion …’ A true professional with no great pretensions to literary merit, Idriess wrote more than fifty books, publishing at least one a year for more than thirty years. On average he sold about 35 000 copies of each title – impressive numbers, particularly during the Depression. His greatest success was probably Prospecting for Gold (1931), which sold more than 300 000 copies: many men ‘on the wallaby’ bought it hoping it would give them a way of making a living. Day after day at his desk on the mezzanine floor Idriess busily covered sheets of quarto paper with his large schoolboy scrawl, handing them to a typist when he had finished. He was very keen to autograph copies of his books – so keen that George Ferguson joked that future anti-quarian booksellers’ catalogues would have entries that ran ‘Idriess, Ion L., unsigned, scarce’.

  Like most companies of its time, Angus and Robertson was run by men. All the executives were male, women were subordinates. They worked in the bookshop, in the accounts department, as secretaries and clerical assistants. The most influential woman in the company was Rebecca Wiley, a tiny, soft-voiced autocrat in steel-rimmed spectacles who ran the mailing department. The company’s first woman employee, Wiley started as a clerk in 1894, became switchboard operator and cashier and then secretary and confidante to G.R., to whom she was devoted; when his first wife died it was thought she might become the second Mrs Robertson. She was the company’s unofficial historian, keeping detailed diaries and voluminous books of newspaper cuttings, and she had known Walter Cousins and most of the other Angus and Robertson executives since they st
arted as boys.

  Rebecca Wiley was in charge of the female clerical staff, and what she said went. Her girls were not permitted to wear scarves or jewellery, and she put a sign in the washroom forbidding the use of lipstick. She once sent a young girl home to scrub off rouge. Every Thursday morning the women lined up to receive their small brown pay packets from Rebecca Wiley’s hands and were expected to say, ‘Thank you, Miss Wiley,’ as if their salaries came directly from her.1

  Beatrice, mainly employed as a proofreader, had relatively little to do with Rebecca Wiley, who retired about a year after Beatrice joined A&R. The technology for preparing books had not changed since the invention of the Linotype machine in 1884. Solid lines of type were cast from brass dies, or matrices, automatically selected by operating a key-board. This type, known as hot metal, was arranged in long, shallow trays called galleys, from which an impression was taken and transferred to long strips of paper. These strips, which had to be checked and corrected against the original manuscript before being made up into pages, were called galley proofs.

  Beatrice worked with Grace George, known as Georgie, the head proofreader, who had been with A&R for at least thirty years. Georgie supervised the company’s readers and copyholders (whose job was to read the text aloud while the reader corrected the proofs), all of whom were women. Originally Rebecca Wiley’s clerical assistant, Georgie had been taught to read proofs by George Robertson. It was she who most often asked, ‘What would G.R. have done?’