A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Beatrice’s staff were angry at this perceived slight, but Beatrice herself apparently passed it off with a shrug. She did not want to be a company director; finance and profit-and-loss statements were of little interest to her and she didn’t have a particularly high opinion of the board members. As long as she was allowed to run her own department and to publish books she considered worthy, she was content. But a series of devastating events was about to destroy not only her ability to do her job, but the job itself.

  Since 1951 a New Zealand-born businessman named Walter Burns had been quietly buying shares in Angus and Robertson through his Sydney stockbroker Arthur Hordern. Burns’s various business ventures had made him wealthy, and for some years he had been a real-estate developer. Had Burns appeared about thirty years later he would have been called an entrepreneur, although he was anything but flashy. On the contrary, he looked like one of the bank managers he dealt with: about five and a half feet tall, neatly dressed, with grey eyes and greying dark hair and an alert, brisk manner. The only unusual thing about him was his voice: a benign growth had been removed from his larynx and he could speak only in a rasping whisper. This disconcerted many people, and Burns, a small man anxious to exercise authority – he was known as the Pocket Battleship – knew how to turn it to his advantage.

  By 1958 Walter Burns had become the major shareholder in Angus and Robertson. The board considered him a sensible, intelligent man with a good grasp of business principles. They themselves were hardly a dynamic group. A.A. Ritchie, then in his early seventies and an A&R employee for the greater part of his working life, had been a director since 1923. George Ferguson, appointed in the 1930s, had never worked for another company, nor had his fellow board member Aubrey Cousins. The business of their monthly board meetings consisted largely of listing share transfers and approving such things as Christmas bonuses to the staff. Over the years the seven-member board of directors of Angus and Robertson had acquired the torpid complacency of a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club.

  There were signs that this pleasant, patrician style of operation was losing its effectiveness. Though the shareholders were happy with their returns, a firmer hand was needed on the financial and marketing tiller. It was a warning sign that the bookshop, one of the biggest in the world, with a credit customer and mail-order list of more than 200 000, was forced every year to run huge bargain sales in order to clear its stocks. The Australian Encyclopedia, the jewel in A&R’s crown, had not sold as well as it might, mainly because the company had done little to promote it – by giving special deals, for example, to schools or universities. The sales force, hamstrung by the company’s lack of energy, were becoming increasingly frustrated. A&R were losing authors to newer, hungrier publishers, and were commissioning few books of their own. The company was beginning to drift.

  George Ferguson, who controlled the board, thought that the culture of A&R had become too inward-looking. The board needed new blood. In August 1959, when one of the longest-serving A&R directors retired, Ferguson invited Burns, whom he liked and respected, to fill the vacancy, and Burns agreed. In welcoming him, Ferguson and his fellow directors did not stop to wonder why a real-estate developer who had no real interest in the publishing business had spent so much time and energy on becoming A&R’s major shareholder and joining the board.

  To those with greater financial sophistication the answer was clear: Angus and Robertson, which owned very valuable property in the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs, was sitting on a gold mine. The directors knew that their real estate was worth a great deal, but as the company was making a reasonable profit and the shareholders were happy, they could see no reason to realise their assets, or even to determine their value. Already one large company had suggested that 89 Castlereagh Street be torn down, redeveloped and leased back to A&R, an offer greeted by scandalised incomprehension.1 Angus and Robertson were booksellers and publishers, not dealers in real estate; property was to be used, not speculated with. There was no reason to seek liquidity. The same line of thinking applied to buying other companies: why would Australia’s most venerable and esteemed publishing, printing and book-selling company want to become bigger players on the business scene?

  But Walter Burns had no time for the views of cautious Scottish-Australian booksellers: he was a businessman who saw a golden opportunity. Once on the board he helped drive out two more directors, including the chairman A.A. Ritchie, then persuaded the rest to appoint his own nominees, making his stockbroker Anthony Hordern chairman. In a surprisingly short time Burns and his nominees had a majority on the board, and by the end of 1959 Walter Burns was managing director of Angus and Robertson, with George Ferguson as his subordinate.

  Burns then assumed extraordinary powers to split the company’s operations into several wholly owned subsidiaries: A&R (Publishers) Pty Ltd, A&R (Bookshops) Pty Ltd, Halstead Press Pty Ltd, and HEC Robinson Pty Ltd. The last, a retailer and publisher of maps, was a new acquisition. Burns also bought up as subsidiary companies the Melbourne booksellers and publishers Robertson and Mullens, the Sydney stationers and booksellers Swain and Co., Albert’s Bookshop in Perth, and other retail outlets in Australia, New Zealand and London. Having split the retailing, publishing and printing sections of the company into three separate divisions, each with its own director, Burns further diminished George Ferguson’s role by putting him in charge of the publishing division only, and forcing Ferguson to dismiss his right-hand man and chief supporter, the production manager Paul Tracy, who had worked for A&R for many years.

  To many at A&R, Ferguson acquiesced in all this far too readily. He was like the commander of a brigantine who, having invited another mariner on board and shown him all over the ship, suddenly finds him hoisting the skull and crossbones and can do nothing about it. Ferguson’s apparent helplessness must have made Beatrice feel that he could not be relied upon as a strong ally if Burns continued to move against the publishing department.

  Burns then invented a new position: director of publishing, whose job was to create books - to think of ideas, to commission and publish new books, as well as to liaise between the sales and editorial departments, keeping a check on books published, their costs and scheduling. ‘We only want to publish bestsellers,’ Burns declared, causing a great deal of irritated amusement in the editorial department – so he had found someone with a magic formula, had he? Someone whose judgement was so infallible that he could change book publishing from a gamble into a business with hard-and-fast rules? Marketing books was like selling toothpaste, was it?

  Beatrice knew she wouldn’t get the job. Burns dearly did not consider her and her department sufficiently attuned to commercial realities (and besides, she was a woman). Burns appointed Alec Bolton – a man fifteen years younger than Beatrice, whom she had trained – to be her immediate boss. Beatrice’s staff were furious about the decision, and Bolton was distressed and embarrassed, assuring Beatrice that he would always consult her and defer to her greater experience. Beatrice herself said little; perhaps she was relieved that she would not have to work directly to Burns.

  Probably to further divide the staff, and also to get rid of George Ferguson, Burns now decreed that the publishing division (including the production and sales departments as well as editorial) should leave 89 Castlereagh Street. The bookshop would remain on the ground floor for the time being, but there were plans to redevelop the rest of the building. So at the end of June 1960 Beatrice and her department moved to the fourth floor of 221 George Street, one of a row of terraces near the Newcastle Hotel and above the premises of the newly acquired Robinson’s Maps. Moving from the office she had occupied for twenty-three years was a wrench and recovering from the chaos took time, but by October Beatrice was able to write to Sadie Herbert that ‘The new quarters are really much pleasanter and cleaner, and all should be well when we get under way again properly.’2

  This resolutely positive response was typical of Beatrice’s reactions to Burns and his plans, at least in
public. Keeping a calm front was second nature, and she could see no point in alarming or unsettling her authors: in spite of these upheavals, A&R were still A&R. ‘It does not matter that our present managing director, Mr Burns, has had no publishing experience; for we have,’ she wrote to Xavier Herbert in July 1960 (she was in the throes of editing Soldiers’ Women).3 ‘He is certainly interested in our making more money out of publishing; but that will be all to the good for our authors; and we still intend to publish the best possible books we can get – and to sell them.’ She did, however, permit herself to add that ‘life is not easy here’.

  It certainly was not, working with someone whose attitude to books and publishing was the antithesis of hers. In the Observer of 26 November, Burns spelled out his philosophy in detail – that of economic rationalists the world over:

  The 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 publication of literary masterpieces and prestige works, with appeal to a limited market, is not the obligation of a public company … The main responsibility for what might be termed prestige publishing rests with the universities and similar institutions. In a public company the publisher’s first responsibility is to the shareholders, and if he undertakes a programme with undue emphasis on prestige works he courts financial disaster … [S]uccessful marketing depends on good marketing research; too many publishers rely on experience and intuition. This is not good enough. If [market research] is desirable and necessary to the marketing of other commodities, why not books?4

  In October Angus and Robertson held a mammoth book sale, unloading many of their ‘prestige’ books at ridiculously low prices. The sell-off delighted discerning book buyers all over the country. But Adelaide’s Max Harris, while appreciating the opportunity to pick up most books in A&R’s poetry catalogue for a shilling a copy, sounded a note of disquiet. A&R clearly intended to publish fewer ‘serious’ books in future, he wrote, but what did that leave them with? He listed the current program: Christopher Brennan, a comedy about a family running a bush pub, one or two Ion Idriesses, popular novels … not a very impressive list. A&R’s retreat from serious, heavyweight publishing would leave a gap in the market; the other major local publishers, though perhaps more dynamic, were unlikely to fill it because such books were not profitable.5

  Burns’s next innovation was to set up what he called a committee of review: editors, sales reps and sales assistants were to meet regularly in order to decide print runs and prices for all upcoming titles. The sales force approved of this – they felt they had not been consulted enough – but Beatrice found these meetings, which she usually chaired, intensely irritating because she felt the decisions ignored questions of quality. Soldiers’ Women had been costed at 32s 6d a copy, which was expensive, and the committee decided a better price would be 22s 6d a copy, so the book would have to be shortened. No editor has ever taken kindly to sales or marketing people deciding on the length of a book to fit a particular price, especially if they haven’t read it. Almost every meeting featured this sort of clash between salespeople and editors, and Beatrice was soon thoroughly sick of arguing.

  She may even have considered resigning: with a steady, though small, income from the Bridges estate she could just have afforded not to work. But she felt she was part of Angus and Robertson; it was her life, she didn’t want to let her authors down, and where would she go? Apart from A&R the biggest publisher was probably F.W. Cheshire, who brought out about twenty books a year. Other significant publishers were Melbourne University Press, Jacaranda, Shakespeare Head Press, Ure Smith, Horwitz, Oxford University Press and Georgian House. Of these the ‘serious’ publishers – Cheshire, OUP, MUP and Georgian House – were based in Melbourne and, even assuming any of those was able to offer her an editorial job, Beatrice had no intention of leaving Sydney. There was no alternative: she had to stay.

  In August 1960 Burns appointed P.R. Stephensen, writer, editor and sometime literary agent, to develop a paperback list. George Ferguson had always been against paperback publishing; paperbacks weren’t ‘real’ books, he felt, and the success of Allen Lane’s Penguins had not changed his mind. A&R were not set up for paperback publishing, and the quality of Australian paperbacks (those printed by Horwitz, for instance) was generally poor. For months Stephensen had been urging Burns to start a paperback list – up to 100 000 copies per title – running off the Angus and Robertson backlist or any other Australian books that looked promising.6 He said he was confident that with his experience and contacts he could find two hundred titles a year, from either reprints or new manuscripts, to be printed in England for worldwide distribution. The whole idea greatly appealed to Burns. Paperbacks were cheap, the books already existed, and buying books from other publishers was much less risky than publishing A&R’s own. Burns was more than ready to boldly go where Allen Lane had gone before.

  Beatrice considered this a disaster in the making. Why choose someone as erratic and unbusinesslike as Stephensen to run the program? Where would he find enough material? Who would oversee production of these books, and how would they sell 100 000 copies of books that most potential buyers had probably already read? None of these questions apparently occurred to Burns, who speedily and without consulting George Ferguson or anyone else appointed Stephensen at a salary considerably higher than Beatrice’s.

  The word spread that Burns intended to stop A&R doing any original publishing at all, relying for profits on buying books from elsewhere and putting existing A&R titles into paperback. Beatrice’s worst fears were confirmed when in late September or early October the publishing department was ordered to stop work altogether, ostensibly while a new costing system was fine-tuned and budgets revised. The staff were not laid off, just told to await developments, and in the meantime everybody was supposed to fill in a form indicating their place in the company and how they related to other departments. Halstead’s binding machines were shut down in mid-flow, and a run of textbooks for the following year was abandoned, costing the company thousands.7

  Beatrice swiftly decided that the ruling was absurd, and she and her staff continued to edit, proof and check books as usual. With incoming jobs dwindling, the production department spent much of its time calculating page extents in all typefaces in all sizes for all books. (This turned out to be very useful in years to come, as they could calculate, say, how many pages a 70 000-word manuscript would make in a particular typeface and book size.) The freeze lasted for about six months.

  From being a company that took pride in its relationship with its staff, a company where people trusted each other, Angus and Robertson had become a place where the atmosphere was poisonous, thick with suspicion. Staff who favoured Burns’s reforms were hardly on speaking terms with those who supported George Ferguson and traditional publishing. Everyone was unhappy. The resignations began. Among the first to leave was Alec Bolton, who found the pressure of his new job intolerable. After only a few months he stormed into George Ferguson’s office, deeply upset, declaring that he could not accept the decisions Burns was making.8 When Burns sold the Australian Encyclopedia to the Grolier Society for a ridiculously low £100 000 – after ten expensive years in preparation the encyclopedia had hardly been on the market long enough to recoup any costs – its associate editor Bruce Pratt went with it. David Moore, who had worked on the Encyclopedia and moved to editing non-fiction, also left, as did Quinton Davis (no relation to Beatrice), the art director. When Davis left, Burns abolished the art department. In all, the publishing division was reduced from thirty to eighteen people, which Burns considered quite large enough. Beatrice’s secretary Judy Fisher often went home in tears during this spate of resignations and dismissals, wondering whether Beatrice herself would be the next to go.9

&nbs
p; Burns and his plans for Angus and Robertson were generally treated admiringly in the press; he was called the ‘stormy petrel’ of publishing and described as ‘shrewd, vital, likeable, bold’.10 Among those impressed was the writer Colin Simpson, a former journalist who combined work in an advertising agency with the writing of successful travel books. Burns’s plans agreed with his own views on marketing books – not least his own – and in mid-1960 he left his well-paid job to become Burns’s personal assistant. He quickly realised that the managing director knew little about marketing books, became disillusioned and resigned after only a month.

  Simpson then became one of Burns’s chief critics, a change that did not go unnoticed. As a correspondent in the Observer noted:

  An equilibrist who could thus establish a footing in each of the two camps at A&R in rapid and vacillating succession, while at the same time maintaining a foothold in the advertising business, and all the time balancing a chip on his shoulder and pushing his own barrow, deserves all the applause that such an acrobatic feat could earn for him.11

  Simpson took particular exception to Burns’s enthusiasm for paperback publishing and his assertion that the hardback had had its day. In Simpson’s opinion, paperbacks would never replace hardbacks, as readers and buyers wanted something good-looking they could keep. He might have been George Ferguson when he declared, ‘The culture of this country is bound up with the hardback book; and I do not propose to stand by and see Mr Burns or anyone else “merchandise” the book culture of this country out of existence.’12 Having changed sides so comprehensively, Simpson now began to mobilise other authors against Burns and his further plans for Angus and Robertson.