Undercover

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 29, 2008

Susan Wyndham

VIRAGO CLASSICS

Australian-born Carmen Callil started Britain's Virago press in the 1970s to celebrate women's writing in the early years of feminism. She began Virago Modern Classics in 1978 to rediscover and keep alive works by women such as Virginia Woolf, Christina Stead, Penelope Lively, Barbara Pym and many more. For the Classics' 30th anniversary, Virago has relaunched eight titles as hardbacks with introductions by contemporary women writers and covers by female textile designers. Callil herself introduces Angela Carter's 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop ("You will laugh on the first page ...") with cover art by Jacqueline Groag. Julie Burchill introduces Valley Of The Dolls by Jacqueline Susann with art by Barbara Hulanicki, who was famous in the '60s as Biba's fashion designer in London. Alexander McCall Smith - yes, a man - introduces Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. The books are out here next month through Hachette Livre at $27.99 each.

HEAVYWEIGHTS AT HUGHENDEN

A historic gathering of 30 Australian publishing figures met at the Hughenden Hotel in Woollahra last week. Organised by Ivor Indyk, head of Giramondo Publishing and professor of writing and society at the University of Western Sydney, the two-day conference was called - with an implied question mark - Halcyon Days: Australian Literary Publishing 1965-1995.

Among the speakers were three generations of Penguin bosses. Brian Stonier started Australian Penguin Books with Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris in 1963 and in 1965 launched the independent Sun Books which published landmark books such as Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny Of Distance. Brian Johns (pictured) was Penguin's publishing director from 1979 to 1987; with a backlog of Australian material waiting to be published, he and editor Jackie Yowell "mapped the culture" and reached a 50:50 ratio of Australian and overseas books. Penguin's current publishing director, Robert Sessions, followed Johns and has achieved a 64:36 ratio (including non-literary titles such as the bestselling The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet).

Other speakers included Rodney Hall, Richard Walsh, Michael Costigan, Katharine Brisbane, Michael Wilding, Sylvia Hale, Nicholas Jose, Bruce Sims, Angelo Loukakis and D'Arcy Randall, who flew in from the US to recall being senior editor at University of Queensland Press in the 1980s when she fought to find female writers such as Barbara Hanrahan, Olga Masters and Elizabeth Jolley. It was a time of growth, with publishing harnessed to social movements; the bicentenary, globalisation, and the collapse of literature in universities complicated the scene.

But most agreed that - along with more trash - more literature is published and read now. "Today is even more halcyon," said Walsh, noting 50 of the top 100 bestsellers on BookScan are Australian.

ABBEY'S BIRTHDAY

More history is in a free anthology called 40 Memories to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Abbey's Bookshop, one of Sydney's oldest and best independents, with impressive specialist stocks of literature, crime, science fiction and language books. Eve Abbey, still the owner, recounts the 1989 firebombing when Abbey's was the only city bookshop to stock Salman Rushdie's (pictured) The Satanic Verses. One Herald anecdote told by family, staff and customers is that of Michael Wilding's memory of the late Ron Abbey calling the then-literary editor to complain that a reviewer was stealing books. It was the poet Martin Johnston, son of George Johnston and Charmian Clift, taking his own poetry books to give to friends.

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© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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