Until the last decade, there has been very little serious scholarly interest in Australian book publishing. Indeed, when I began lecturing in this discipline in 2001, there was no historical or contemporary overview that could be recommended to my students beyond the entry in the Australian Encyclopedia. However, with the recent dramatic growth in Communications courses, and spurred on by projects such as the History of the Book in Australia (HOBA), this situation has suddenly changed. UQP has already published two of the three promised HOBA volumes on the history of Australia’s print culture. Now we have, from the same publisher, a new collection of scholarly articles, which is undoubtedly superior to Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946– 2005 (2006), the HOBA volume that dealt inter alia with contemporary publishing. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing is less impressionistic and more systematic in its approach.
Making Books: Contemporary Australian publishing by David Carter and Anne Galligan
UQP, $39.95 pb, 416 pp
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