Once upon a time, I thought that the book I bought in the bookshop was the book the author wrote. Yes, silly I know, but my earliest literary training skimmed over the issues of editorship, marketing, book cover/design and the lies and damned lies of best-seller lists. Then one day I read an anecdote in which an author (Amelia E. Barr) recalled that a printer at the New York Ledger (printer mind you, not editor) had changed 'Calvinist' for 'Presbyterian'. Sassenach that I am, even I knew that such an alteration changed the tenor of the remarks about a very Scottish serial, its reception, and so on. Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005 reminds readers of the complexity of the book industry.
Review of Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946-2005, edited by Craig Munro and Robin Sheahan-Bright
The full text of this essay is available to ALS subscribers
Please sign in to access this article and the rest of our archive.
Published 1 November 2008 in Volume 23 No. 4. Subjects: Book history.
Cite as: Johnson-Woods, Toni. ‘Review of Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946-2005, edited by Craig Munro and Robin Sheahan-Bright.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 2008, doi: 10.20314/als.2a0c49ba34.