Literature within the reach of all

Penguin's Geoff Walker relished the chance to reprint some very estimable New Zealand novels. Photo / Natalie Slade

The invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1440 was a revolutionary moment in Western history.

The ability to produce, en masse, pamphlets transmitting the opinions of anyone willing to pay was immensely democratising, circumventing the stranglehold on information held by religious and political authority.

Whereas it had taken countless man-hours to produce a handwritten, coloured edition of the Holy Bible, for example, dozens could be produced in a day. And give a man a Bible of his own to study, especially if it was in his own language, and the Latin-spouting priest who formerly dispensed religious truth, and the king who claimed to rule by divine appointment, seemed less impressive. We may well be living in a Gutenberg moment.

Advances in information technology - mass electronic data storage and transmission - together with an increasingly desultory regard for intellectual property rights mean we are on the brink of the collapse of traditional models of book publishing, even if it's not altogether clear yet what the alternative will be.

Today, when anyone can produce an e-book with all the design bells and whistles, and have it printed cheaply in short runs or even as one-offs on-demand, the grip of the big publishing houses is loosening. It's timely, then, to have a reminder of the decisive advantage that the big houses have over the hoi polloi with their laptops, iPads and Kindles, namely the notion of imprimatur - the mark of quality.

The big houses have traditionally set the bar to publication so high that the mere fact a book bears the colophon of a big-name publisher is a reasonable assurance of quality.

One of the most successful demonstrations of the value of this principle is Penguin Books, which started out as an imprint of British publisher Bodley Head in 1935.

It was the brainchild of Allen Lane who, sick of hunting fruitlessly through penny dreadfuls at the railway station in search of something worth reading, asked himself why it wasn't possible to publish something more worthwhile than lurid thrillers and trashy romances in paperback.

The first run of Penguin titles - reprints of previously published works enclosed in cheap and cheerful covers and printed on cheap stock - was a massive success, and Lane was able to found Penguin as a publisher in its own right in 1936.

Because production values were relatively low (especially compared to traditional hardbacks), Penguin books were very cheap. But because Lane's sights were set on reprinting "quality" literature, the appearance of a book in its Penguin edition also meant it received a kind of seal of approval.

Penguin rapidly became one of the 20th century's most trusted brands. It was a shrewd move, then, when Penguin Books - now a subsidiary of British giant Pearson - recently decided to release a series called Popular Penguins, a nostalgic run of reprinted titles in editions that mimick the original Penguin Classics.

They would be cheap - in New Zealand, Popular Penguins retail for $12.99, or a third of the cost of a novel published as a full-price trade paperback - and they would look and feel like their 1935 counterparts in every respect, from the orange and white panels on the cover, the typeface and layout of the titles and the small, cramped text on coarse paper within.

The Australasian branches of Penguin were invited to release their own selections under the Popular Penguins brand.

Ten local titles have duly appeared: John Mulgan's Man Alone (first published in 1939), Ronald Hugh Morrieson's Came A Hot Friday (1964), Karl Stead's Smith's Dream (1971), Maurice Gee's Plumb (1978) and Going West (1992), Patricia Grace's Potiki (1986), Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider and Stevan Eldred-Grigg's Oracles and Miracles (both 1987), Shonagh Koea's The Grandiflora Tree (1989) and Fiona Farrell's The Skinny Louie Book (1992).

At first glance, it's a pretty idiosyncratic assortment, but it was constrained, according to Penguin New Zealand's Geoff Walker, by the requirements of the series.

The selection criterion was "lasting quality and literary excellence", but the format meant that 290-odd pages was as long as they could get and the cover price meant that only titles to which Penguin or associated companies owned the publishing rights could be considered. The length requirement excluded Maurice Shadbolt's Strangers and Journeys.

The retail price meant Penguin was out of the market for the rights to reprint Keri Hulme's The Bone People. What's more, because of the low retail price and the relatively low return to the authors - each agreed to receive 5 per cent of gross retail on sales - only those books with no chance of a full-price reprint was likely to be considered eligible. That has disqualified many more recent titles such as Charlotte Randall's dazzling The Curative and Lloyd Jones' phenomenally successful Mr Pip.

Walker confesses he's always wanted to do a classic New Zealand novel series, but the sales prospects had always made the shopping list for publication rights too steep.

Thus, he relished the chance the Popular Penguins series offered to reprint some very estimable New Zealand novels. Some would have selected themselves.

Whatever its individual literary merits, Mulgan's iconic depiction of a damaged drifter in post-war New Zealand has become a landmark in the historiography of Kiwi identity. Plumb is the masterwork of our best novelist. Came a Hot Friday is that rarest of birds in Enzed Lit, a successful comic novel. And if you'd decided not to include any of Witi Ihimaera's early novels, then his beloved The Whale Rider probably gets an automatic nod.

Patricia Grace's beautiful, lyrical Potiki doesn't need its tokenist claim to fame as the first contribution to the history of the New Zealand novel by a Maori woman to warrant inclusion. Others are contentious.

Which of Stead's novels would you include? Which of Farrell's consistently excellent oeuvre? Gee deserves a second bite, agreed, but which of his sublime novels do you plump for? While many will be old friends to any consumer of New Zealand novels, some were pleasant surprises to me: I hadn't previously read Oracles and Miracles, The Skinny Louie Book or The Grandiflora Tree, and now wonder where they were all my life.

Reading them as a series is a fascinating experience. Because the works are largely concentrated in the 1970s and the 1980s, they provide a bit of a snapshot of New Zealanders' lives back then - growing up down at heel in Christchurch (Oracles and Miracles), living in small-town New Zealand (The Skinny Louie Book, Came a Hot Friday), in Maori communities (The Whale Rider, Potiki) - and of New Zealanders' fears: viz, the vivid dystopic strand of The Skinny Louie Book and of Smith's Dream.

The jaundiced may argue that the whole Popular Penguins thing is merely further evidence of a big publisher responding to the squeeze being applied by the recession and by the threat from new technology. But from a reader's perspective, the achievement is the same as Allen Lane's all those years ago: to bring high quality literature well within the reach of all.

The only disappointment in the Popular Penguin series is that the next batch of 75 titles planned by Pearson to mark the 75th anniversary of the brand doesn't include any further New Zealand titles.

But Walker doesn't rule out another round of titles. Bring it on, I say.