EARLIER I REVIEWED THIS VERY FINE HISTORY OF
PUBLISHERS AH & AW REED .

In Wellingtron's Dominion newspaper last Saturday a former senior editor at Reeds, Dale Williams, contributed a most interesting article on the book having interviewed the author, and with of course the benefit of having been an insider.
Her own contribution to the company during the six years she was there was significant and as she is too modest to state that herself I am glad to do so.

So here for the interest of those who do not have access to the Dominion is Dale's story:


Reed all about it

They were careful with their money and their morals, but A H and Clif Reed were responsible for New Zealand’s most successful home-grown publisher. As the firm celebrates its centenary, Dale Williams meets the historian who has spent five years researching its story.


“New Zealand icon” is a threadbare phrase. But if anything deserves to be called iconic, it’s the logo of A H and A W Reed, the renowned New Zealand publishers. Their clump of raupo - New Zealand reeds - has appeared on the covers of several thousand books, and on hundreds of cassettes and records and souvenir objects like maps and slides and postcards.

The turbulent times of New Zealand’s most successful indigenous publishers, who celebrate their centenary this year, are outlined in a new book by historian Gavin McLean. When he set out to read the massive Reed archive in the Alexander Turnbull Library, he did not expect it would take him five years. Whereas the usual problem with company histories is that records are scant and there is nothing to go by, with Reeds the opposite applied.

The Reed Papers are the Alexander Turnbull Library’s biggest single private collection, and possibly the most exhaustive publishing archive in existence. Historians will be consulting it for years to come, McLean reckons. The huge collection of general letters, financial records, voluminous author files, publicity and overseas rights records is bulked out by forty-three years of almost daily correspondence between a remarkable uncle and nephew.

Alfred Hamish Reed, who left the gumfields of Northland to become a typewriter salesman in 1895, started his own business in Edwardian Dunedin distributing Sunday School cards and cradle rolls. Skilled with his pen, he illustrated many of his publications himself. Although the firm’s first general book was not published until the 1930s, with the opening of a Wellington branch in 1932 under the management of his nephew Alexander Wyclif (“Clif”) Reed, the firm found its feet as a general publishing house.

The personal nature of their letters lifts them above the usual humdrum run of business archives. Each Reed had his own private interests: A H liked walking, and Clif read widely in mythology and in Maori culture.

A H’s mind, says McLean, remained essentially that of a Victorian Sunday School teacher. He never quite grasped how large and complex his firm became. Although his more worldly nephew shared many of his uncle’s puritanical beliefs, he enjoyed the trappings of the wealth he’d earned.

Both men were economical to the point of stinginess. They wrote on whatever was to hand, a single letter often using sundry ill-assorted scraps of paper. A batch of obsolete Bible Society letterhead lasted them thirty years. AH carried his abstemious beliefs into his private life, cooking his food in bulk days in advance, and to the last sleeping on a sugar bag pillowcase.

Their shabby offices in the now-refurbished building on the corner of Wakefield and Taranaki Streets were furnished with offcasts and cheap purchases. Not wasting string was more important than getting orders out quickly. Their austere approach meant reusing everything possible, placing intermittent bans on toll calls, and endlessly carping at staff about wanton use of oversized envelopes or reckless deployment of air mail.

Whereas at Christmas most firms offered staff some form of bonus, Reeds celebrated with a giant bag of boiled lollies. Not a bag each, mind, just the one, kept at reception, for staff to dip into till they were giddy with indulgence.

Whether it was through thrift, divine providence, business nous, dumb luck, or all of the above, the firm thrived. At the height of Reeds’ success, in the late 1960s, the firm published two out of every three books to appear in this country. Print runs were huge by today‘s standards; Barry Crump sold over 250,000 copies solely in New Zealand.

Reeds were in the right place at the right time, says McLean. “They were also lucky in that Clif and later publisher Ray Richards understood the lay market - they knew what people in Oamaru and Pahiatua would want to buy. They were smart and efficient publishers, savvy about packaging the same idea in several ways and striking several markets for the same book in various formats.” Reed editors were encouraged to think hard and consult widely about the likely audience for a book before commissioning it.

“Although they published for the intelligent layman and woman, Reeds had some very bright people working for them and could publish the odd academic tome if a suitable one presented itself,” says McLean. “They would routinely visit university departments, museums and major art galleries to see if any staff were working on a hobby project. No one else in Australasia was doing that. It was all part of the editors’ duty of keeping their finger on the pulse of the country’s interests.”
By the time I joined the firm in 1973, on the retirement of much-loved senior editor G C A Wall, a social revolution was occurring in the wider world. Within Reeds, however, it was forever Edwardian tea-time. Because their imprint was their name, both Reeds sincerely felt it should reflect their beliefs, and they were conservative, devout teetotallers. As local writers developed a more sophisticated voice, they knew that if they offered certain manuscripts to Reeds, they could expect a bumpy ride. Reeds missed out on the new generation of novelists, says McLean; despite a developing market for New Zealand literature, their fiction list was very thin. This frustrated authors and some of the editors, too. Within the firm, arguments about the moral content of books became heated.

From the 1970s, competition from outside began to strengthen. British publishers kept a beady eye on Reed’s successes, as they realised that New Zealanders were enthusiastic book purchasers who liked local content.

Reeds went through several restructurings in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the pain of that shines through in the Reed papers. Because of the size and prominence of the firm, their financial crisis had a New Zealand-wide effect on the whole writing and publishing community.

Although Reeds has been overseas-owned since 1983, and a mere imprint to a multinational company since 1988, the Reed list remains the country’s biggest consumer books list and still represents some of their traditional areas of interest. In 2007 the firm is on the market again, as part of the Harcourt’s division of international giant Elsevier. It is unlikely to return to New Zealand ownership.

“The Reed history was more fun to write than anything else I have worked on,” says McLean, wistful that it’s all over. “I have seen the wonderfully indiscreet comments made in-house by publishers and editors about their rivals, their colleagues, authors and booksellers.” [He quotes to me one of my own reports of attending a book launch in a provincial town where the mayor was clearly drunk by lunchtime, and I said so.] “The book reflects many of the quirks and quibbles of New Zealand personalities of the day. And it has allowed me to see how different a finished book could be from the raw manuscript that the author submitted - after the skills of Reed staff had been brought to bear on it.”

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Dale Williams was Senior Editor at AH & A W Reed from 1973-78

Whare Raupo: The Reed Books Story by Gavin McLean (Reed, hb $59.99)