HONORARY LIFE MEMBERSHIP BESTOWED ON ELIZABETH CAFFIN

At a most enjoyable function in Auckland last evening Elizabeth Caffin was made an honorary life member of the Book Publishers Association of New Zealand.

Tributes were paid to her by the President of BPANZ, Tony Fisk, pictured here with Elizabeth, and fellow honorary life members, Rosemary Stagg and Graham Beattie.

In her typically modest manner Elizabeth then replied as follows:

Thank you Tony, Rosemary, Graham. To receive the approbation of one’s professional colleagues is the highest of honours and I am deeply grateful for this honorary life membership of our association. I was a pretty small player in this industry, much in awe of the movers of millions – in books and dollars -- so I am humbled and I thank you all.

When I first went to AUP in 1986, having been made redundant by Collins, I was extremely naive and inexperienced. Somehow I got put onto the Council of the Book Publishers Association where I learned for the first time what a profit and loss account was. The university financial arrangements were fairly rudimentary then too and I had to get an economist friend to show me how to write a budget.

That first experience on the Council taught me heaps. Most of the things I know about publishing I learned from all of you. In a small press, without its own sales or distribution arm, you are very isolated and I was all the more so from being in a big institution whose collective mind was on other things. So Rosemary Stagg, Bob Ross, Graham Beattie, Gerard Reid, Michael Moynahan, David Elworthy and many more of you taught me how to be a publisher. Thank you for all those lessons and even more for your friendship.

We are so lucky to be in an industry of gifted people who are as profoundly cooperative as they are fiercely competitive. By getting together we’ve made ourselves stronger and had a good deal of fun in the process. Events like the weekend workshops took a huge amount of organisation but were for me enormously exciting and stimulating.

As it happens this is also a farewell, as I have recently sold my Auckland house and I am moving to Wellington in a few weeks to start the next part of my life. But I can assure you that it is bound to have connections with book publishing. I’m marked for life.
These are hard times in the book trade and the speed of change is terrifying; but we all know that writers will never stop writing or readers reading and that each new book is a different one.
There are going to be a lot more good books in my life and I hope in yours too.