Hugh Price: Energetic bookworm took words to millions
By Peter Kitchen - The Dominion Post - 18/01/2010


Left - Hugh Price
Photo by Maarten Holl/The Dominion Post

Hugh Price was an eminent New Zealand publisher whose devotion to books was lifelong.

The influence and success of the Price Milburn company he founded in 1957 with school teacher Jim Milburn grew from kitchen-table beginnings into an important and influential publisher specialising in learn-to-read and educational books, with a general list of New Zealand non-fiction books, poetry and plays.

Price's 25% stake in the tiny Wellington company was half its start-up capital. By the time the sale of the company was concluded in 1982, it was New Zealand's principal publisher of educational books, with substantial sales abroad.
Price Milburn's learn-to-read and storybook list ran to more than 400 titles, all edited or written by Price's wife, Beverley Randell, and sales ran into the millions.

He could have retired, but did not. Books were second nature to him. He collected, read, edited and designed them, and wrote or co-wrote bout 20 titles after 1982. His output was staggering, to say the least.

Like most New Zealanders, Price came to books as a child, although in his case he was a captive audience of one, the sole child of a Masterton woodwork teacher and his homemaker wife. He attributed his early start in reading to an affliction – he had been born with club feet. While he recuperated from a series of operations to straighten them, his mother adopted a massage routine as part of his healing and used the daily sessions to read to him. The patient was hooked for life. He was a schoolboy at Hadlow School in Masterton. His fascination with books would have doubtless seemed precocious in a classroom where the observations he offered were wider than the conformist prescriptions expected.

The school's reaction was violent disapproval.

Later, his physical inability to engage in field games and the corporal punishment used in futile attempts to make him meet Wairarapa College's physical standards drew a lifelong distaste for sport.
Significantly, the lesson he learned was that he would never inflict violence on anyone. Cruelty and bullying were anathema to him, and his courage in the face of adversity was unshakeable for the rest of his life.

Wellington would prove to be a saviour in 1948 for this small, quiet bloke with a stutter, fresh from the Wairarapa as a new student at Victoria University College and later at the city's teachers' college.

At the time, the Victoria was a crucible for debate – academic, political and often very public. Price thrived in it. He would lose his stutter on the way to earning a master's degree in history and, crucially, gain entry to the world of book production, thanks to Prof John Beaglehole, who explained to him how he was going about production of his book on the papers of Captain Cook.

His teaching career was short-lived. He took a job in the textbook department at Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd (now Whitcoulls) in Lambton Quay, and transferred to their London buying office in 1955.
He studied print production and typography at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, and worked on small projects for Penguin, Methuen, Hodders, Gollancz and the BBC.
He returned to Wellington in 1957 to be manager of Modern Books, a co-op retailer at 48a Manners St with 3000 members.

Modern Books was an important source of books for New Zealanders. It was Price's pledge that the shop would locate, order and import any book from any publisher anywhere for any New Zealander. It not only catered for readers in English, but imported books for migrants keen to read in their own language.

The shop attracted the interest of the police Special Branch. There was an assumption that it was a Communist Party front, notably because it sold books in foreign languages from Iron Curtain countries along with books from obscure publishers in the West.

For Price, it was grist to the mill. He was not to know it, but at the time he and two student colleagues, none of whom were communists, were already on the Special Branch list as compilers of a short-lived cyclostyled sheet Newsquote, which consisted of commentaries they had clipped from foreign newspapers but which had not seen the light of day in the local press.

Penned by reputable journalists or commentators from illustrious newspapers, among them the Wall Street Journal, The Times and The New York Times, they were somehow viewed as potentially deleterious to the conduct of good order in Cold War New Zealand.

Price sought to have more than 50 years of official covert attention ended for what he described as an official fantasy. The matter was resolved last year when he received a letter from the SIS, successor to the Special Branch, telling him that "hindsight shows Newsquote to have been misjudged", but there was no apology.

Later, he would move to the School Publications branch of the Education Department until 1963, when he was made the founding general manager of the Sydney University Press.

Read the rest of Peter Kitchen's excellent tribute to Hugh Price at the Dom Post online.

Hugh Price is survived by his wife, Beverley, and their daughter, Susan Price.

Hugh Charles Llewellyn Price, book publisher: born Wellington, July 13, 1929; married 1959 Beverley Randell 1 daughter; died Newtown, December 28, 2009, aged 80.

Footnote:
Publisher Hugh Price was presented with an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University in August 2009 for his achievements in the world of publishing, and his contribution to New Zealand literature.
I reported on the presentation on my blog at the time and concluded by adding the following:

Bookman Beattie is delighted for Hugh. What a great and well-deserved honour to a fellow who has contributed much to our society.
Years ago, in the late 60's, when The Bookman was impoverished and busy setting up as a bookseller in Napier, Hugh Price kindly allowed me to use Price Milburn's offices in Wellington as a place to sleep when I was visiting the capital. I was hugely grateful to him then and still remember our friendship from those days with great warmth.
As I recall James K Bxter also used to crash there from time to time. Price Milburn were his publishers in those days. Thanks Hugh and warmest congratulations on this accolade.

A few days later I received a handwritten note from Hugh recalling those far-off days and thanking me for the mention on the blog.
My condolences to Beverley and Susan.