From the time he started as an office boy in 1936, Ray Richards was at the heart of New Zealand literature as a publisher and later a literary agent.
By Joy Stephens
At 91, Ray Richards, pictured with wife Barbara, still works with a few major clients, photo David White.
Show Ray Richards a newly published book and his focus is immediate and intense. “Here is a jacket that is a joy to look at, which tells you that the book has been loved. The interior design is first class.” After examining the cover further: “I can see a full point there, which I think is arguable.”
Editor, publisher and vice-chairman at AH and AW Reed through its golden years, and a literary agent for another 36 years, Richards has had a lifelong love affair with books. In 1936, aged 15, he began working as a callow office boy in the new Wellington offices of Reed. “I was as green as grass; nobody could have known less about the world than I did.”
Richards’s father, a dedicated Methodist minister, was emotionally reserved. When Richards was 11, he and his younger brother were taken to hospital to see their mother, who, unbeknown to them, was dying of pernicious anaemia. Likewise, when Richards senior remarried, the brothers weren’t told until just before the wedding.
The family did not experience hardship during the Depression years, but transfers to new churches and towns took their toll on the parson’s son. By the time he arrived at Wellington College, Richards was unsettled and insecure and thought he would fail the crucial matriculation exams. He didn’t, but a job offer from AH Reed, a Dunedin church friend of his father, provided an escape from school uncertainty and employment at a time when jobs were scarce.
“Ray was born to be a publisher,” says Barbara, his wife of 63 years. Charming and warm, she is the emotional backbone of Richards’s life. Mrs Richards regards her husband’s single-mindedness with a mixture of pride and exasperation. Over the years, she has cooked hundreds of dinners for authors and the literati, and hard-up writers have slept on the sofa.
“Making books became the first priority in my life. I was obsessed by it and it was unfair to my wife and children,” Richards admits. After four years at war, where he flew a Corsair for the Fleet Air Arm in World War II missions in the Far East, earning a Distinguished Service Cross and a captain’s commendation, Richards worked as a journalist in London for a short time, before returning to Reed in 1946. “They were making a mark in the publishing world, but looking back, some of those 1930s books were terrible, ugly things which had no right to be printed, let alone published.
“AW Reed wanted to write and virtually gave me my head as production manager, editor and publisher. I commissioned many authors, including two crucial acquisitions – artist Peter McIntyre and the remarkable and exasperating Barry Crump.”
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