This section deals with printing and production in New Zealand between 1830
and the present day. After a brief general introduction, the subject is
treated under four main divisions:
Technology : the technology of printing, considered in terms of
technical processes, equipment and materials
Trade : the people whose skills created printed products of all kinds
for the use of New Zealand society
Economics and government regulation : the economics of printing
and the impact of legislation and other government intervention
Private printing : non-commercial and hobby printing
Under these broad headings will be found a number of particular topics as the
subject requires.
Some overlap with the
section on publishing is inevitable, since some firms have carried out both
printing (in all departments, including binding) and publishing, and often
other functions as well, such as bookselling and stationery trading.
Histories of newspapers and periodicals are to some extent also relevant to
this section, because they include the histories of their production
processes; moreover, the firms which have produced them have in most cases
been involved concurrently in general and jobbing printing.
The printing industry has
always been subject to changes in technology and in ownership, yet up to a
couple of decades ago the structural organisation of the print materials
production industry remained relatively stable. However, from the 1970s
onward the pace of change has hugely accelerated. Computerisation and the
introduction of new categories of copying machines have not only brought
major changes in the ways print materials can be produced, they have also
made possible radical organisational changes. In the 1990s, while there are
still some printing firms, especially in provincial towns, that continue to
operate in terms of long-established modes of organisation, much of the
kinds of work traditionally carried out by the printing industry is
dispersed to typing/word processing businesses, copy centres using
sophisticated photocopiers and laser print copiers, and stationery supply
stores, operating as chains or buying associations. Moreover, for relatively
small runs, many organisations that previously provided business for
printers can now carry out 'desktop' print production in-house, using their
own computers, scanners, high quality printers, and copiers. Any individual
with access to such resources, and sufficient funds, can embark upon
self-publishing. Some material is published electronically only, to be
downloaded by individual users.
Accordingly, the
historiography of print materials production can be envisaged as, for the
period up to the 1970s, largely a matter of identifying and describing
relatively slow-changing technologies, and patterns of organisation of the
printing and related trades, according particular attention to their initial
establishment. While it has to recognise a period of substantial change
within the period 1890 to 1914, with the introduction of hot-metal
typesetting, photo-engraving, rotary presses for newspapers, offset presses,
and electric power, together with major growth in worker and employer
organisations, it should also stress the continuities throughout this
period, and the decades of relative stability thereafter. Since about 1970,
however, it has to accommodate accelerated technological change and
structural diversification, and to acknowledge that these processes will
doubtless continue to proliferate. It needs also to comprehend the recent
consolidation of ownership of larger scale enterprises, and the opening up
of the country, since the mid 1980s, to takeovers by overseas-based
corporations.
The New Zealand printing
industry has always had to accommodate the pressures of competition from
larger scale overseas enterprises. Before about 1938, the trade for books,
specifically, within this country was heavily dominated by British
publishers, so that relatively few were printed locally, and those mainly in
niche areas (school books and readers, cookery, gardening, local histories,
directories, official publications, and so forth). Helen M. Oliver in Printing and Publishing in New Zealand (1976) notes
that, for the period prior to 1967, many New Zealand published books were
printed in Australia because of the favourable exchange rate, and some were
printed much further afield. In the last couple of decades, computerised
technology, and the increasing globalisation, in diverse ways, of
production, markets, and ownership of capital resources, have generated new
kinds of pressures and complexities affecting the printing industry. Even
when the composition process is carried out in New Zealand, presswork and
binding may take place in Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong. In this kind of
situation, the local work is generally done by trade typesetters rather than
by printing firms.
Shifts in the economics of
print material production are thus of major importance, and involve not only
factors within New Zealand but also exchange rates, relative wage and paper
costs, the level of sophistication of offshore production facilities,
international or bilateral trade agreements, and the policies of other
governments.
Historically, since 1900,
the printing industry has been strongly affected by four major upheavals:
the ongoing impact of the industrial relations and working conditions
legislation of the earlier years of the 1890-1911 Liberal Government,
principally the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894; World War
I, with its shortages and challenges; the Depression of 1929-35; and World
War II.
