Creating an interest in print culture
A history of the creation of interest in print culture is largely that of
institutions and organisations, and thus is relatively easy for the
researcher to identify and access. Two aspects seem important historically
and in contemporary terms: the education system (including its encouragement
of reading as a function of the basic skill of literacy), and a generally
held (though increasingly contested) notion of 'culture'. That is, those
values which a civilised society deems its duty to uphold, and which have
historically included literature. Victorians, such as Matthew Arnold, saw
literature as a moral force in a world increasingly uncertain about the
security of religious faith, and the academic study of literature, new in
the 19th century, took on this Messianic tinge. In Britain, movements
towards universal education and in particular adult self-improvement
combined both these strands—the educational and the
cultural—and these values were brought to New Zealand by
19th-century immigrants, who saw and used reading as a central part of their
value system.
The history and
development of the public library system embodies these attitudes, and is
therefore an obvious source of information. Libraries not only provide
books, but historically have also developed programmes of encouragement and
education aimed both at adults and children. Encouragement of membership and
use, reading sessions, special promotions concerning particular books or
events and the generally high profile of the library in the community are
factors that contribute. Sources for the researcher are, obviously, written
histories and archival material concerning individual libraries. Examples
include C.W. Holgate's An Account of the Chief Libraries
in New Zealand (1886), John Barr's Auckland
Public Libraries 1880-1950 (1950), and Dorothy Stafford's The Library from the Sea: the Nelson Public Library
1842-1992 (1992), which contain a wealth of detail and anecdote,
as well as testifying to the commitment early communities had to literary
culture. Mary Ronnie's Books to the People: A History of
Regional Services in New Zealand (1993) gives an overview.
There are a number of more
theoretical or policy-oriented works which concern the library and its place
in society: for example, McIntyre's Building the Library
into the Community (1969); Cullen and Calvert's Public Library Effectiveness (1992b); O'Reilly's 'Libraries': An Exercise in Definition (1968), and Euan Miller's
The Library and the Community (1973). These may
be more an expression of an aspiration than a reality, but are still useful
in denoting the general climate. Evidence for individual promotional efforts
are more difficult to trace, but a somewhat random sample, from M.J.
Edmonds's 'Children's Book Week, 20-24 August' (1956) to Woodhouse's Great Library Success Stories (1994) is indicative of
activities at a local level, and more material may be available through
individual archives. The New Zealand Library (now Library and Information)
Association has been active in this regard, with nationally organised
campaigns, reading and activities, as well as being a publisher of research
material. While the latter is easily accessible, the former is harder to
identify, and local archives and personal memory may be the most profitable
source.
Many libraries evolved out
of private institutes or societies formed in the early days of settlement
for the encouragement of civilised intercourse, with their functions later
superseded by or subsumed into the official public library service.
Histories and archives of organisations such as the Mechanics' Institutes,
and the Leys Institute, mainly relating to last century and the first part
of this century, recount their history and expand upon their general
philosophy. Cultural, quasi-social organisations such as the English
Association also played a part. There are a number of archival and published
records of such organisations which record their aspirations and
achievements.
Non-government
organisations with a more overtly educational bias also contributed to the
creation of an interest in print culture. As mentioned, Victorian ideas of
self-improvement, sometimes combined with a political, often left-wing,
agenda formed the basis of adult educational movements, such as the Workers
Educational Association (WEA), Mechanics' Institutes, and university
extension programmes, where book groups, literary discussions and lectures
were an important feature. Works such as The WEA of New
Zealand: What it Is and What it Aims At (1968) deal with the
aspirational base of the organisation, whereas works such as J.B.
Condliffe's The Beginnings of the WEA (1968) record
an anecdotal history. Rachel Barrowman's A Popular Vision:
The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950 (1991) gives a broad
context to the ideological basis of this movement, while histories of
individual universities (for example, Keith Sinclair's History of the University of Auckland (1983) and Barrowman's
forthcoming history of Victoria University of Wellington) discuss the growth
of university extension and continuing education movements.
Book groups, semi-formal
organisations meeting in individual members' homes to discuss a prepared
book, seem to have arisen from such organisations; the WEA and university
extension departments have been involved in the provision of reading lists,
sets of books, study guides and advice. And there is a great deal of
anecdotal evidence that informal groups, based on this model but without the
institutional backing, have been a feature of middle class cultural life for
some time. The enormous popularity of reading is both attested to and
encouraged by literary festivals such as the Women's Book Festival and the
Writers and Readers Week component of the Wellington International Festival
of the Arts. Ann Mallinson's Recollections of Five
Festivals (1996) gives an account of the latter, while in-house
and archival memory of those involved in the former is a source to be
tapped.
Government patronage of
the arts has been organised around the Arts Council, previously the Queen
Elizabeth II Arts Council, now Creative New Zealand, and there is a large
body of material, both descriptive and philosophical, which has resulted in
the Council's responsibility towards encouragement of print culture. Some of
this energy has been directed towards writers and thus is only indirectly
within the ambit of this discussion, and, in general terms, in the absence
of any in-house history, the researcher will have to rely on archival
material. But there is a great deal of material dealing with specific
initiatives. There are strategic plans and policy discussion documents, such
as The What and Why, Who and How of the Arts Council
(1968); Policy into Action: the Seventies (1970); A Policy for the Arts (1973); The
Arts Council in the Community 1981-88 (1988). The Arts Council has
commissioned research in the area of print culture, such as the 1993 Research Report on the Literature Programme: Publishers'
Survey (and complementary . . . Writers'
Survey ); the purpose of the research is often polemical, as in New Zealand's Best Kept Secret: The Arts (1995), a
collection of facts and figures which show the depth and breadth of New
Zealanders' involvement in the arts and the impact arts have on everyday
life. The Arts Council also supported a number of periodicals: The Arts in Education News-sheet , the Pacific Island News-Sheet, The Arts Advocate , and
Arts Times promoting its work, and culture
generally in the community.
What is not recorded is
the contentious area of the Arts Council's role as arbiter and also, in a
sense, as creator of a distinctive New Zealand culture. Debates over who
gets funding for what are associated with the aims and outcomes of creating
an interest in print culture, but can probably only be approached through
the institutional memory of the participants, and its occasional overflow on
to the pages of the newspapers.
Literary prizes, and
patronage generally, have long been a means of enhancing the status of and
thereby the interest in literature, and are discussed in more detail in the
following section of this chapter. Exhibitions play a similar role by
publicising aspects of print culture, whether it be reading or literature,
as well as forming a historical record of past attitudes. Descriptive
catalogues are sometimes available for the researcher, e.g. New Old Books: An Exhibition of Recent Additions to the de
Beer Collection (1996), Working Titles: Books
that Shaped New Zealand (1993), and Fabulous and
Familiar: Children's Reading in New Zealand Past and Present
(1991). Travelling exhibitions have disseminated materials to provincial
areas and the Book Council has been active in this respect, often in
cooperation with the public library system: examples include 'A Library
Exhibition of New Zealand Poetry' (1976) and 'A Library Exhibition of Small
Presses in New Zealand' (1977). The National Library has recently also
become active in this area, with its Carnegie Libraries exhibition currently
on tour. Evidence of earlier events of this kind are, again, likely to be
found in archival and local newspaper records.
The New Zealand Book
Council is an organisation overtly dedicated to the promotion of interest in
print culture, and has exercised a widespread influence. It has functioned
in a number of areas, well represented by archival and published material.
Founded in 1972 as part of Unesco's International Book Year, its first
brochure stated its aims as 'to encourage the wider use, ownership and
enjoyment of books; to encourage research into all aspects of book
publication and distribution; to encourage increased provision of books by
public authorities of all kinds' ( Booknotes ,
no.117, Autumn 1997). Its first major initiative was Operation Book Flood in
1973, an exercise carried out in association with the New Zealand Council
for Educational Research. Two Auckland schools notable for low rates of
literacy were 'flooded' with over 500 books, and the resulting effects on
literacy and reading skills monitored (see Elley, Cowrie and Watson's 1975
interim assessment).
This set the tone for the
Council's role as a publisher of research papers backgrounding print culture
and its various manifestations. The Changing Shape of
Books: A Collection of Papers Presented at a Seminar Held at Victoria
University September 15-16 1973 (1974) summarises the Council's
approach. Other Council publications have provided a focus on individual
authors, for example Lynley Dodd Talks About her
Books (1990). The Writers in Schools scheme is typical of Book Council
initiatives; an explanatory booklet (1993) sets out its parameters with the
Arts Council. The Writers Visiting Prison project, described in an
explanatory handbook (Penny Mahy, 1995), is another. More generally, the
Book Council has fostered regard for books and reading in publications such
as Brian Brooks's New Zealand Community (1973), 'a
list of books which contributors believed had the greatest influence on
their lives and their community at large'.
The Book Council has also
been active in promoting commissioned research associated with the promotion
of print culture, such as Esslemont's Survey of Book
Buyers in New Zealand (1979) and the supplementary pamphlet Book buyers . . . published in the same year. Some
of this work has been done in cooperation with the trade, such as Maconie's
Survey of Teenage Reading (1969). It has
contributed to general social debates, as in Books You
Couldn't Buy: Censorship in New Zealand , by C.E. Beeby (1981). The
Book Council's quarterly members' newsletter Booknotes (originally Book Counsel ) contains a
range of material relevant to print culture, reading and the literary scene,
and thus both promotes and records initiatives in these areas of interest.
A recent non-institutional
initiative, author Alan Duff's Books in Homes scheme, also suggests the link
between literacy and the promotion of reading. Begun in March 1994, and
supported subsequently by government funding, private sector sponsorship and
philanthropy, Books in Homes has similarities to the Book Council's
Operation Book Flood of the 1970s. In an effort to encourage both literacy
and an appreciation of books and reading, 110,000 books have so far been
distributed to 111 primary schools for individual pupils to keep. The
textbook publisher Scholastic is associated with the project, supplying the
books at cost.
The extent to which the
'self-interest' of purely commercial activities are included here is an
interesting question. The publishing industry and bookselling trade may
promote themselves from purely profit-oriented motives, but thereby also
promote an interest in print culture. Early Whitcombe & Tombs
catalogues, primarily pieces of advertising, nonetheless included short
essays on literature: on 'New Zealand authorship' by A.H. Grinling in the
1927 catalogue, and 'A survey of the Dominion's productions' by H.H. Driver
in 1930. Whitcombe's Monthly Review of Literature ,
which became Books of Today , appeared from the early
1930s until 1970. Public occasions such as book signings, involvement in
book festivals, and cooperation with radio and television book programmes
are also relevant. A number of organisations have been associated with the
book trade: the Book Publishers Association of New Zealand, the Association
of Booksellers of New Zealand (now Booksellers New Zealand), the New Zealand
Book Trade Organisation. Many of these have produced trade periodicals, such
as The Publisher and New Zealand
Publishing News , and also publications of more general interest,
such as the New Zealand Book Publishers Association and the Association of
Booksellers' Books of the Year (1964-67), or the
Dunedin Publishers Association's Books in Dunedin
(1949-62). The Wellington bookseller Roy Parsons published Parsons Packet , part catalogue, part review journal, from 1947
until 1955 of which a selection edited by Parsons and Bridget Williams
appeared in 1984.
As a part of their
protection of their industry trade organisations have taken part in debates
over issues central to print culture, e.g. censorship and import controls,
leaving published and archival records. Market research into aspects of
readership has often gone ahead with the industry's support, providing
useful statistical data and reference resources such as New Zealand Books in Print (1957-).
The newspaper industry is
an obvious subject for investigation, both in itself—as a
transmitter of print culture—but also in the more specifically
literary context in promoting book reviews, book pages, literary
competitions, and literary advertising. Dennis McEldowney's (1991) and Mark
Williams's (forthcoming) chapters on literary patronage and literary
criticism in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature
in English are relevant here. There are also a number of local
histories of individual newspapers, such as: 100 Years of
News: As Presented by the New Zealand Herald 1863-1963 (1963); 120 Years, 1866-1986: The Nelson Evening Mail (1986);
100 Years of Newspapers in Dannevirke (1988).
While largely anthologies without any commentary or argument, both point to
a body of significant potential research materials.
There is a close
relationship between the encouragement of interest in print culture and the
education system, which cannot simply confine itself to the mechanics of
literacy, but has always seen a responsibility for the more general
promotion of reading as a desirable social activity. Organisations such as
the Children's Literature Association of New Zealand have concentrated on
providing teachers with resource materials with which to encourage reading:
publications such as Gilderdale and Bowden's World Beyond
World (1976); McLaren and Fitzgibbon's New
Zealand Picture Books (1979); Brenda Knight's Teenread '85 and In and Out of Time (both
1985); and McLaren's New Zealand Books for Children
(1980).
An area where there is
little material concerns the history of readership. Australian research
which provides fruitful models for New Zealand includes works such as 'The
colonial reader observed' and 'Libraries' in The Book in
Australia (1988), 'Books, readers and reading' in Australian Cultural History (1992), and Books,
Libraries and Readers in Colonial Australia (1985). Dulcie
Gillespie-Needham's 1971 PhD thesis 'The colonial and his books: a study of
reading in 19th-century New Zealand' is one of few local studies, while
Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa's Australian Readers
Remember (1992) suggests a promising but as yet untapped source of
material in this area—that of oral history.
Autobiography, biography
and personal reminiscence are also a source in this area, whether of such
people directly associated with books and reading such as Phoebe Meikle,
Dorothy Butler, and Alan Duff, and those of teachers, librarians and
booksellers. In general, any autobiography or biography of any literate New
Zealander is also a potential source as they inevitably encounter print
culture.
Implied in much of this
material is a consensus of what constitutes the literate and cultured
citizen, and a history of trade and institutional cooperation in pursuit of
this commonly agreed good. This is unlikely to be a feature of the future,
as a society of far more disparate and contestable values
emerges—one in which ethnicity, gender, and class challenge the
consensus. Popular culture will similarly question and challenge the notions
of high culture implicit in the last century and a half's attitudes towards
readership.