Cirrus@Austlit

'This week on the ABR Podcast we look at Qantas with business writer and historian Stuart Kells. In his review of Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison, Kells notes that the company’s declining reputation extends beyond the area of substandard customer service. Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Listen to ‘Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.' (Production summary)

'Australia’s oldest university press is also one of our best known and most trusted publishers. Founded in 1921 as a bookshop for students at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne University Press was soon publishing important works that contained the best of national scholarship.

'Landmark MUP books and series include The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Manning Clark’s History of Australia, The Encyclopaedia of New Guinea and the journal Meanjin. These and other MUP publications helped shape how Australians perceived themselves, and how they talked about literature, politics, race, the Pacific, the world wars and public policy.

'From its inception, MUP grappled with hard questions. How should a university press be governed? To what extent should such a press be concerned with political, polemical and radical works? And can a university press be financially self-sustaining if it focuses on books that commercial publishers overlook? The respective leaders of MUP answered these questions in ways that regularly led the press into controversy.

'Using a century of MUP publications and archives, Stuart Kells has written a rich and fascinating history of an invaluable Australian institution—one that is widely seen as public property, and whose ups and downs have always been news.' (Publication summary)

'Last year two Danish librarians – Christian Lauersen and Marie Eiriksson – founded Library Planet: a worldwide, crowdsourced, online library travel guide. According to them, Library Planet is meant to inspire travellers “to open the awesome book that is our world of libraries, cities and countries”.' (Introduction)

'Libraries are filled with magic. From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of Middle Earth, Umberto Eco’s mediaeval library labyrinth and libraries dreamed up by John Donne, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Stuart Kells explores the bookish places, real and fictitious, that continue to capture our imaginations.'

'The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It’s a celebration of books as objects and an account of the deeply personal nature of these hallowed spaces by one of Australia’s leading bibliophiles.' (Publication Summary)

'Richard Lane was one of three brothers who founded Penguin Books in 1935.

'But like all great stories, his life didn’t start there.

'After sailing to Adelaide in 1922, Richard began work as a boy migrant – a farm apprentice living in rural South Australia as part of the ‘Barwell Boys’ scheme.

'In Australia, he deepened his appreciation for literature, and understood how important it was to make good writing widely accessible.

'Richard’s diaries – the honest and moving words of a teenager, so very far away from home – capture vividly his life and loves; the characters he met; the land he worked; the families he depended on; and his coming of age in a new land.

'A remarkable social record and one of the best first-hand accounts of the child migrant experience, the diaries also capture the ideas and the entrepreneurship that led to the founding of the twentieth century’s most famous publishing house.

'With a foreword by eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, Richard Lane’s diaries are an important document for the history of rural Australia and global publishing.' (Publication summary)

'An intimate partnership of three brothers – Allen, Richard and John Lane – lay at the heart of Penguin Books, the twentieth century’s greatest publishing house. In a spirit of daring and creative opposition, the brothers issued quality books on a massive scale and at minuscule prices – and achieved a revolution in publishing.

'The Lane boys did their best thinking together in bathroom board meetings, where at least one director would always be ‘mother naked’. They innovated in countless ways – in the early years, a church crypt served as their office and warehouse. Penguin was an unconventional upstart, bringing literary giants such as Agatha Christie, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene to vast new audiences, and it seemed unstoppable.

'Yet the 1942 death of John Lane brought the troika to a halt. Allen, the enthusiastic frontman who relied on his younger brothers to drive Penguin’s success, became more erratic and suspicious over time. Ultimately, he would force Richard out of the company he had cofounded and built.

'A portrait of a remarkable family and a publishing powerhouse, Penguin and the Lane Brothers also explores the little known story of Richard Lane – the heart and backbone of Penguin, and its strongest influence. Richard’s experiences as a youth in Australia shaped his character and outlook; his dedication to the business was matched only by his devotion to his brothers.

Relying on unprecedented access to Lane family sources, including Richard’s diaries, Penguin and the Lane Brothers sheds new light on the relationship of Allen, Richard and John, so crucial as a driver of Penguin’s spirit and success. By turns hilarious and tragic, moving and insightful, this is a groundbreaking counter-history of an unlikely publishing triumph.' (Publication summary)

'Beautiful and valuable books, arcane terms and conventions, eccentric personalities – these are the mainstays of the fascinating world of antiquarian books.

'Kay Craddock has lived in that world for over forty years. She embarked in business from very modest beginnings and overcame considerable personal and cultural obstacles to reach pre-eminence in the international rare book trade.

'In telling their remarkable story, Rare chronicles the fascinating social history of the book trade in the second half of the twentieth century – when antiquarian bookselling emerged as a recognisable profession.

'Stuart Kells has written a thoroughly compelling book which paints an unforgettable picture of the principal figures in Kay (and her mother Muriel's circle), and which also explores how these identities influenced the supply of and demand for old, rare, finely printed and finely bound books.

'Rare gives the reader access to a world that few have entered. It is also a highly personal account of the challenging journey of an amazing Australian woman' (Publication summary)