Powerhouse to dusty old outfit

Melbourne University Council has decided that the Australian book market is ripe for an injection of dry, turgid, unreadable academic texts.

Prepare yourself for bodice-ripping tales of bacterial infections or rapturous personal journeys through sociological analysis from Durkheim to Bourdieu. Be still my beating heart.

Enjoyed reading Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt? Why not grab yourself a copy of MUP’s next big release: a textbook of colorectal cancer featuring 96, count ‘em, 96 colour plates of diseased backsides.

The book publishing company, Melbourne University Press, effectively blew up during the week after its overseer, the Melbourne University Council, told MUP directors to tell their stories walking.

In the wake of the board’s departure, a statement was issued which haughtily declared Melbourne University Press would “refocus on being a high-quality scholarly press.”

Never mind the catastrophic impact on a company’s bottom line, feel the quality.

Of course, Melbourne University and its bosses are free to do as they wish. The university provides funding amounting to approximately one quarter of MUP’s annual turnover. The MUP board which included Bob Carr and publisher Louise Adler was told if they could not come to grips with the changes, they should move along.

Other commentators have bemoaned the loss of an independent publishing company but authors will move on, a publisher with the runs on the board like Adler will find new digs and MUP will return to what it was when I was in publishing, a commercial anachronism even by 1980s standards with odd, dandruff-speckled sales men and women forlornly flogging a list that no one wants.

For the record, my books have been published through Random House, Allen & Unwin with a forthcoming book due out this year to be published by Penguin Random House.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I worked for William Heinemann Australia. The company has since been consumed by other publishing conglomerates, but I am pleased to see the imprint still exists. Back in the day, MUP was a dusty old outfit doing what presumably its academic bosses want it to do now. From memory, its bestsellers then were a series of Australian plays that found their way into schools and became required purchasing on high school booklists.

The rest of the MUP list back then was as dry as a Methodist wedding and a good deal less entertaining. MUP published books that did not sell or more properly found an almost microscopic niche within academia, selling in tens of copies at best.

The company lost money year after year and got by on the annual cheque from the university.

The Bob Carr approach, babbling yesterday along with others about the loss of Australian voices is a bit of a stretch because those voices will be heard or read elsewhere. Book buyers pay little or no regard to the publisher’s imprimatur on the spine of the book.

What is interesting about the MUP brouhaha is that this furore appears driven by an academic world that has no truck with commercial reality and adopts a siege mentality based largely on hubris. It holds a derisive view of the world outside its comfy confines that people, readers, consumers are drawn like moths to an insect zapper to the lowest common denominator.

In the real world, airport fiction and nonfiction, is merely a statement of where new books and bestsellers are available. In short where a lot of people browse and buy books. In the academic world it has an altogether different meaning. Airport fiction and nonfiction has less to do with location. It is a pejorative, a sneering condescension.

Speaking as an author, having one’s book in an airport bookshop is precisely where one would want it to be, not to mention on the shelves of the big retailers and department stores.

Most sensible people would assume correctly that more sales were better than less but in the academic world, niche is king and warehouses with books sitting interminably gathering dust and the odd cobweb is a sign of almighty triumph.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of reading academic texts and papers will know that scholarly authors for the most part, can’t write. Sure, they can bang out words and throw them into roughly coherent sentences, but the end result is about as captivating as reading a refrigerator hire-purchase agreement.

I am trying to remember the last time anyone who spent their lives in the cloistered world of academia wrote a bestseller. It may have happened, but I can’t think of when or who.

If the Melbourne University Council had their way, there would be no Shakespeare, no Dickens, no Bukowski, no Heller. Henry Lawson would have been dismissed as a drunk with a wonky eye. Memoirs of the famous in the political, business or entertainment worlds would not see light of day because these notables had not spent the last 40 years of their lives in corduroy jackets with suede patches on their elbows.

Suffice to say, if anyone has been in academia long enough, they lose not just the will to live among the rest of us but the ability to write in an entertaining and absorbing way.

The fact is MUP could be both a general book publisher as it is now, making money and selling books as well as publishing technical and tertiary texts. It would need to be done carefully with the academic stuff published on print to order or by online subscription and sale. But according to Melbourne University Council’s sniffing, the two are mutually exclusive.

The MUP barney will soon pass and while tales of the disappearance of Australian voices is a gross over-reaction, what these week’s events have shown is the disconnect between academia and the real world, a world academics rarely enter into and understand even less.

This column was published in The Australian on 1 February 2019.