Sydney Publishing

“Australian writers and printers are being starved” intoned Senator Donald Cameron in 1939. His impassioned speech in federal parliament highlighted the ongoing debate about the importation of overseas magazines. The United States had been exporting pulps for years but when Britain and Canada imposed import duties on their pulps, publishers sought alternative markets such as Australia. Imports continued to rise and as Cameron explained

"Pulps . . .are landed in Australia at practically their cost as waste paper, and sold through chain stores and other retail places at prices much below their face value and cost of production in the country of origin. During the last couple of months, three steamers . . .discharged no fewer than 305,000 copies of back-dated American magazines in Sydney"

Since the turn of the century, debates had raged about the effects of American comics and books on Australian publishing industry and on Australian teenagers. Concerned religious, trade union, publishing industry and political groups lobbied various Ministers for Customs. But was it the quality (a censorship issue) or the quantity (a trade issue) of the material which was the most problematic? World War II intervened and import restrictions were applied on all products except essential items. At around the same time Customs, under the Customs (Australian Industries Protection) Act, imposed a tariff on printed material. The tariff was, in effect , a “dumping duty”. Both events stemmed the flood of cheap mass-produced printed material; thus creating a void that local publishers and writers were only too keen to fill. Until the restrictions were lifted in 1959, Australian writers, artists and publishers flourished in the protected environment. In the 1950s Australian newsagents and bookstands groaned under the weight of locally written and produced fiction—commonly (but not accurately) labelled “pulp fiction”.

Most of the pulp fiction of the 1950s emanated from Sydney publishing houses. Each company printed a variety of genres in a cross-section of formats (comics, pulp magazines, digests and novels) often under different imprints. The most successful companies printed hundreds of thousands of copies of dozens of titles each month.

Action Comics (194? -1957); Henry John Edwards purchased Leisure Publications; Edwards then joined forces with Action Comics) printed crime and western magazines which contained two/three stories (Leisure Detective Magazine, “Nemesis for a Nude”, Indian Western, Thrilling Western), and single novelettes (One Sided Romance and Death in a Nudist Camp). In keeping with the comic-book tenor of the company, inside pages were often illustrated (“They Paid in Blood” Thrilling Detective Magazine). Longer fiction (plus 30,000 words) appeared as book imprints: Red Back Novels (You Can’t Forget Murder), Blue Circle Novels (Lightning-Draw Vengeance), Sapphire Books (Love’s Cavalier). Longer books (50,000 words) are paperback precursors with soft covers and glued not stapled (Dinero Trail). Most of the material was written by Australian authors; Bleeck started writing for them in 1953 and in May he signed contract agreeing to write 46,000 words a month.

Calvert Publishing Company (1950 – 1961) printed romance, sports, crime, and war digests.

Cleveland Publishing Company (1953- ). At first Cleveland Book included crime and western digests (Bitter Beauty and Texan Tornado). Eventually the imprint published westerns exclusively including Marshall Grover titles which, in turn, moved to the Cougar Book imprint. The crime fiction list included pulp magazines such as American Detective Novels”which contained one, two or three short stories and single-story digests such as Cleveland Detective. Its longest running crime series was the Larry Kent series. Other genres include horror and war fiction (Commando and Frontline series). Cleveland was and still is a family business; today they publish mainly westerns.

During the 1940s “You can’t go wrong with a Currawong” Publishing (1942-1951) Company consistently printed digests written by local authors such as Philip Richmond, Alan Connell, and Stan Hennell (The Scarred Hand, Warriors of Serpent Land, The Mad Marriage and War in Tuscon). Some titles appeared in both hardback and softcover formats (ie Gordon Clive Bleeck’s Everybody’s Crazy).

Horwitz Books (1920- ) also Associated General Publications, Transport and Maritime Publications). Horwitz printed magazines, comics and, according to Graeme Flanagan, 24 paperbacks each month, covering a wide variety of fiction including crime, romance, war adventures, western and humour and non-fiction. In the 1950s, the mainstay was crime fiction by “authors” Marc Brody, K T McCall and Carter Brown. The Carter Brown Mystery Series proved to be the longest running and most successful of all: Horwitz printed one or two new titles a month in print runs of around 30,000.

Under King Books, G I Books, Gold Star Books imprints Horwitz printed some Australian material but mainly the series included overseas reprints often with the titles changed and original cover treatments and revised to comply with Australian censorship guidelines (GI Books were bowdlerised by C J MacKenzie, the series editor). John Laffin, the military historian, wrote crime but not war fiction for Horwitz. War pulps came instead from war correspondent James Gant and ex-naval officer J E MacDonnell. In the 1960s Horwitz and its imprint Scripts printed titillating adult books by John Slater (Ray Slattery), Ricki Francis (Carlene Hardy), Stuart Hall and factional books by James Holledge. By the 1970s it had all but finished publishing books and today it prints mainly magazines.

Invincible Press (Truth and Sportsman Ltd) produced novels and soft-cover westerns, romance and mysteries in the 1950s.


Lesser-known publishers include: Frank Johnson Pty Ltd concentrated sports including Frank Johnson’s Sporting Novels and Kings of the Turf series; Johnson’s Magpie Books boasted “the finest and cheapest books yet issued in Australia” and reprinted local authors Jean Devanny, E V Timms and Max Afford. In 1948 four men pooled ₤500 pounds each to start Frew Publications which focused on comics (such as The Phantom). In the mid-1950s, Webster Publications published two detective series J C Jason and Martin Kane and one western series Riot Series.