Printing and Typography in New Zealand: A Short Bibliography
My latest obsession, as some of my recent essays here might attest. But I’m currently in the wrong country to be learning about New Zealand printing—and I would have found a short bibliography most helpful as I began to learn. Below are some of the sources I found particularly useful and interesting, in the rough order that I think it would have been most effective to have read them in.
But first, some background. Printing in New Zealand began as it did in Europe, out of theological necessity. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) operated the first presses out of Northland, and as Don McKenzie points out in his Oral Culture, Literacy & Print in Early New Zealand : The Treaty of Waitangi, the NZ case provides a fascinating look at a society moving from a primarily oral culture to a print-based one almost four hundred years after Europe went through the same shift. The first item ever printed in New Zealand was a pamphlet of catechisms in Maori, printed by Reverend William Butler Yate at Kerikeri in 1830. But as surviving copies show, Yate didn’t really know what he was doing with the printing press, and he soon went back to Sydney to have a professional print 1,800 (shoddy) copies of the Bible in Maori.
Four years after Yate’s botched attempt, William Colenso arrived at Paihia with a better printing press—and, more importantly, the knowledge of how to use it. (Don McKenzie mused on this: “Technology itself is nothing without a human mind…”) Within weeks of his arrival, after having some missing parts of his press re-made, he too had printed sheets of Maori catechisms, plus the first item in English: an announcement, with hindsight ironic, of the New Zealand Temperance Society. And two years later, in 1936, Colenso would start printing his run of 5,000 copies of sections of the Bible, the first full “book” printed in New Zealand. Colenso is today probably best remembered for being the printer of the Treaty of Waitangi, and for his record of the days and ceremonies surrounding the Treaty itself.
Robert Coupland Harding has been called (by McKenzie) “New Zealand’s first and most eminent typographer” (here’s a more recent summary of his life and work). Printing properly from the 1860s through the end of the century, Harding worked in the craft tradition of typography, culminating in his journal Typo. His international reputation in printing and typography was apparently significant, maybe presaging New Zealanders’ twenty-first century influence in global typography (I’m thinking of Kris Sowersby and his Klim Type Foundry, whose work I love and which I come across on more and more websites, among others).
Then there are the twentieth-century big names: Denis Glover and Leo Bensemann at The Caxton Press, and Robert “Bob” Lowry, first with the Auckland University College Students’ Association Press, and then later both Pelorus and Pilgrim presses. Numerous other private presses operated in the twentieth century (including McKenzie’s own Wai-te-Ata Press at Victoria University), but for sheer influence, Glover and Lowry get the credit.
With that too-brief summary, here’s the reading list I wish I’d had when I became interested in the topic:
1. A History of Printing in New Zealand, by R A McKay & Wellington Club of Printing House Craftsmen, 1940. First printed in a limited edition of 600 copies, this has been described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in this country.” It is interesting both for its content and for its quality. Includes various essays on aspects of early and contemporary printing in NZ, plus illustrations throughout.
2. A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand, edited by Penelope Griffith, Peter Hughes and Alan Loney, Auckland University Press, 2000. A fantastic set of essays on printing in NZ. I particularly enjoyed Donald Kerr on “Sir George Grey and his book collecting activities in NZ” (this was really great), Peter Hughes on Bob Lowry, and Alan Loney’s essay on typography.
3. Book and Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa, edited by Penny Griffith, Keith Maslen and Ross Harvey, 1997. Essays on all aspects of printing and publishing in New Zealand. Probably one of the most thorough books I’m including here, but it doesn’t capture the lives of those involved as well as the others here—it seems more aimed at those interested in printing from an industry point of view, so if that’s you, start here.
4. Printing, bookselling & their allied trades in New Zealand circa 1900: extracts from the Cyclopaedia of New Zealand compiled as materials towards a history, compiled by D.F. McKenzie and K.A. Coleridge. The Wai-te-Ata Press, 1980. This is a “brain dump” of materials, itself cheaply printed; not so much a history as a way to find things to look up that you might not come across elsewhere. Research has gone further than this since, but I was still interested in this pamphlet as an example of McKenzie’s bibliographic research in NZ.
5. The National Library of New Zealand’s “Book History at the Turnbull” guide. An online resource with a huge number of links and sources, not all solely related to NZ. This is a great bibliography, but the reason I’m writing my own rather than directing readers to it is that I didn’t really know where to start with their list—not all their sources are equally useful.
6. Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945, by Lawrence Jones. Victoria University Press, 2003. This is a great book, but isn’t focussed just on printing. The printing history is incidental to the thrust of the book, but this gives a much better idea of the role printing and typography played in the years of literary nationalism.
7. Oral Culture, Literacy & Print in Early New Zealand : The Treaty of Waitangi, by D F McKenzie. Victoria University Press, 1985. This really should be a classic in NZ, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t heard of it before this reading. It’s based on a speech McKenzie gave at the British Library, where he took up the NZ case of the Treaty of Waitangi to make a broader point about the meaning and nature of texts. The only reason it’s not higher in this list here is because it is primarily focussed on the text of the Treaty; but the early sections about Yate’s and Colenso’s printing efforts are brilliant.
8. PRINTING TYPES: New Zealand Type Design Since 1870, by Jonty Valentine. This is the brochure accompanying a 2009 exhibition at Auckland’s Objectspace. From Harding to Jack Yan, Warren Olds and Kris Sowersby, this is an inspiring look at typography in this country.
9. A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand, by Thomas Hocken. Printed by J Mackay, Government Printer, Wellington, 1909. What it says on the tin. This was reprinted in 1979 so copies can be found quite easily.
10. Early New Zealand Books, online database by Auckland University. This is a great chronological list of materials published about and in New Zealand, with many digitised books.
11. The Lure of New Zealand Book Collecting, by Johannes Carl Andersen. Whitcombe & Tombs, 1936. Printing from a collector’s standpoint: covers books earlier than printing began in NZ, but includes a number of good sections on early books produced in/about NZ. I didn’t bother reading this right through, though—and it looks like no one else here in Oxford has either, because some of the pages were still uncut in the Bodleian’s copy.
12. The William Colenso Bibliography, 2013. This is a huge scholarly undertaking, but allows one to easily find further Colenso sources. I used it to find materials in the library here, including some of Colenso’s early printing.
Thanks to everyone who pointed me in the direction of some of these sources. I hope it proves useful to others.