NEW ZEALANDERS’ KEEN APPETITE FOR NEW BOOKS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 69, 25 March 1949, Page 4

NEW ZEALANDERS’ KEEN APPETITE FOR NEW BOOKS

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand ].% Kemsley Empire Journalist) London, February 20. Apart from suspiciously fulsome testaments to our scholarly depths, English publishers cannot explain why New Zealanders read so much. It seems that on a population basis we top the Empire markets, and American as well, in books bought per head. To a suggestion that, after six of ’ an evening, there is nothing left to do through the length of the land except read, publishers are warily noncommittal. Talking it over, they will accept the interim conclusion that New Zealand’s bookish habits may rise partly from a lack of alternative entertainment, and partly from the education system, with its higher school leaving age and so forth. Appetite Ahead of Taste f Though ahead in appetite, New Zealanders trail after the British in taste. There is no evidence of our yet having developed a literary mind of our own. A book’s reception in Britain is a near-certain pointer to its fate in New Zealand. Whether direct general contact with contemporary Ameri- | can writing would alter this is a matter only for speculation until Mr Nash chooses to resolve

it by liberating more dollars. ] Publishers say books by New Zealanders, with or without New Zealand settings, would be welcomed, treated on their, merits, and (emphasis on this) suffer no penalty because the action took place in Oriental Bay instead of Chelsea. Which led on to the proposition that perhaps New Zealanders have at least one native approach to their reading. The story is almost always laid in, fo us, far off lands. An exotic touch denied a Londoner who lives his everyday life on the set, so to speak. Familiarity Breeds—?

For a New Zealand reader to discover his hero awaiting the villain in a little, tavern just off Piccadilly is one thing. For the same hero to be awaiting the same villain in a familiar beer shed down Lambton Quay might be another. Ngaio Marsh may straighten this one out by disclosing whether her New Zealand corpses have been markedly more popular locally than her British corpses. British publishers are squinting into the future like a man trying to see whether the sun is setting or just going behind a cloud. The war was their high noon. Millions of men and women in uniform found themselves in lonely camps with time on their hands. Millions of civilians sought escape from daily pressures and anxieties. Reading was the answer.

Free of purchase tax, books were about the best buy in under-stocked shops.

But now, simultaneously, money is tightening up, and shops are filling up with good quality wares which compete with books for that tighter money. Publishers’ accounts are slimming accordingly. Nevertheless the popular guess is that more books will still be bought than pre-war. For all the return to’ normalcy, people have retained the reading habit the war brought them. , But the decline will imperil some publishers, particularly those who, relying on fiction, lack such solid bread and butter lines as school-, books and technical works. The drift today is away first from fiction, second from war. Generals’ memoirs are stillborn, privates memoirs only slightly less so. Novels have to be in the Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh or Elizabeth Bowen class to do much business. ■