Looking back in pleasure on the Pegasus Press years at 14 Oxford Terrace

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 21

Looking back in pleasure on the Pegasus Press years at 14 Oxford Terrace

By

STAN DARLING

The editor in “Word For Word,” Robin Muir’s 1960 novel about publishing, had this to say, among other things: "Anyway, printing thrives in an atmosphere of decadence. Look at all those modern factories with everything planned to the last detail. Really lavish. And look at the shoddy, uninispired, mediocre, ill-de-signed, completely nauseating printing that results from it all.” Arthur Henderson, the fictional character, grinned after he said it, adding: “Perhaps it’s just the green-eyed monster talking.” Still, there was some of Robin Muir, the real-life co-founder and editor of Pegasus Press, in the observation.

Now the firm Mr Muir has been semi-retired from for seven years is about to move from its historic headquarters, the old

house at 14 Oxford Terrace, being acquired by Bascands Commercial Print from Skellerup Industries. Its employees and printing equipment will shift into a modern factory.

“I would much rather have something valuable printed on some clanky old thing that’s falling to bits instead of in a sanitary factory,” says Mr Muir, who helped start the firm with the late Albion Wright in 1947. “The time of small, independent publishers as we have known them is gone,” he adds. “Many are being swallowed up by bigger firms.” Years ago, “we could do a

small book of verse, a journal or a history of 500 to 600 copies and break even,” says Mr Muir. Now the economics are different. Now there are many picture books, ghosted books, and so-called “non-books” on the market.

"I’ve got nothing against it,” he says, “it’s all publishing. But it’s not our scene. “Part of the idea when we started was trying to do good quality work — we’ve been terribly fussy, in typographical standards and book design. And in the general standard of writing. All of this shoddy grammar you see these days would never have got through Pegasus.” Robin Muir says that Pegasus Press has not published books in a big way for some years now. The tradition of hoisting a flag outside the house every time a book was published “just faded out as new books became fairly infrequent.” Mr Muir had come up through newspapers. He is from a newspaper family in Gisborne. He and Mr Wright had been in advertising before they moved into their first old building, at 82 Oxford Terrace, in 1947. “It was hard to get printing done at the time,” he says. “Both of us knew Denis Glover from way back. We originally thought of expanding his Caxton Press and working with him in some way.”

The two men kept on doing advertising work “for quite a long time after Pegasus started,” says Mr Muir. “That slowly withered away.” Peter Low, who has been with Pegasus for 39 years, since six months after it started, remembers the original building well. He was the firm’s first apprentice, and stayed on. He has been factory manager more than 20 years, and a director. All the printing equipment was kept upstairs in the two-storey building next to St Michael’s Anglican Church, and the floors eventually started to bow badly under the weight of metal and equipment. The walls and floor were starting to come apart by the time Pegasus Press moved upriver.

“One of the reasons this building was sold to Pegasus was that we planned to preserve it,” says Mr Muir. “For a long time, we were worried they were going to widen the street.”

The historic building began as a small cottage resting on granite blocks brought out to New Zealand as ballast on ships. Later, with a two-storey addition built in 1862 at the back, the

building was nome to a succession of doctors. In 1865, the first meeting of the Canterbury Me.’ cal Association was held there.

Pegasus Press moved into t' • house in 1952. It was “all paintea dark red and filled with old ladies” when it was purchased, says Mr Muir. Out back was a ted stable, which became the bindery and paper store. That building was pulled down in the 19605, before the present factory, designed by Peter Beaven, was built.

“It was all quite atmospheric around here. We used to have launching parties, quite literary events.”

Mr Muir says there has never been a shortage of manuscripts. “They usually start coming in from now on, Christmas is when people write books. About 90 per cent of them you can see will not make it by reading the first and last pages. The bad ones sort themselves out.

“The ones you agonise over are the in-betweens.” Those are manuscripts that might work if they get worked over. Many manuscripts received are between bad and very good. In his novel, Robin Muir’s editor says: “The duds are easy enough. It’s the ones that are not good and not bad that give all the trouble.”

As an editor, says Mr Muir, “it is hard to overcome your prejudices. Some you think would go over like a house on fire just sit there.” Working with writers had always been “a tricky business — it takes a lot of tact.”

Mr Muir says his novel was “just a curiosity, to see what it was like from the other side. I knocked it off in about three

weeks; it was great fun.” The book, which offers insights into New Zealand publishing, is the only one he has written. “I think being an editor makes it more difficult to be a writer.” In “Word For Word,” the editor, Arthur Henderson, says: “That’s the only good thing about this job; it emasculates one’s literary yearnings.”

The fictional editor talks about “the dull ache he felt when he first handled a book he had worked on.” He faced the “inevitable sensation of disappointment when comparing the real with the ideal.”

Mr Muir says that is much the way he felt. “I used to hate it when a book came out. I could never pick up a finished book I felt satisfied about “The one literal in the book stares up at you. I used to think,

‘Oh, put it away face down. Let it mature a bit’ A book can take the best part of a year to do. You can almost recite it by the time it’s finished. You pore over it A tremendous amount of effort goes into it, God knows why.” Mr Muir says it is “not strictly accurate to say the commercial printing side subsidised the literary side, but we couldn’t have lived on books alone. New Zealand is simply too small. “They keep saying that New Zealanders are the world’s greatest readers, but I am suspicious of that statistic. A lot of them are educational books, or things like All Black reminiscences.

“But the pendulum could swing back’. People will find — and it will be a great discovery — that books are more portable than a portable TV. You can turn them on and off and create your own pictures." Quite a few novels could be sold before television came along. Barry Crump’s “A Good Keen Man” sold 10,000 copies for his publisher (“They just walked out,” says Mr Muir), but "you can sell only between 2000 and 3000 now, if you’re lucky.” Pegasus Press had done a lot of historical journals, well-pre-sented and bound, that could be valuable in coming years. A complete set of books published by the firm has gone to the Canterbury Museum, along with some correspondence with early authors which will have an embargo on public access until the authors are dead.

“We also did a lot of vanity stuff because we were printers,” says Mr Muir, “and couldn’t be snobbish about it. If we printed it, we seemed to have to take responsibility for it, even if we said it was just printed for the author, so we tended to be pretty tough on those authors.

“They were very small sellers, but we made them rewrite them, make them look good. They are valuable in their own right.”

Peter Low remembers that one man from the country saw Albion Wright to start with, telling him he had so much money ito spend. He was told “he had a choice of a trip to England, a new Zephyr car, or a family history,” says Mr Low. “Because we had a history of publishing good books, we were also approached by others, such as schools, to publish material,” says Mr Muir.

When Pegasus Press moved into its new factory bildlng in the 19605, Denis Glover and Bob Gonnack (later assistant editor at Whitcoulls and founder of his own Nag’s Head Press) were the firm’s two compositors.

Peter Low remembers that they used to have a nail in the factory where a coat could be hung. They would go off to lunch at a nearby pub. The first one back would hang his coat on the nail. When the other arrived, he would take the first coat down and hang up his own. “I used to think how • much trouble could it be to put up another nail,” says Mr? Low,

“until I realised there was something more to it than that” Bascands intends to maintain the Pegasus Press imprint, and will review the firm's backlist to determine which titles might be kept in print. p Archibald and Govan Investmentments, Ltd, the company that will be restoring the historic old house after Pegasus Press leaves, has made no specific commitment yet on how the building will be used, "except to retain it in the best possible form,” says the company’s chairman, Mr John Fairhall. Two possible options could be a restaurant or offices.