MATT RUBINSTEIN is a publisher, writer and lawyer. His novels have been shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel award, adapted for theatre and published internationally. He has also written or co-written a number of award-winning short films as well as a film adaptation of Helen Garner’s bestseller Joe Cinque’s Consolation.

Matt shares with us his journey to breathe life back into great Australian books that have gone out of print.

About 22 000 books are published in Australia every year. That’s inspiring, but also kind of terrifying – especially when you think how many of those titles have all but disappeared. They kick around for a while in libraries and second-hand bookshops, and then – for all practical purposes – they’re gone.

In 2020 the Author’s Interest Project found that even 10 past winners of the Miles Franklin Award – Australia’s most prestigious literary prize – were no longer available in any format. Some of them had been out of print for decades. If that could happen to Thea Astley and Vance Palmer, what hope did the rest of us have?

I set up Ligature Publishing in 2012 to explore the new opportunities that digital publishing seemed to offer with the sleek tablets and e-readers that were just coming out. I started with my own books – so I wouldn’t be hurting anyone but myself – and then moved on to my friends and family who had prize-winning books that nobody could buy anymore. When it became clear that paperback books weren’t going anywhere, I added print-on-demand. That let me print a single copy of a book and send it just about anywhere in the world. We slowly worked up to about 50 titles from 20 authors.

Then Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project got in touch. This was an ambitious research project headed up by Rebecca Giblin, who’d run the numbers on those Miles Franklin winners. The project was concerned that many e-books weren’t available from Australian libraries because publishers thought they’d cannibalise sales. They wanted to digitise a bunch of Australian classics that had gone out of print and see what happened. And that’s where we came in.

We already had pretty good systems for turning paper books into properly typeset text files, but there were a few new challenges. A lot of the time even the authors had run out of copies of their books. We found a few in second-hand bookshops and on eBay, but some of them were only available in the legal deposit libraries – and those were closed because of COVID-19. Our friends at the State Library of NSW agreed to courier them to us for a few days of non-destructive scanning. Converting the scanned image into text was pretty accurate, but there’d always be a few errors scattered through the book – and those could only be caught by careful proofreading. We enlisted arts workers who’d been struggling through the pandemic and students doing publishing degrees. The hardest part was stopping them from correcting ‘mistakes’ that the authors had made in the last century.

Luck was often on our side, though. The very last book we added to the list was Honk If You Are Jesus by Peter Goldsworthy. We’d finally managed to get his signature on a contract, but it was the weekend before the deadline and we couldn’t find a copy of the book that would arrive in time. I told the team we were out of luck and took the dogs for a pandemic walk in the rain. We were passing the Balmain ferry wharf, where there’s a community library, and thought I I’d drop in on the off chance. There was the book, of course – I cut the walk short, ran home and put it through the scanner, and Rebecca proofread it herself.

In the end the Untapped project covered 161 titles from around 100 authors. Among them were six winners of the Miles Franklin Award, including five of the 10 that had been out of print, and an amazing array of novels, plays, poetry and non-fiction. Most of them had been nominated by state and territory libraries. There were quite a few that I hadn’t heard of and some of them seemed pretty niche – of course, those ended up among the most often borrowed or bought. Booktopia and its publishing imprint Brio Books came on board as well, bringing advances to the authors or their families and beautiful paperbacks to the project.

We had a lot of great feedback from the authors whose books we had the privilege to bring back. Some of them were no longer with us, of course – and sadly we have lost a few more since. But we will continue to publish their books for as long as their families want us to.

And what about the research? The Untapped team found there was plenty of unmet demand for out-of-print books: even the most obscure ones were borrowed at least five times over the year, and the most popular racked up almost 2000 loans. Publishers don’t need to be worried about e-books in libraries affecting book sales – in fact they may have increased them. The team will be sharing more detail about their data and findings in the coming months.

In the meantime, the project has introduced us to more titles from the Untapped authors and other writers with amazing bodies of work, like a Japanese translation of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss and some incredible domestic noir thrillers from Wendy James. We should all embrace the thousands of new books coming out each year, but we shouldn’t abandon our literary heritage. •

Find out more at Books Untapped or ligatu.re