John Reed was the last of a century-long dynasty of Reeds who were book publishers, and who revolutionised book publishing in New Zealand. A.H. Reed, later to become Sir Alfred Reed, set up a bookselling business with his wife Isabel in Dunedin in 1907, which specialised in religious supplies. A.W. Reed was his nephew, who lost his parson father in childhood, grew up in Auckland with his mother and joined the family business in Dunedin as a teenager. A.W. was known in the family as Clif and John was his second son. His brother Selwyn died some years ago. Young Clif and Heather are the surviving siblings.
In 1932 the two Reeds published their first significant book, THE LETTERS AND JOURNALS OF SAMUEL MARSDEN, then the business moved to Wellington, and for the next 50 years the company grew and grew. When it was taken over it had published 3500 books, which sold millions of copies. After the emotional and sacrificial years of World War 2, these books captured the hearts of New Zealand readers, providing national pride as well as good reading and good profit, initiating what has been called the Golden Age of New Zealand Publishing, which continues to this day. In Australia, when John and I had established the publishing branch of A H & A W Reed Australia in 1964, popular and ironical book trade gossip was of The New Zealand Publishing Invasion. Our timing could not have been better. The series of full-colour New Zealand books Reeds had published were translated into Australian full colour books that covered similar genre; natural history, Aborigines and the Australian landscape and cities. These were all large format books that had not previously been available in such abundance of colour illustrations and at relatively modest retail prices.
In Wellington John had been production manager of our book publishing. In Sydney he was managing director of the brand-new company and I was his chairman. I commissioned the first Reed list of Australian titles and John looked after warehousing and marketing, before taking over the commissioning and publicity. In all our years together we never had a disagreement.In the 1980s the overall Reed company ran into financial difficulty. We had out-grown our financial backing, and were facing stronger competition from television, radio and UK-based publishers. Such an unhappy ending overtook all the locally financed book publishers of Australia and New Zealand, including the wonderful Angus & Robertson. We once proposed to A & R’s top man, George Ferguson, that they might be interested in a merger but George already had as many survival problems as us.
In the breakup of the Reed company – at the time it had five office-warehouses and over 100 employees – John was the one who suffered most, for the downfall that he was not personally responsible for. I had resigned before the fall. I was free to start my own business. The same for John. He now had Inga beside him, as I had Barbara – a coincidence we are all proud of.
John had immense gifts, which he passed on to his children, a multitude of friends and to his publishing business. He had courage, endurance and generosity – just weigh these words as you think about John, Courage, Endurance, and Generosity. He was everybody’s best friend.
Footnote:
We had been using Gary Allen as our Australian distributor until 1998, but they decided that the time they were spending pushing NZ titles in Australia (a hard task) was not worth the results obtained; John Reed was recommended to us and it was a good recommendation.
In early 2008 it was announced that Reed Publishing in NZ was becoming an imprint of Penguin/Pearson and the name was to disappear. This was John's response to us in an e-mail:
Terrible, isn’t it? When I was there for the 100th celebrations in Auckland, I was told most emphatically that the Reed name would be retained. So much for that! Everyone tells me that a name change would be the worst thing to do, but from what you are telling me now, it almost sounds as if they want to close it down. That was what happened in Australia of course, with the publishing list sold to New Holland, who made an absolute botch of what they bought. I went in at one stage, at their invitation, with my suggestions as to how they should revitalize the list, but they wouldn’t listen. Subsequently most of the authors went elsewhere, being published very successfully under other imprints.
As a matter of interest, I use the Raupo name for our registered company. Will be interesting to see if they try to use it here also, but I suppose that would be a waste of time. Everyone here gets our name wrong, from Paupo to Rappo and so on!
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