Information Science

Is publishing in the global South by definition publishing ‘from below’? What does the community of scholars, generally, know of publishing and of book history studies in countries of the global South, such as India, Brazil or South Africa? The aim of this paper is to create a firmer foundation for advancing the field of book history and publishing studies in South Africa. The paper explores the research that has been done, in a disparate and fragmentary manner, and attempts to synthesise these into a more coherent body of knowledge.

This chapter aims to analyse and evaluate whether South African scholarly books find an international readership, especially in the markets of the 'North'. The marketing and distribution efforts of several publishers were examined, and reviews of academic books used as a proxy for reception. Findings show that making publications available, accessible and discoverable is complicated by logistical problems, lack of funds, and simple prejudice. At the same time, though, there has been success in reaching a wider audience.

Print culture came to South Africa with the Dutch East India Company, followed by the British colonisers. This influence persisted after colonisation officially ended, with the Union of South Africa in 1910. Many early publishers and booksellers were immigrants, especially Dutch immigrants. While the  settlers were Dutch, many lent their support to Afrikaner nationalist causes. This article considers the implications of the colonial influence for the development of South African print culture, using a case study of Van Schaik Publishers, which was founded by a Dutch Immigrant, JL van Schaik, in 1914. Attention is paid to the question of how this early publisher saw its role in developing an ‘imagined community’ that
engaged both with the culture of the coloniser and that of the developing settler colony. It is argued that Van Schaik played a significant role in the development of Afrikaans publishing, but little scholarly attention has been paid to his publishing
philosophy and strategy.

Book clubs and mail order booksellers Leisure Books/Leserskring, Sunday Times Book Club, etc. Corporation direct sales Business to business sales: corporate gift packagers, legal and accounting firms, etc. Direct sales to the public Website, telephonic and contact sales to members of the public. Libraries and library suppliers Public libraries, academic libraries, institutional research libraries and specialist booksellers serving these clients. State and provincial institutions Departments of Education and government institutions. Schools Suppliers that supply books directly to schools. School book suppliers Holders of provincial tenders to supply school books to schools. Other types of outlets This category includes staff, authors, NGOs and a variety of other types of outlets.

Book clubs and mail order booksellers Leisure Books/Leserskring, Sunday Times Book Club, etc. Corporation direct sales Business to business sales: corporate gift packagers, legal and accounting firms, etc. Direct sales to the public Website, telephonic and contact sales to members of the public. Libraries and library suppliers Public libraries, academic libraries, institutional research libraries and specialist booksellers serving these clients. State and provincial institutions Departments of Education and government institutions. Schools Suppliers that supply books directly to schools. School book suppliers Holders of provincial tenders to supply school books to schools. Other types of outlets This category includes staff, authors, NGOs and a variety of other types of outlets.

Print culture came to South Africa with the Dutch East India Company, followed by the British colonisers. This influence persisted after colonisation officially ended, with the Union of South Africa in 1910. Many early publishers and booksellers were immigrants, especially Dutch immigrants. While the settlers were Dutch, many lent their support to Afrikaner nationalist causes. This article considers the implications of the colonial influence for the development of South African print culture, using a case study of Van Schaik Publishers, which was founded by a Dutch Immigrant, JL van Schaik, in 1914. Attention is paid to the question of how this early publisher saw its role in developing an 'imagined community' that engaged both with the culture of the coloniser and that of the developing settler colony. It is argued that Van Schaik played a significant role in the development of Afrikaans publishing, but little scholarly attention has been paid to his publishing philosophy a...

The study of book history is in its infancy in South Africa, with a small group of scholars working in the area and little sense of a shared body of literature, which could be used as foundational texts for those wishing to conduct research in this fi eld. This article describes an attempt to map the terrain of book and print culture studies in South Africa to date. Although it is only in recent years that writings have come to be grouped under a broader heading of book history (whether at conferences or in special issues of journals), work has been done in this fisince the early twentieth century. This is similar to the situation in other countries, where the ‘accidental’ growth of book history has meant that a great deal of work has been done on a wide variety of relevant topics. The article describes key strands in the literature, including print history, publishing history, the overlap with literary history, and studies of readership and reception.

Amid ongoing concerns about the reading decline, the lack of a “reading culture” and children not reading enough, a variety of solutions are put forward, largely in the form of reading promotion campaigns. these campaigns are seldom sustainable, usually owing to sporadic funding. however, this paper considers whether another factor that affects the sustainability of such campaigns has to do with how they are conceptualised, and whether it is a mismatch between aims and outcomes. Working from a theoretical perspective of the social uses of literacy, the paper examines discourses around reading and how they reflect certain dominant ideologies, social meanings and values. based on a content analysis of the main publicity, communications and speeches associated with some of the dominant reading promotion campaigns in South Africa, the paper examines the words and images being used to promote reading, and how these affect the evaluation of such reading campaigns.

My research examines the role of print culture and publishers in political contexts, especially in the twentieth century. Studying the history of university presses in South Africa led me to consider the multiple ways in which a society can attempt to suppress academic freedom, as well as the resulting forms of resistance and collusion. In apartheid-era South Africa, the universities were subject to the same polarizing forces as the rest of society, encouraging a choice between acquiescence and resistance or rather, as I found, a position on a broad spectrum between complicity and dissent. This led to the politicization of campuses across the country and the growing involvement of staff and students in political activities (both for and against the government). Intellectual repression, both structural and legislative, was one of the government's central tools: universities were racially segregated 1 and fairly closely monitored and, more broadly, a highly repressive legislative array of censorship and control was aimed mainly at "undesirable" publications. The state imposed intellectual censorship with a plethora of regulations intended to support separate development and the security of the state. This took the form of direct intervention, through banning both books and individual academics, as well as indirect influence and pressure that led to self-censorship. But this should not be interpreted as a total crackdown on academic freedom. Even during the most repressive days of apartheid, academic freedom was tolerated, at least to some extent, at the universities. The government maintained a careful balance between the appearance of academic freedom, when it was not directly limited Beth le Roux is an Associate Professor in Publishing Studies at the University of Pretoria. Her research areas include the history of publishing and the history of science in Southern Africa. She is author of A Social History of the University Presses in Apartheid South Africa and co-author, with Sam Naidu, of a book on crime fiction in South Africa. She is co-editor of the journal Book History. 1 This essay does not use the full array of apartheid racial classifications, especially not the exclusionary term nonwhite. Rather, it uses black and white, where appropriate, to refer to academics from different races.

There is a key and oft-repeated assumption that the book is not indigenous to Africa, and has a relatively short history here. 1 Thus, to tell the story of the book in Africa, some would start with the coming of the first printing presses, brought to missions, colonies, and trading posts around the continent by Europeans. Others would argue that we should look at the first indigenous publishing initiatives, mostly newspapers set up by welleducated locals, which led to the inculcation of print into African cultures. But there is also a textual history that is around a thousand years older, the story of the writing, reading, and circulation of texts before the advent of movable type. Where we begin is also a question of location, and the geography of Africa is a complicating factor in any historical study. Borders have changed, peoples have migrated, and the transnational nature of trade and circulation has had a lasting impact on the continent. And "Africa" itself is a troublesome concept, often conceived of either as a monolithic whole or as broad swathes: sub-Saharan and North Africa, or black and Arab Africa, the linguistic and political categories of Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and so on. Moreover, while Adrian Johns argues that print has a role in transcending place, it is also important to look at the specifics of locale when examining book history in such a contested terrain. So there is great variety in both the places and times where the written word has been used, traded, printed, and dispersed in the African context. As a result, print and textual culture has had a differential impact in different parts of Africa, and for different groups. A core complication, then, with attempting a survey of the history of the book in Africa comes down to definitions: the use of the term "print culture" may be inappropriate in situations that rather have a scribal culture, for instance. The "book" has various definitions, in different contexts.

Against the general assumption that crime and detective fiction has only recently emerged as a genre in South African publishing, this essay will consider the publishing history of this genre in South Africa. The question that is considered is whether trade or general-interest publishers targeting a mass audience in South Africa have produced 'whodunnits' in addition to their output of cookbooks and romance fiction? The evidence of writers like June Drummond, James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn, at the very least, suggests that they have, but there is also an older history. This article aims to develop a bibliography and publishing profile of this genre. This will enable us to build a contextualised historical perspective and deepen our understanding of a very popular genre.

Publishing is an important cultural industry, and its products form part of the record of our social and cultural history. Yet what of the records of the publishers themselves-the voluminous correspondence, financial information, manuscripts, policies, review reports, and so on-and what is preserved of such records? In this paper, I propose to discuss the ways in which South African publishers keep-and do not keep-archives. If we are to write a full publishing history in this country, then it is imperative that there should be archives, records, sources of information. Yet publishers, while concerned with record-keeping for corporate purposes, turn out to be not particularly good at keeping records for posterity, for examination, or for independent study. A key problem is access to source material for further study, as often it has not been retained, or certain corporate archives are closed to outsiders and considered confidential. This problem is the result of a tension between why such archives may have been compiled for 'management information', precedent, or compliance and what users such as historians or other researchers may seek in them. There is a core difference in what each party regards as valuable. In other words, we may view publishers and their products as part of a cultural industry, but they largely view themselves as business entities. Another problem with sources results from the repressive legislation of the past, which banned books, suppressed authors and constrained publishers. The effect was to create gaps, omissions and even excisions in the archives that survive. This paper aims to examine which kinds of traces survive, and under what circumstances, in the archives of South African publishers, using a case study approach. As part of a larger, ongoing project, this would be of use to researchers who are seeking to write publisher histories, as well as to publishing houses with haphazard policies for sorting and retaining records for archival purposes.

In this essay we demonstrate how the burgeoning field of South African crime fiction has responded to the birth and development of a democratic, post-apartheid South African state. First, an overview of South African crime fiction in the last twenty years is presented. Then the essay presents an argument for South African crime fiction to be regarded as the 'new political novel', based on its capacity for socio-political analysis. In the following section, the genre-snob debate and the resurgence of such terms as 'lowbrow' and 'highbrow' are considered in relation to crime fiction and the role it plays in the socio-cultural arena of post-apartheid South Africa. We conclude with a comment on the significance of popular literary genres for democracy and critical discourses which underpin that democracy. The essay shows that crime fiction is a strong tool for socio-political analysis in a democratic South Africa, because it promotes critical discourse in society, despite it being deemed lowbrow or ideologically ambiguous.

Start-up problems for a journal include attracting authors and building initial readership, but challenges further down the line include building visibility and maintaining credibility. One of the key strategies in this regard is indexing. According to the literature, the main reasons for having a journal indexed or listed in an abstracting service relate to visibility, and to quality, in terms of credibility and prestige. In this paper, I will look at each of these in more detail. For concrete examples, I will draw upon my experience with indexing an interdisciplinary journal in the social sciences, Africa Insight, of which I am currently the editor. Our experience, in a nutshell, has been that getting the journal indexed does create more visibility, and that it certainly confers some credibility – but it has had little effect on the bottom-line of subscriptions and sales. Résumé Les problèmes de démarrage d'une revue consistent notamment dans les difficultés à susciter l'i...

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South Africa's academic publishing history has been profoundly influenced by its colonial heritage. This is reflected in the publication of Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society (later, the Royal Society of South Africa) from 1878. Although the Society and journal sought to promote original research about South Africa, it was modelled after the Royal Society in London and formed part of an imperial scientific community. As the local higher education institutions grew more independent and research-focused, local scholarly publishing developed as well, with university presses playing an increasingly important role. The University of South Africa (Unisa) Press started publishing departmental journals in the 1950s, with a focus on journals that ‘speak to the student’, and it is today the only South African university press with an active journals publishing programme. As external funding declined and the country became intellectually isolated in the high apartheid ...

Research into print culture studies in Africa has largely been dominated by histories of how European missionaries, colonial administrators and traders brought the book and literacy to Africa, by what Isabel Hofmeyr describes as 'the idea of the imperial gift'.1 Indeed, Africa has been marginalised within the discipline of book history, and has been either omitted or assigned only the briefest mention in the major book history companions, dictionaries and readers, while histories of British publishers routinely overlook their profitable enterprises in Africa.2 As a result, a number of gaps and silences remain. This collection addresses some important issues that have been widely neglected; the focus here is on black southern African writing, publishing and readerships, in contrast with the often white-dominated narrative of print culture, even within African scholarship. Print culture holds important implications for questions of identity, nationality and colonial or postcolonial politics, and, as David Johnson states, there is a need for close attention to 'how "print, text and book cultures" have functioned and continue to function within South Africa's vastly unequal political economy'.3 Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, this journal special issue encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book, art history and information science. Many of the articles are based on previously unexamined archives and collections, for example authors', publishers' and state archives as well as oral history research. They are, thus, evidence-based * We would like to acknowledge the excellent support of the JSAS editorial board in the publication of this special issue, and our particular thanks go to Dennis Walder, the in-house editor of this volume, for his extensive help and constructive advice at every stage.