The economics of the Australian literary classic

It was when I started teaching and writing on Australian literature in the early 1980s, that I became aware of the disparity between the critical value attributed to the literary classic as a site of interpretation, and the haphazard existence it led in the marketplace, and in the minds of Australian readers. This was during the second part of the period we now think of as the halcyon days for Australian literature, the period between the two bicentennials in 1970 and 1988, when national self-consciousness was at its height - but even then the teaching of Australian literature was a tricky affair, requiring the reframing of courses, and the replacement of chosen texts, because the classics you wanted to impress the students with were out of print. I remember being fobbed off by publishers when I rang and told them that my course alone would sell 100 copies of their out-of-print title (which even then was an exaggeration), not understanding that they would be the only copies of the title the publisher would sell that year, and a long way short of justif)ring a reprint. There are immutable facts about our vast country and its largely immigrant population which make it difficult to keep Australian classics in print, even without the supposedly devastating effects that literary theory and the destruction of the literary canon are supposed to have had on our universities. 1he commercial viability of Australian literary publishing - at least that part of it devoted to classic titles -is almost completely dependent on educational adoptions since the reading public, in the course of its daily browsing, isn’t likely to feed on a classic, unless some rare event, like a film adaptation, or a television mini-series, or a centenary, piques its interest. University listings might deliver sales of around 200-300 copies a year - given the tiny profit margin that attends sales on this scale, a publisher would need a large number of classics on its list, all of them being taught, to make an impact on their bottom line. The new digital printing technologies make it possible to do print runs of 500 copies, or even 200 copies, at a reasonable rate, which means that you can't lose money on a small reprint - but you can't make money either.