Arcade produces attractive yet inexpensive, ‘tiny tomes’ in A6 (palm-sized) format, described as ‘little nuggets of history and joy.’ Titles include: EW Cole: Chasing the Rainbow by Lisa Lang, Madame Brussels: This Moral Pandemonium by LM Robinson, Our Girls: Aussie Pin-ups of the 40s and 50s by Madeleine Hamilton (which also screened as a documentary on SBS TV), Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds; from Plato to Norma Khouri by Simon Caterson, and Making Modern Melbourne by Jenny Lee. Lang won a Vogel literary award in 2009 for her novel about EW Cole.
So who resides at the House of Arcade and how did it come about?
Dale Campisi and Rose Michael are the publishers and editors, Michael Brady and Peter Daniel the graphic/print designers. Campisi and Michael met at the University of Melbourne where they were both teaching publishing and communications. As both had worked in publishing for many years and had ideas for a list, they decided to hook up and do something different for a niche market. Michael says inspiration came from the 1930s Penguin paperbacks – ‘intelligent books for educated laypeople.’ Campisi explains that the small format is cost effective for a small publisher and the Arcade team shares a love of Melbourne’s ‘quirky, curious history’.
“Certainly my interest has always been Melbourne history. There are so many big stories from Australian history that are little known and remain untold”, says Campisi.
So what kind of book would make it onto Arcade’s list?
“Illustrations are important, there must be quotes from the primary record, the material must be authoritatively well researched and engaging. The author should use story-telling techniques rather than just recording history,” Campisi explains.
Arcade is a proud member of the small press underground networking community (SPUNC) — a not-for-profit incorporation with around 100 members. It is funded by Copyright Agency Limited and the Australia Council. “We’re really lucky to be based in Melbourne, in the UNESCO city of literature”, says Campisi. “Innovation and collaboration are central to what we do. We work together rather than against each other. Text and Scribe have both been really helpful. We are being mentored by someone from Text.”
He further explains Arcade’s philosophy:
“Publishing is in a bit of a crisis at the moment. Partly because of the amount of ‘over-publishing’ that is going on. We’ve had the parallel importation debate. We’re competing against online books and we’re not just competing against other books but we’re competing against other media as well. So we really identified that we needed to make beautiful books that people and ‘non-readers’ – people who may not be regular visitors to bookstores – in particular can engage with and that’s part of our broader project as well. People that may not be regular visitors to bookstores get our books beyond bookstores.”
And that’s where e-books come in. Arcade has recently launched one of its titles, Simon Caterson’s Hoax Nation, on Eco Reader.
“It’s a really exciting technology,” says Campisi. “One of the problems is that we’re still applying our old publishing models to the new medium and that’s to be expected. We did exactly the same thing when the Internet first became popular among publishers. There’ll be big changes with the role of the distributor and certainly in the collaboration between publisher and author. The author will become more prominent and there will be a lot more collaboration between authors and publishers in the production of their books,” he says.
Another way of taking books beyond the store is to take them to the streets, so the folk at Arcade teamed up with Fiona Sweetman of Hidden Secrets Tours to organise sell-out walking tours based on their books. Campisi explains:
“Part of our project in publishing these short histories is in communicating the stories that we’ve got, and certainly in Melbourne where all of our walks take place at the moment. We’ve got so many touchstones to the past that are around the city that people know very little about, and we want to tell our history.”
“People can engage directly with the history of their city, and they can live it and breathe it and look for it and identify it and understand it and feel part of the fabric of their city when they have that direct contact with it, which you sometimes can’t get from a book, so it’s another way of storytelling. It’s been fantastic fun to run and the tours book out so quickly. We run 8-10 tours during the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and they book out in a week.” Arcade has also published a Melbourne by the Book pamplet. It’s a free Arts Victoria resource which maps the city’s literary hotspots, bookstores and festivals.
So what of the challenge of new technologies and the future of the printed book?
“The great thing about books is that they always work even if the power’s off. You can take them with you to the beach or to the bath,” Campisi says. “Books are functional and they’re loaded with culture. They signify certain things. When you walk into someone’s house you can tell a lot about a person by their bookshelf. Just having books in a room it makes it feel warm. It says ‘there are clearly ideas in here’. Print books have always got a place. I think we will see the other media change. My opinion is that magazines and obviously newspapers will be transformed. The Internet is much better for gathering information and keeping up to date so newspapers are becoming an outmoded technology.”
What’s in store for Arcade in 2010? Campisi gives us a glimpse:
“We’ll be publishing a book about Melbourne’s very own Willy Wonka, and a book by historians Seamus O’Hanlon and Tony Dingle about Melbourne from the 1970s to today. We’re also talking with Oslo Davis about a collection of illustrations. We’re growing, which is exciting!”
You can visit the House of Arcade at: www.arcadepublications.com
