Everything,

A New Pacific Islands

Year Book

Everything, Including Blood From Stones

By Judy Tudor

After nine months’ preparation the eighth edition of the Pacific Islands Year Book will he available 1 the public by the time you read us. It has been completely re sed, statistically and otherwise; obsolete passages have been reaced by new material; there are any new maps and, in keeping with current practice, it has a new, resting, acid-green jacket, cal culated to stop even buyers of reference books in their tracks.

AS a gestation period, the nine months required for this edition is a record neither way: Some itions have been as long as two ars on the stocks; while one, in 42, when we were urged by a llion importunate Americans who ;med to feel they needed it in order to win the war, was produced about two months.

But the elapsed time of the fhth, from first letter to the notest Territory, to the first book the press, is regarded as reason e, as the Year Book now con ns something like 500,000 words its 480 pages, each of which has be read at least three times 'ing the process of revision and nting; and some four-score ps.

To produce it, needs the cooperation of 27 scattered Adminiitions, or parts of Administra is, from as far east as Hawaii and French Polynesia, westward r 7,000 miles to embrace Norfolk Island, Indonesia and Netherlands New Guinea. ; needs also the co-operation of rate trading and transportation companies and of dozens of mission ies.

With few exceptions the coration has been willingly given though some, naturally enough, led more urging than others, a very few cases, extracting information can best be compared i wringing blood from a stone — now that it is over for another year or so, we are prepared to et it, if our victims do likewise, thanks go to all of them, the k or the reluctant, nally, there is the technical of producing a book of this ire—the setting of the type, -drawing, printing, binding. In

an industrial set-up based on a 40 hours, 5-days week, all these de partments bring troubles of their own.

The first edition of the Pacific Islands Year Book was produced in 1932. it was a soft-cover book in form something like our Papua-New Guinea Handbook of today. It sold for well under 10/- and, on the front cover, was an advertisement for "Burns Philip Mail Steamers"— a fact that, for years, gave rise to the fable that the whole book was produced by Burns Philp & Co. Ltd.

The reason for the PIYB was simple: Mr. R. W. Robson started the Pacific Islands Monthly in late 1930, and within a few months had come up hard against the fact that there was no current Pacific Islands reference book that could give de tails of the administration, politics, geography of thousands of islands which are scattered over millions of square miles of ocean and administered by a score of different nations.

Wrote His Own Handbook The only book of the kind had been Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands, which, between 1908 and 1923, was compiled for McCarron, Stewart & Co by Mr Percy S. Allen. By the time the PIM was under way, the information in the last Handbook was already 10 years old and useless, and Mr. Robson decided to produes his own handbook which would incidentally provide all the information he himself wanted for Pacific Islands Monthly background.

Although the Handbook of the Pacific Islands had not been published for 10 years, the publishers

of that book still held copyright, and so that word Handbook could not be used in the Robson production — it became, instead, the Pacific Islands Year Book. Year Book, of course, it never has been and, due to economic and other circumstances, probably never will be; but, as use of the more suitable Handbook was verboten, that was the only alternative.

Copyright trouble of another kind occurred during the Pacific War Due to the tremendous demand by the American services, some hurried editions and printings were made in Australia; but our wartime paper stocks were not adequate so in 1942, Macmillan, the American publishers, arranged to produce an edition in the USA.

For some reason this did not come out until 1944, and in the meantime a Cleveland outfit, by a process of photo-engraving and lithography, produced an exact copy of the 1942, Australian edition— every line, comma, map and literal mistake. The only thing that was missing was the imprint on the last page—a legal requirement in British countries, but not, ap parently, in the United States.

There is no reciprocal copyright law between Australia and USA, so there is no redress for this sort of thing; any fly-by-night US pub lisher may proceed similarly with out legal consequences, and without paying a penny. By the time Macmillans had produced their edition in 1944, the pool had been scooped, and neither they nor Pacific Publications Pty. Ltd. in Sydney made any money out of it.

A copy of the pirated edition, sent over by an American friend, has an honoured place among our other valuable first editions. Some thing of a joke now; but at the time it happened it was not cal culated to forge those closer bonds between Allies which, in 1943-44, were supposed to be so valuable.