McPhee Gribble's ‘determinedly unglamorous’ parties: A small publisher's accrual and conversion of social capital

Abstract

This article uses material from two archives pertaining to Australian independent publisher McPhee Gribble to argue that social capital is as important to a small press as economic or cultural capital. Such independent publishers pursue forms of capital other than economic capital. Yet the particular importance of Pierre Bourdieu’s social capital to small presses has been more difficult to demonstrate than symbolic capital more broadly. This research positions the parties thrown in McPhee Gribble's warehouse, documented in the archives through photographs, guest lists, and planning memos, as the publisher’s mechanism and site for the accrual of social capital, and its simultaneous conversion into capital's different forms. This archival material establishes a framework to understand a pervasive feature of the publishing industry that has gone understudied, with such parties often appearing to exist outside the primary business activities of a press.

Introduction

This article uses material from two archives pertaining to McPhee Gribble and their co-founders to assert the importance of social capital to an independent publisher. Founded in 1975 by Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, McPhee Gribble was an independent publisher based in Melbourne, Australia, until it was sold to Penguin Books in 1989, with whom they had entered into a co-publishing agreement in 1983. The small house belied a large reputation, publishing works by some of Australia's most recognisable literary names, such as Tim Winton, Helen Garner, and Gerald Murnane. The 1970s and 1980s were a fruitful period for Australian publishing. McPhee Gribble, like many other small presses, were founded alongside new opportunities in the cultural space: easier and cheaper access to printing technologies lowered the cost of entry for a new publisher (Matulionyte, 2019; McPhee, 2001: 127); these small houses were underpinned by new government grants intended to nurture Australian cultural life (Denholm, 1979); meanwhile, changes in international anglophone publishing arrangements opened new avenues for Australian books to enter the American market (Bryant, 1979; Carter and Osborne, 2018). Both McPhee Gribble's records at the University of Melbourne Archives and Hilary McPhee's personal papers at the National Library of Australia provide insight into the publisher's internal strategies and reflections, which are otherwise difficult for a researcher to analyse externally. These archives document a period of flourishing literary bohemia and cultural community in Australia's major cities, particularly apparent in the importance of parties to the activities of McPhee Gribble.

Independent publishers pursue forms of capital other than economic capital. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) describes these different types of capital in his most sustained way in ‘The Forms of Capital’. To understand the structure and dynamics of the cultural world, Bourdieu (2001: 98) asserted the need to first understand the concept of capital beyond its economic form, that ‘which is directly and immediately convertible into money’. Bourdieu (1993: 75) thus outlined cultural and social forms of capital, both of which could be termed symbolic capital, in the sense that they are hidden forms of economic capital manifesting as recognition and prestige. Symbolic capital is a form of power linked to reputation and prestige, often coupled with and converted into economic capital: together, symbolic and economic capital are the axes that structure Bourdieu's field of power (1984). Cultural capital is one's wealth in terms of taste, which can be institutionalised in one's education, embodied in one's behaviour, or objectified in one's association with cultural goods. Social capital, of primary concern in this article, is ‘possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 103), that is, the strength and reach of one's familial, professional, and social networks. The significance of social capital is often harder to demonstrate than its other forms. As such, this article's new analysis of old material from an important Australian publisher can help to fill a gap in scholarly understandings of a small press' relationship to symbolic capital, with the focus on social capital modelled here relevant to networking events of the cultural industries more broadly.

This article positions the parties thrown in the publisher's warehouse, documented in the archives through photographs, guest lists, and planning memos, as McPhee Gribble's mechanism and site for the accrual of social capital, and its simultaneous conversion into capital's different forms. I suggest three functions of a successful publishing party, in terms of accruing and converting social capital: constructing an informal, seemingly disinterested atmosphere; utilising the space to negotiate interpersonal relationships among the local cultural industry; and using the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion inherent to a guest list to strategically profit from attendees. The archival material thus demonstrates the usually ephemeral relationship of a small press to its social network and establishes a framework to understand a pervasive feature of the publishing industry that has gone understudied, with such parties often appearing to exist outside the primary business activities of a press.

Background

Capital conversion and independent publishing

Bourdieu's different types of capital are often mutually reinforcing and are frequently converted between types. For example, the economically wealthy can send their child to an expensive and prestigious school where they will acquire the cultural capital of a respected qualification and likely form a social network of other economically wealthy and subsequently culturally wealthy friends. For Bourdieu (2001: 106), one's ability to convert capital between its different forms is the key to gain power within one's particular field. That is to say, a publisher's ability to transform their symbolic forms of capital into economic profit, or its economic heft into cultural prestige, would position such a publisher as dominant within the literary field. Such conversions tend to be from symbolic forms, which Bourdieu (2001: 106) called ‘disguised forms of economic capital’, into economic forms, which are ‘at the root of all the other types’. Bourdieu structured the field of cultural production around such relationships to different types of capital. This field of culture exists within the field of power, wherein it occupies a dominated position; these dominated fields ‘are traversed by the necessity of the fields which encompass them: the need for profit, whether economic or political’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 216). Within the dominated field of culture, then, Bourdieu's typology of publishers is organised based on their strategies of pursuing these external necessities, in order to survive within the field of power. Where a large publisher, at the pole of mass or commercial production, is primarily concerned with short-term economic capital and books that provide immediate profits, Bourdieu positioned small, avant-garde or independent publishers at the restricted pole. A small press invests in symbolic capital hoping that, in the long term, it can be converted into economic capital (Bourdieu, 1993: 54).

Mechanisms for converting symbolic capital into long-term economic capital have been the focus of studies of small presses in the tradition of Bourdieu. James English's (2008: 10) notable study of literary and cultural prizes figured such awards as the most effective institutional agents of ‘capital intraconversion’ in the literary space, ‘negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital’. Literary prizes usefully model how symbolic capital operates in the literary field. The media visibility of a prize win boosts the sales of the book, while the author symbolically benefits from this apparent approval of the quality of their craft; multiple prize wins for a publisher increases their symbolic capital as they become perceived to produce high-quality books; those selected to judge are positioned as purveyors of literary merit; and the sponsors of the prize, being seen to support arts and culture, increase their own symbolic capital and advertise their brand. In other words, the recognition of the prize-winning publisher by other players in the literary field generates an authoritative reputation which may enable greater economic profit through the conversion of this prestige into sales. The importance of other players in the field in producing the belief in this symbolic power is expressed in Bourdieu's (1993: 39) defining this field of restricted production wherein ‘producers produce for other producers’; this is to say, McPhee Gribble's peers in the Australian cultural field would be vital in producing and legitimising their symbolic power.

English's work has been followed by other studies of capital conversion through literary prizes (Lawson & Mills, 2021; Squires, 2007). Others have considered the role of cultural capital conversion within literary festivals (Dane, 2020; Driscoll, 2013; Rossetti and Quinn, 2021; Sapiro, 2022); the capital conversion available for a book represented in reviews and features in literary magazines or journals (Osborne, 2010; Philpotts, 2012) and subsequent adoption by educational institutions (Indyk, 2013; Stinson, 2016; Thompson, 2010); or the role of literary translation in bestowing symbolic capital on dominated languages, while simultaneously increasing that of the translating literary region (Casanova, 2021; Sapiro, 2015). Such studies on the importance of capital conversion have a particular focus on the life of the book post-publication; research into social capital conversion, outlined in the next section, focuses more so on the conversions of capital within the business activities of the press.

The continued pertinence of Bourdieu's model to studies of the publishing industry, in contrast to its limitations elsewhere, is striking when reading different publishers’ own accounts of their professional lives, where capital conversions are pervasive. One recent issue for using Bourdieu in contemporary publishing research is identified by Simone Murray, who suggests that the increased role of the algorithm in literary taste making through social media has bypassed Bourdieu's model of literary ‘coteries and exclusive salons’ (Murray, 2018: 18), and through which ‘reputation becomes less a question of accrued symbolic or social capital than of mathematics’ (p. 55). While this argument is compelling for the commercial pole of literary consumption in the twenty-first century, with algorithms focused on immediate popularity rather as-yet-unconverted symbolic capital has diminished the role of human agents for publishing at the commercial pole, the role of human tastemakers continues to dictate taste at the restricted pole.

Indeed, accounts from publishers operating prior to social media demonstrate an alignment with Bourdieu's model, from producers at both the restricted and commercial poles. André Schiffrin’s (2002: 19) memoir, The Business of Books, recounts how his father Jacques, founder of Editions de la Pléiade in 1923, set up a new publishing company in 1942 in his own name upon fleeing Paris for New York, using money supplied by his friends. This is to say, Jacques Schiffrin converted the symbolic capital associated with his old press and his social capital with potential investors to launch this publisher. Within a year, Jacques Schiffrin had joined Pantheon Books with Kurt Wolff. André Schiffrin's family name became his own form of convertible social capital, when he was approached by the subsequent heads of Pantheon to join the press, now an imprint of Random House. From a cultural capital perspective, Schiffrin (2002: 36) credited Random House's Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer's literary idealism in allowing the imprint to continue publishing difficult and cosmopolitan books, that is, those with more immediately symbolic than economic profits. Indeed, in the long term the investment in cultural gains resulted in economic capital conversion as ‘difficult intellectual works were ending up on university reading lists’, with this backlist eventually covering most of the press' costs (Schiffrin, 2002: 75).

For McPhee, Schiffrin, and other publishers, the ability to convert different types of capital, particularly in the direction of the symbolic into the economic, was vital to their presses’ periods of success. Parties are one particularly fruitful means of conversion, predicated on social capital.

Social capital and parties

The McPhee Gribble parties analysed in this article operated in a longer tradition of social capital conversions in publishing-adjacent parties. The memoirs of other publishers recount the similar business deals and social profits that have long occurred in such parties. Bennett Cerf (1977: 123) of Random House described making the deal to acquire Smith and Haas while at a party hosted by Robert Haas in 1936. The deal precipitated large symbolic and economic profits for Random House, gaining writers such as William Faulkner in the process: ‘suddenly we became really important publishers’. Jason Epstein (2002: 50) of Anchor Books and Random House recounts hosting his own unglamorous parties in his Greenwich Village flat in the early 1950s, ‘so battered by its previous occupants that further damage hardly mattered’. At one such party, Epstein's future wife Barabara Zimmerman brought along Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, who themselves gave a plus-one to W. H. Auden. Such networks, gained through Epstein and Zimmerman's ‘forays into the literary world’ proved economically valuable for Epstein (2002: 51). Ten years later, and recounted later in the memoir, the Epstein (2002: 191) utilised their connections to launch The New York Review of Books in 1962 alongside Robert B. Silvers and Elizabeth Hardwick, recruiting their friends and acquaintances to write for the journal . The first issue featured writing from Auden, Hardwick's husband Robert Lowell, and Epstein himself.

The importance of specifically social capital in the literary field has not garnered the same amount of scholarly attention as that of symbolic capital more broadly. At the level of the cultural worker, David Lee (2013: 195) has argued that recruitment in creative industries can ‘act as mechanisms of exclusion, favouring individuals with high levels of cultural and social capital’. In this instance, one's social capital guards access to economic capital in the form of employment (as in Ashton, 2018 and Oakley et al., 2017). At the level of the reader, other studies have considered how social capital influences engagement with certain books, and the social hierarchies that emerge through association (Dane, 2020; Driscoll, 2024; Hazel, 2021). Particularly fruitful for this research into publishing parties are studies of the role of social capital for the relationships between publishers. John B. Hench's (2015: 282) study of The Publishers’ Lunch Club in New York, originally exclusive to those with high symbolic and indeed cultural capital, that is, directors and partners of American publishers, notes that ‘the club served both social and business purposes’. Members could enjoy drinks and gossip but also, according to Hench, negotiate deals in a ‘neutral space’, that ‘would be lacking when one businessman meets with another in the latter's posh corner office or board room’ (Hench, 2015: 274). These studies illuminate the use-value of socialisation within the literary field as a mechanism for all these cultural agents to promote their chances to persist with the demands of the field of power. The importance of these networks is particularly apparent in the dynamics of publishing parties.

Similarly, research into the social aspects of the Frankfurt Book Fair offer a fruitful avenue for understanding the role of parties (Driscoll and Squires, 2020; Gonsalves, 2015; Moeran, 2011). The latter two studies both posit the importance of the book fair to buzz within the publishing industry. For Gonsalves (2015: 437), this buzz is generated at informal gatherings at drinks and parties external to the fair, and, further, that such informal meetings are important to ‘generate business’; for Driscoll and Squires (2020: 66), parties are the site of the book fair's buzz: a means ‘to assert various forms of cool identity, and to forge international relationships, both professional and personal’. These studies develop Moeran's (2011) figuring of book fairs as carnivals or marketplaces, in a physical sense, where people come together and interact socially in order to trade goods and services. Driscoll and Squires (2020: 63) recount being participant observers at parties orbiting the book fair, whether invited or as gatecrashers, and particularly stress the social hierarchies that underpin such dynamics of inclusion and exclusion: in order to access potential profits, one needs to have pre-existing familiarity with other attendees, be in-the-know over where and when events are taking place, and have identifiable taste affinities to locate one's community of fellow publishers within the fair as a whole. Pre-existing reserves of social capital, then, can unlock further profits. Gonsalves' study focuses on the constructive potential for a marginal publisher in attempting to play this game of hierarchical social capital accrual. She adapts Bourdieu's social capital to suggest that friendliness enables Indian English-language publishers at the fair to ‘negotiate their positions’, with the resulting social profits helping to mitigate their marginality in the global publishing field (Gonsalves, 2015: 428).

These studies of the mingling of work and play at the Frankfurt Book Fair align with Andreas Wittel's (2001) important conceptualisation of a ‘network sociality’. Wittel utilises Bourdieu's concept of social capital to suggest a new form of socialising in urban and middleclass spaces. Wittel (2001: 51) uses networking within London's new media industries, occurring within social events organised with the expressed purpose of networking within your field, to argue that ‘Network sociality consists of fleeting and transient, yet iterative social relations; of ephemeral but intense encounters’. The short-term nature of business projects in the internet industry and the experience of sociality in this industry's apparently non-work events are mirrored: intense and fleeting collaborations, with a ‘fluctuation of social figurations’ once that collaboration ends (Wittel, 2001: 66). This is applicable to projects within the publishing industry and will be evident in my analysis of McPhee Gribble's social events. To thrive in this system of social networking it is particularly important to have ‘knowledge of someone's resources and his/her position in the social field’, in order to maximise one's gains from the brief opportunity to interact with them (Wittel, 2001: 67). A pre-existing reserve of social capital enables easier access to other potential profits.

The importance of social knowledge recurs in research across the cultural field, with live music offering a useful analogue for such party-based social capital conversion. Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures (1995) adapted Bourdieu's taste hierarchies to the social circles of young attendees of British clubs and raves in the 1990s. For Thornton, being at the most symbolically profitable clubs or raves required being in-the-know of the current field and hierarchies of venues, DJs, or genres. Knowledge of this was best spread by word of mouth, that is, one's social networks, for as soon as a venue became consecrated by broader visibility, it lost its appeal (Thornton, 1995: 10). In this instance, one's social capital guarded access to the symbolic capital. Recent work has extended this Bourdieusian understanding of live music spaces into niche Australian fields. Simon Chamber'’ (2023: 117) research into taste performance in the Australian contemporary art music scene interviewed attendees to problematise Bourdieu's nexus of familiarity and pleasure in cultural preferences. Interviewees who are themselves invested in this niche field, as aspiring composers or music journalists, repeatedly expressed their attendance of these gigs as a kind of work, rather than as a pleasure. This implies an awareness of the different profits available to those occupying this space, with attendance less about enjoyment of one's taste preferences ‘and more concerned with the maintenance and accumulation of valuable social capital’ (Chambers, 2023: 119). Sam Whiting's (2021) useful study of two niche music venues in Melbourne's Inner North understands these bars as spaces of capital conversion in an explicitly Bourdieusian sense, positioning the venues’ booker as the vital broker of capital: the booker utilises their networks in the local scenes to leverage social capital into economic, with an awareness the current trends to ensure that they appear to pursue cultural rather than economic capital. The capital conversions occurring in these spaces are not discrete, but, as Whiting (2021: 559) argues, ‘are always hybridised and entangled in collective understandings’; or, as Behr et al. (2016: 409) describe, ‘“cultural value” accrues in aggregate rather than in a set of individually ascribable experiential transactions’. Particularly relevant to my figuring of the coolness and subsequent symbolic capital profits of the McPhee Gribble parties is Whiting's discussion of the cultivated atmosphere of these venues. Booking agents explain to Whiting (2021: 568) that they avoid booking ‘careerist professional bands’ in order to keep a venue's atmosphere ‘informal and friendly’, as an outward pursuit of economic capital hurts the perceived authenticity of the venue as a niche or restricted space within the cultural field. This research shows how organisers at this venue have identified appearing non-commercial as valuable to their cultural prestige, and, therefore, to their economic survival. A party well-suited for capital accrual and conversion must therefore disguise its pursuit of capital.

My research thus bridges the gap between research on the broader importance of symbolic capital to independent publishers and research on the particularly social profits that can be gained through social spaces and networks. Access to McPhee Gribble's parties through these archives demonstrates an independent publisher's strategic approach to social capital. I argue that parties provide a particularly clear framework to understand how consciously a small publisher constructs, curates, and maintains its social networks in order to accrue different profits and so succeed within the literary field.

McPhee Gribble’s Publishing Parties

Keeping it casual; projecting disinterest

The McPhee Gribble parties documented in the two archives consist of book launches and annual Christmas parties. All the photographed parties were held at their Fitzroy office on Cecil Street, their final office space before the Penguin takeover. The office was a two storey-warehouse. Compared to their previous offices – a single room in South Yarra, a green shed-like construction in Jolimont that staff called ‘the bunker’, and a terraced house in Carlton – this was a very large space for hosting, and mirrors the growth of McPhee Gribble as a force of Australian literature. The main ground floor room was an open plan space with bookshelves, a few desks, sofas and chairs around a coffee table, populated in all the pictures with magazines, flowers, and mugs or glasses. Behind the sofa was a pink staircase in front of a wall full of framed portraits of McPhee Gribble authors, referred to in handwritten captions as ‘the editorial stairs’ or ‘editorial balcony’ (Papers of Hilary McPhee, 1989: MS Acc13.134, Box 2, Item 111). During parties, the staircase became the stage for speeches and readings. The room would fill, surfaces covered in empty bottles and cans, and the air filled with cigarette smoke. Distinguished authors or reviewers arrived with crates of Victoria Bitter or Foster’s beer under their arms. ¹ Some photos show the attendees moving into the street for fresh air, perched with their drinks on the curb and the hoods of parked cars (Papers of Hilary McPhee, 1989: MS Acc13.134, Box 2, Item 75). There was no apparent dress code: some men wore jackets while others wore printed t-shirts. Photos from the 1988 Christmas party show McPhee Gribble staff back at the office the following morning, filling heavy-duty bin bags with the dregs of the party, collecting cigarette butts, and attempting to clean vast stains off the wooden floorboards (Papers of Hilary McPhee, 1988: MS Acc13.134, Box 2, Items 21–28).

That the celebrations were held in their own office space shaped the atmosphere and dynamics of the party. The setting was more relaxed than holding events at a public venue, with less of a concern, it seems, for appearances. On the other hand, this made the parties less accessible and visible, a cultural in-group congregating away from the general or reading public. This inaccessibility enabled the informality: a guest can’t bring a crate of their own beer to a restaurant; nor can they smoke inside a library or bookshop function. When recounting these parties, McPhee is keen to stress, or mythologise, this unpretentious aura. The ‘huge and desirable’ parties, McPhee (2001: 163) writes in her memoir, ‘were determinedly unglamorous and as inexpensive as we could make them – always BYO and catered for by us and the nearby markets’.

These ‘determinedly unglamorous’ parties align with Bourdieu's (1993: 40) notion of disinterest. In ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, Bourdieu described those cultural producers who pursue symbolic capital over economic capital as having ‘an interest in disinterestedness’: that is to say, being seen to be pursuing capital over artistic purity is to make oneself seem too commercial and thereby decrease your symbolic capital. Where Bourdieu is discussing disinterest in terms of appearing to pursue ‘pure’ art over economic profit, I can apply it here to the projected authenticity of artistic community in McPhee Gribble's parties, disguising their pursuit of social profits. For Bourdieu (1993: 75), successfully performing your disinterest ‘guarantees’ profits in the long run. McPhee Gribble not only saved money by keeping the parties casual, but this veneer of disinterest increased their parties’ symbolic capital in Bourdieu's terms, or, in more colloquial terms, increased the coolness of their parties. That McPhee continues to mythologise the parties for lacking glamour may be an element of nostalgia on the co-founder's part, but nevertheless continues this disinterested performance.

Archival material relating to parties thrown in the 1980s by Virago Press, a feminist independent publishing house founded in London in 1973, with whom McPhee Gribble maintained a strong relationship through the friendship of McPhee and Virago's founder, Carmen Callil, emphasises the particularly informal approach of the Australian house's parties. McPhee (2006) has described Virago and McPhee Gribble as having ‘remarkably parallel lives on opposite sides of the world’, but their parties were strikingly different. Photos of Virago's anniversary celebrations through the decade show parties held at the Dover Street Arts Club, a private members’ club founded in 1863 by, among others, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, with bookable spaces for non-member functions. The outfits at these parties were more formal, with men in suits (and most with ties) and women in dresses. All the guests and Virago staff wore nametags, perhaps to avoid any awkwardness between guests, with Virago not assuming that all the attendees will already be familiar with each other. The object of celebration was different to McPhee Gribble: the London publisher were expressly celebrating themselves on their anniversary, with cakes decorated with the covers of their books (Callil, Dame Carmen Therese, 1981); McPhee Gribble's Christmas parties were less outwardly focused on celebrating the publisher's brand and more so on their community of staff, writers, and other industry connections, as Zacher (2023) notes of such annual, ritualised holiday events. Virago's semi-public parties had more formal boundaries than McPhee Gribble's more private events, which, counter to their setting, were more permeable. McPhee Gribble's parties were held in a private space, but open to those confident enough to enter without an invitation: McPhee (2013: 174) nostalgically lists ‘gatecrashers from the pub’ as evidence of their parties’ desirability. Virago were less happy about gatecrashers, with the press writing to Michael Horovitz after their 1981 Arts Club party to scold the poet and editor for crashing their party, given their attempts to keep their numbers manageable (The Virago Press Archive, 1981). While this note could potentially be considered as sarcastic without further context, the sincere or parodic anger at gatecrashers at least suggests that Virago are conscious of the invitational boundaries to their parties. Where McPhee Gribble viewed random interlopers as a sign of their parties’ desirability, Virago were seemingly angered by even culturally rich agents entering their spaces without invitation.

A projection of informal unpretentiousness, wherein one could walk straight into McPhee Gribble, was part of their wider atmosphere and branding. In an interview with Astrid Edwards in 2020, McPhee described how the publisher's young and ‘eccentric’ personnel made visiting their office less of a ‘terrifying experience’ compared to other publishers, ‘where you come in through the reception’. At McPhee Gribble (2020: 03:45), ‘you just came in to our funny old office and there were people sitting around the table – talking, usually’. Ignoring the expected formalities of the industry created a more welcoming atmosphere for certain individuals affiliated with McPhee Gribble, promoting social relationships between agents in the literary field. Indeed, McPhee's comment is prompted by Edwards noting how Kaz Cooke, a former guest on Edwards's podcast, mentioned that she always liked visiting the McPhee Gribble (2020: 03:25) offices because someone would always compliment her shoes. It is important, however, that while this approach welcomed younger, stylish agents such as Cooke, it's easy to imagine the unstructured, unconventional threshold of the publisher's office intimidating those older or less fashion-conscious agents in the Melbourne literary field, that is, with less cultural capital. As with the gatecrashers, this informality required a self-confidence from the person crossing the threshold. Cooke is a particular example, given that she expressly sought this family-feel from her publisher. Cooke (1990) wrote to McPhee after the Penguin takeover informing her publisher that she wouldn’t stay with a ‘gigantic corporation run, it seems, by aliens’: ‘I wanted to work with a small, independent company I could trust’. This casual, disinterested veneer had genuine benefits to the publisher.

In terms of branding, an internal planning document for their video at a 1989 sales conference sought to cultivate a similar appearance of disinterest. The video that McPhee Gribble conceived would begin with a ‘travelogue of Brunswick Street showing Black Cat cafe, Mario's, Brunswick Street Bookshop etc etc with people reading MPG books’, placing the local cultural scene alongside the more quotidian local scene, with a ‘brothel around the corner, three panel beaters, two art galleries etc etc’ (Records of McPhee Gribble, 1989). McPhee Gribble wanted to situate themselves as ingrained in the diverse Fitzroy scene, rather than as a cosmopolitan, nationally prestigious and internationally connected literary publisher (which, at this point, just prior to the Penguin takeover, they certainly were). Foregrounding their social ties in their local community offered opportunities for capital conversion. Associating their symbolic capital with that of their local network lifted the profile of their community and strengthened social ties. This social capital with surrounding business could potentially converted into discounts on things such as meals out, useful for a small, financially strapped press. McPhee Gribble demonstrate a strong connection with their local restaurants: as well as Mario's and Black Cat café, the archives show staff meals at Baker's New Café and Penang Affair, also both on Brunswick Street (Papers of Hilary McPhee, 1988: MS Acc13.134, Box 2, Items 30 & 79–82). This is to say, McPhee Gribble recognised the social profits, particularly locally, to be had in a disinterest towards more cosmopolitan and professional trappings.

Spaces to transact and negotiate capital

Throughout the archives and in her published writing, McPhee shows an awareness of the opportunities to accrue and convert capital within the publishing parties, revealing the constructed or projected nature of the disinterested appearance. Christmas parties collected Melbourne's cultural agents under the McPhee Gribble roof. For each of the Christmas parties from 1986 to 1989, the archive contains enlarged copies of the ‘party crowds’, overlayed with tracing paper, which were annotated and the attendees labelled in pencil in McPhee's hand. In one such picture, from their 1986 party, McPhee has labelled internationally famous authors such as Beverly Farmer and Murray Bail; Penguin Australia editors Brian Johns and Bruce Sims; as well as freelance artist and occasional McPhee Gribble photographer, Ponch Hawkes (Papers of Hilary McPhee, 1986: MS Acc13.134, Box 2, Box 2, Item 1). Other pictures from such parties show academics, literary agents, actors, and journalists. These annotated party crowds demonstrate an awareness, and perhaps a pride, that the McPhee Gribble parties produced a unique concentration of the period's cultural agents. The photographs are valuable both to the publisher, for their planning of future events and positioning themselves as central to this scene, and valuable to researchers of this period of Australian culture given their preservation in this way.

McPhee (2013: 174) described these crowd photos being treated as ‘an archive of social history’ by staff, ‘later spread out on the coffee table to be discussed in forensic detail. We could spot deals being done, affairs in the making’. This is to say that McPhee Gribble (2013: 176) knew that, as well as ‘drinking and smoking and flirting’, there were professional opportunities in this space to begin converting social capital into economic: ‘agents in the crowd are chatting up authors […] publishers are doing deals with printers’. Although McPhee (2013: 176) mentioned that during these parties there ‘isn’t a spreadsheet or a business plan in sight’ in the party photos, she recognised that publishing work was nevertheless being done, albeit informally: by the end of the parties, ‘Di [Gribble] and I look a bit ragged but we’ve made it through the negotiations’. The apparent disinterest of the parties to business, formality, and conventions, disguised this attention to potential profits.

There was an allure for other agents in the cultural field to circulate McPhee Gribble's social network, given the different forms of profit and capital conversions available at these parties. While McPhee Gribble may not seem to directly benefit from all the transactions that take place amongst their guests, they profited by positioning themselves as the orchestrators of this space, the axle of the Melbourne arts wheel. They placed themselves as ‘the centre of its own universe’, as McPhee would later describe the strategies of the press at a 2002 talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival (McPhee, 2002). This central position in the local field created a gravitational pull, with a different appeal to their relatively young stable of authors than the larger firms offering higher advances and promotion budgets, that is, greater immediate economic capital. Tim Winton wrote to McPhee in May 1985, having returned to Western Australia from a McPhee Gribble visit, noting that being published by a small press was a ‘commercial weakness’, but it was important for Winton ‘to feel like I belong with a publishing house’ (Winton, 1985). What McPhee Gribble lack in economic capital, they could offer Winton in social capital through the strength of their community. Winton, only 25 in 1985 but having already won the Vogel and Miles Franklin awards, was geographically isolated from the Melbourne literary scene. Utilising his publisher's social network at dinners or parties, Winton could convert the symbolic capital that he had gained from his novels and awards into his own social capital: a community of other artists, a sense of belonging in a place far from where he lives.

The parties-as-community likewise created a site to negotiate interpersonal conflicts, and so preserve one's social capital with other culturally rich agents. Winton wrote to McPhee in July 1988, following Scripsi editor and literary tastemaker Peter Craven's negative review of In the Winter Dark for The Australian newspaper. Craven was a significant critic, referred to in terms such as the ‘godfather of Australian literary life’ (Wyndham, 2002), and Mark Davis (1999: 122) has argued that conceptions of an Australian literary canon are largely reflective of Craven's taste presented in his reviewing and editing. Winton (1988) addressed McPhee as ‘publisher, editor, friend’ and confides that he was anxious about how to behave when he encountered Craven at one of his publisher's parties. McPhee (1988a) sought to calm Winton's nerves, noting that ‘critics very rarely recognise the fine line between the work and the writer’, implying that, although he may have overstepped, Craven was criticising Winton's work rather than Winton himself. As such, interactions at a party need not be combative. Although it seems risky to invite to their parties figures currently at odds in the Australian literary space, McPhee Gribble recognised the use value of casual, face-to-face contact as an important means of easing tensions, and preserving social capital between the house's authors and useful external consecrators of literary value, such as Craven. The Australian literary scene was small, as McPhee (1995) noted in many of her lectures while chair of the Australia Council in the 1990s, and in-fighting amongst its independent pole was counterproductive for everyone.

McPhee herself tried to exploit the conflict resolving potential of these parties when at risk of losing Beverley Farmer, one of their most nationally and internationally visible authors during the 1980s. In September 1988, Farmer wrote to McPhee and Gribble informing them that she had asked her agent not to offer them her latest manuscript (Farmer, 1988a). Farmer had been a judge for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, which had not awarded the fiction prize to a shortlisted McPhee Gribble book, Rod Jones' Julia Paradise. In her letter, Farmer noted hearing gossip in the local literary scene that suggested people at McPhee Gribble felt that she was biased in her judging. Farmer particularly noted the breakdown in ‘warmth and growing friendship and trust’ with her publishers, that is, placing the motivation to leave McPhee Gribble firmly within social considerations. With a different publisher, Farmer suggested, the engagement could be economic rather than social, and ‘getting a book out can just be business, pure and simple’ (Farmer, 1988b). McPhee's response to Farmer's first statement of leaving the house was brief: ‘I hope you’ll come to a little party we are having for Judy Duffy's book in early November and we can talk about what on earth has gone wrong’ (McPhee, 1988b). In this, the value to McPhee Gribble of Duffy's launch party was greater than promoting the book in question. It was also an opportunity to salvage or maintain social capital. McPhee was so keen to get Farmer to the party that she also wrote to Farmer's agent, Caroline Laurie, in the same week (Laurie, 1988). The parties, in this sense, show McPhee Gribble mobilising their social capital to retain and support their authors, their source of economic and symbolic profits.

Strategic exclusivity

Rather than being ticketed or open to the public, McPhee Gribble sent invitations to attend their parties, based on planned guest lists. A guest list contains dynamics of exclusion and inclusion. McPhee Gribble strategically used this to collect and convert social capital.

McPhee (2001: 163) hinted at the calculated construction of the guest lists for her parties in her memoir: ‘The guest list was regularly dissected, occasionally and dramatically culled, but it kept on growing until we were spilling out onto the street on hot nights’. The conscious dissection and culling, in other words, promoted growth. Poor social behaviour was one cause of exclusion, with McPhee Gribble wanting to maintain a safe space. Writing in 2013, McPhee noted that the office would come together in October to review and amend their guest list of the previous year's Christmas party, with ‘anyone reporting harassment issues’ by guests allowed ‘to cross them from the list, forever’; one's broader symbolic capital is disregarded here in favour of social relationships, as McPhee recounts how this system often led to them excluding ‘another publisher's star author’ from the list because of inappropriate behaviour – a collapse in that author's social capital with McPhee Gribble's (2013: 174) staff.

Other acts of exclusion were more strategically tailored to capital conversion. As opposed to Christmas parties, where informal capital accrual and conversion have less defined objects, launch parties were directly intended to convert social capital into economic capital. For example, the provisional invitee list for the Melbourne launch of Puberty Blues (1979) was constructed with awareness of both the role of the invitee within the industry, and the potential use value they might bring to the book. Puberty Blues, derived from the experiences of teenage authors Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, highlighted the sexism of Australian surf culture and depicts adolescent sex, rape, and drug use, and thus risked censorship and controversy. Instead of being hosted at their Carlton office of the time, the launch was held on November eighth at the nearby Education Centre Meeting Room in Rathdowne Street Primary School, with useful associations to social and educative benefits. The Melbourne launch guest list prioritised figures who would be useful in maintaining the novel's ability to exist and succeed in the market. Each guest was given a caption describing their position: school principals and teachers, censorship and language consultants, as well as the more expected launch invitations for literary journalists and editors. Some of these captions explicitly noted the strategy behind the invitation, as in the case of Margaret Dunkle: ‘State Librarian – Children's Service's Division – excellent lady to have on side’. Other captions highlighted pre-existing social ties between the authors and a guest that McPhee Gribble wanted to mobilise: it was noted that language consultant Lois Johnston ‘loves the girls!’ (Records of McPhee Gribble, 1979a). This approach was explicit in a draft promotion ‘Strategy’ for the book, which aimed to send press releases, advance copies, and reviews to ‘relevant interest groups (e.g., educationalists, social workers, feminists, community groups, etc.). In most cases, personal contact with these people and organisations some weeks/months prior to publication’. The strategy then noted that the Melbourne launch was ‘mostly to acknowledge assistance of people’ in this ‘category’ (i.e., as opposed to reviewers or booksellers) (Records of McPhee Gribble, 1979b). Social capital, here, enabled economic profit, and Puberty Blues became a bestseller for McPhee Gribble, with persistent sales supported by subsequent screen adaptations.

To use a less fraught example of a book launch, one internal memo provides the guest breakdown for the launch of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977), held at their Carlton office on September 16. In the planning documents, invitees are grouped into ‘23 – author, 10 – reviewers / promoters, 16 – bookshop people, 33 – publishers, friends, etc.’ (Records of McPhee Gribble, 1977). In other words, the guest list had been fashioned to efficiently convert the social capital associated with the invitation into symbolic capital from reviewers, or favour from booksellers, and thereby into better early sales for the novel. The list of invitees shifted between the names of individuals to the names of institutions, like the bookshop ‘Readings’ or magazine ‘Nation Review’. A short appendixed list of potential additions to ‘Discuss with Di [Gribble]’ asks whom to invite from the categories ‘Cinema papers’, ‘AIPA People’, ‘Other Pubs’, and ‘Booksellers’. The subsequent version of the invitation list had settled on the invitees for each category, but retained the labels: ‘Rod Bishop – Cinema Papers’; ‘Joyce Jagger – Myers’; ‘Hugh Cuthburt – A & R [Angus & Robertson]’ (Records of McPhee Gribble, 1977). These lists reveal McPhee Gribble's strategic construction of the parties as spaces with a balance of friends and industry figures, the former contributing to the casual atmosphere, the latter offering higher potential yields of capital conversion, with individuals selected based on their useful affiliations.

McPhee Gribble's approach to invitations was different to that of a conglomerate publisher. During their co-publishing agreement prior to the takeover, Penguin Australia's marketing team took over promotion for McPhee Gribble books. Marketing director Jo Bramble would often push McPhee Gribble to limit launch parties in favour of promotion linked more immediately to sales: McPhee wrote to Winton in 1985, prior to the launch of Scission, that Penguin currently ‘are not keen on paying for launches on the grounds that their promotion budget is spent more effectively on activities directly related to sales’; however, McPhee added that she might be able to convince Bramble, on behalf of Winton, to contribute copies of Scission for a Western Australia launch of the book, which Winton believed would boost local sales (McPhee, 1985a). When Bramble was willing to contribute a launch party, such as with Helen Garner's Postcards from Surfers, held at the Fitzroy office in November 1984, it seems that all the organisation had already been done by McPhee Gribble before Bramble found out. Days before the event, Bramble noted that she has just heard about the party and thanked McPhee for arranging it, attaching a list of figures who would be useful to invite. The listed figures were almost entirely reviewers or editors from across Australia, with Bramble even noting that the interstate invitees likely wouldn’t come, given the late notice, and ‘only a courtesy’ but that there was still social capital to gain by inviting them (Bramble, 1985). Nevertheless, following the launch, McPhee wrote to author David Malouf, apologising that the event had not been local affair that she hoped for, and had become something more professional, at least as it pertained to the post-launch dinner: ‘I’m afraid that incredibly prolonged dinner rather spoilt the evening. I was hoping for a smaller group and better talk’ (McPhee, 1985b). Where McPhee Gribble prioritised accruing and mobilising the social capital of their local scene, Penguin, in the instances they would agree to such launches, showed a more expansive approach to marketing, aiming to encompass Australia's broader national media.

Indeed, that McPhee Gribble values socialisation with their community more so than Penguin became striking as the companies were navigating the takeover. Archival material pertaining to this period suggests that Penguin did not view social events as being as vital as the small press, but as instances of economic capital leakage that should be plugged. In a memo from Penguin executive Robert Sessions to McPhee Gribble's Megan Nevett in September 1990, Sessions questioned some of the house's miscellaneous expenditures alongside a scan of a receipt of the imprints wine order from Richmond Hill Cellars the previous week, totalling 128 dollars for 14 bottles of wine. Sessions (1990) queried whether such orders were common, and asked Nevett, going forward, to avoid such expensive bottles if ordering alcohol was necessary (Sessions, 1990). Penguin were more concerned with the immediate economic capital gains and losses of their new imprint, rather than slower and more ephemeral capital conversions through socialising.

Conclusion

McPhee Gribble's years as a publisher, punching above their weight in the domestic and international market, and launching a number of successful editorial and artistic careers, were punctuated throughout by social gatherings. The archives reveal McPhee Gribble's strategic use of such events. The organisers cultivated an appearance of disinterest to the conventions of the industry to make their parties more desirable and their press appear more authentic. McPhee Gribble used their parties as functional spaces to negotiate social relationships and convert those relationships into opportunities for collaboration within their primary business activities. Finally, McPhee Gribble appeared to understand, and were able to utilise, the transactions of social capital in the act of including or excluding someone from their events, in order to enable different profits from their attendees.

This article's focus on the celebrations hosted by one small publisher in late twentieth century Melbourne, facilitated through archival records of planning sheets, correspondence, guest lists, and photographs of the events, information usually internal to a publisher, has demonstrated the strategic approach to socialising in the publishing industry. Small presses hold parties to maintain and profit from their social networks in a way that mitigates their lesser economic capital compared to larger publishers, utilising and increasing their symbolic forms of capital in a way that positions themselves as central to their local cultural community. The McPhee Gribble parties thus offer a model to understand parties in the cultural industry more broadly, putting greater emphasis on the importance of social capital for small and independent cultural producers. The live music industry has been an important touchstone here, with its more explicit congregation of agents in a physical space enabling networking opportunities. Through these publishing parties we can understand the pertinence of these physically networked social opportunities to other cultural industries.