For some Australian publishers, growth has come by expanding into other markets. Publisher Hardie Grant has been very successful setting up companies in the US and UK, and so has Scribe Publications. Black Inc. had a go too, but publisher Morry Schwartz is now trying a different tack by taking over the London-based Jewish Quarterly. Founded in 1953, it was rooted in the Eastern European Jewish tradition. It will be relaunched internationally by Black Inc. in May and will be edited in Australia by Jonathan Pearlman, who also edits Black Inc.’s triannual publication Australian Foreign Affairs. The first issue features some stellar Jewish intellectuals including Simon Schama on democracy, Deborah Lipstadt on antisemitism and some rediscovered letters of the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Henry Rosenbloom’s Scribe Publications proudly boasts that it publishes ‘books that matter’ and has been doing so since 1976. It’s been a long hard struggle and they’ve stuck to their guns. In the last six months their books have notched up some impressive awards: the National Biography Award for Tiberius with a Telephone by Patrick Mullins, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay, and now Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs has just won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in the US. Fathoms is an amazing book that looks at how whales experience environmental and technological change, and what future awaits them and us.