In 2024 we are re-launching Arcade Publications, taking up aspects of the previous iteration to serve new research intentions.
Historically there has been a delineation between trade and academic publishing (in regards to markets, economic models, language preferences and production process); in recent years questions around how the academy relates to publics have challenged these practices. Research translation, impact, and researchers’ engagement with their communities have taken on greater importance and become academic imperatives.
Arcade positions itself at this nexus: the intersection between trade and academic publishing, academia and the public. The press will explore and enable changing agendas, asking how academic research can serve our community – and how it could serve it better.
Arcade Publications was founded in 2007 by Rose Michael and Dale Campisi (UoM) to uncover quirky characters from Melbourne’s ‘hidden’ history. Under the motto ‘small books, big stories’ they commissioned early career writers to craft compelling, novella-length non-fiction reads.
Inspired by the Penguin paperback model, Arcade cut production costs by publishing short-run black and white A6 titles on an unused press at Griffin, which also reduced self-distribution overheads (postage). Minimal editorial intervention and an emphasis on post-production marketing – using the book as publicity – ensured fast turnaround from manuscript to publication. The stylish, bespoke product sold well in non-book outlets, and Arcade events took off. From book ‘christenings’ to walking tours with Hidden Secrets Tours, Arcade worked with academics and historians, fiction writers and poets, La Mama performers and Madame Brussels bar. They secured grants from arts organisations, sold books at The Nicholas Building Open House nights (where they had an office), and ran a stand at Clunes Book Town.
Arcade, the brand, became what readers were buying as Rose and Dale grew a community of writer/researchers.
The press survived for five years, the average life-cycle of a small press (The Freeth Report). During that time they published a dozen A6 paperback on characters as diverse as: EW Cole (publisher of Cole’s Funny Picture Book, proprietor of Melbourne’s first bookstore and builder of Cole’s Book Arcade); Madame Brussels (Melbourne’s infamous brothel owner); Minnie Thwaites (the baby murderer of Brunswick); Henry Savery (Australia’s first novelist). They branched out into broader histories: The Making of Modern Melbourne, and Oslo Davis’ cartoon collection Melbourne Overheard.
