Founded in Sydney in 1930, Beacon Press was set up by
Harrie Mortlock, who was then director of the parent company
Boylan & Co. The Beacon Press was founded in response to authors
P. Neville Bartnett's and
M. Danvers Power's requests to have some of their works published as fine books. The Beacon Press is best known for its 1930s publications about Japanese prints and bookplates. The latter were accepted into the Royal Library of King George V.
Mortlock worked closely with each author and personally oversaw the production of fine books, which his staff manually printed and bound in the press's headquarters, in Sydney's Cunningham Street. The press employed four to five women in its bookbinding department, and some eight men in the printing and composing department; they were largely retired servicemen.
The press published mainly at the behest of its authors, and according to
Mark Ferson, it is 'more than likely that [books] were paid for and hence published by their authors rather than the Press. There was very little interest among Australian publishers in the inter-War period for volumes of poetry, and even established poets often had to pay for their poetry to be published, whether by the major or smaller publishers.'
Mortlock kept a journal of the press's activities, where he described Beacon as a semi-private press. This is to say that the press run to some extent on a commercial basis to produce fine books, but with more autonomy than a commercial press, which is mainly concerned with fulfilling publishers' orders.
Printed in 1930, the press's first book was
Folk Art: Verse, a collection of poems by M. Danvers Power with wood engravings by L. Roy Davies. Davies continued to illustrate some of the Beacon Press's poetry titles, among them Patrick White's second poetry collection,
The Ploughman and Other Poems (1935).
One of the press's most significant commissions came in early 1930s, when Beacon Press printed a book to commemorate the completion of the ANZAC memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park. The Trustees of the memorial specified the book should feature a description of the physical structure of the monument stressing its artistic and spiritual elements. In the late 30s and early 40s, the Press started producing smaller items such as quality and illustrated booklets. It was during this period that Mortlock and Barnett collaborated to produce Beacon Press's best-known works, which focus mainly on Japanese colour woodcuts.
The Beacon Press ceased after the death of Harrie Mortlock in 1954.
