Sun Books

Sun Books was an Australian publisher of paperback books, founded in Melbourne in 1965 by Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier. Sun's three founders were all former employees of Penguin Australia who, having grown frustrated by the latter's tepid interest in home-grown content, had resigned in order to establish the imprint, envisioned as a publisher of “quality paperbacks for the sophisticated Australian reader”, and a platform for local literary talent. Prior to its acquisition by Macmillan in 1981, Sun had published over 330 titles, of which 187 were first editions.

Sun’s non-fiction collection was wide-ranging, encompassing politics, sport, the environment, travel, social justice, gender politics, aboriginal mythology, censorship, and homelessness. However, as evinced by the prominence in the catalogue of parochial satirists and cultural commentators like Donald Horne and Barry Humphries, this diversity was subsumed by a unifying (and self-consciously indigenous) cultural agenda, as summarised by John Arnold in commentary accompanying a 2005 Monash University retrospective: <blockquote>The Menzies era was coming to an end, and there was a questioning of established values… Sun Books was both a product of, and a contributing player, to the sixties movement to change and reform Australian society.” </blockquote>Among Sun’s most successful original non-fiction first editions was Geoffrey Blainey’s classic interpretive history of colonial Australia, ' first published by Sun in 1966, and still in publication by 2001