Research
Wai-te-ata Press is a research collection of artifacts documenting Wellington's significant printing and publishing heritage. In addition to our historic presses, we have type and equipment from a number of newspaper houses and defunct printing establishments, the extant printery of the noted printmaker and watercolourist John L Moore, and several rare technological oddities collected by founder D F McKenzie.
The Press's focus on the history, transmission, and preservation of the printed and visual word plus its location in the information-rich city of Wellington with New Zealand's premier archives, libraries and research collections makes Wai-te-ata Press a valuable meeting point for researchers and interested parties alike. We work closely with the Beaglehole Room at Victoria University which collects fine printing, hosts the Print Culture Exemplars Collection, and has the Printing Trade Union archive, the Literary Archive, and the Swiss Family Robinson collection, amongst other notable treasures. Digital humanities projects are undertaken in collaboration with Victoria's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre.
Topics in book and print culture are our speciality as is the relationship of oral, manuscript and electronic culture to print. Dr Shep's current research projects include reading in conflict, the material legacy of migration, the digital Colenso, NZ-Scots migration and identity in the papermaking and printing trades, and the recently awarded Marsden-funded project The Printers' Web on typographical journals in the long nineteenth century.