About Us

Book publishers Wild & Woolley was founded in 1974 by writer Michael Wilding and Pat Woolley to publish new Australian works. Between 1974 and 1983, Wild & Woolley published books by Vicki Viidikas, Antigone Kefala, Ron Cobb, Bruce Petty, Glenn A. Baker, Fred Cress, Faith Bandler, Robert Adamson, Rudi Krausmann, and many others, and distributed twentieth century writing from US, UK and Australian publishers.

Wild & Woolley logo drawn in 1974 by Ron Cobb

In 1991, after completing her law degree at the University of New South Wales, Pat bought fabulous machinery that enabled her to print books in small quantities inexpensively and quickly. She called the new business Fast Books.

Since then, we have 'published' more books than even the largest commercial publishers. But rather than print too many, and remainder them at a loss, we print the quantity you need, as you need them.

About the technology:

1990-1991 We printed on a Xerox 5090 high speed photocopier. Each single book required a complete feed of the original document. (100 books meant 100 times the document went through the feeder.) No memory.

1991-1995 We bought the Xerox DocuTech 'thermal belt reproduction system'. Its memory could hold up to 15 complete books. If a client wanted to reprint within 2 weeks, we could use the memory, but otherwise the entire book had to be rescanned. There was no extra memory, and no method to download from other sources.

1996-2002 We added the newly invented Xerox DocuBlob system to save and archive electronic copies of books onto magneto optical disks and their network server to be able to design books off line and download them to the printer.

2002-2003 Xerox discontinued its support for the DocuBlob magneto optical system. All the books which were electronically saved on disk are now lost. We closed our factory in Glebe. Xerox took back all our equipment and credited our account a miserly $15,000 for the machinery which at its purchase cost us over $500,000. That's depreciation, they say.

2003-present Since then, we have gained much more flexibility and can provide short and long run book productions, because we aren't dependent on just one equipment provider. Our prices have gone down, too. Xerox had a monopoly in the early 90s, but by 2000 there were several more companies with comparable machines.

To reprint a book which we published for you:

1990-2002 Yes, if we typeset and designed the book for you.
2003-present. Yes, if you gave us a PDF or we designed the book for you.

Mia Farrow 1968

When Pat Woolley lived in Los Angeles, she designed a dress made from an India print bedspread.