Bovine University Press
We are a boutique publishing company based in Aotearoa, specialising in arcane and academic books about theatre and theatre-adjacent subjects. We currently have one title available, Shakespeare’s Tropes, which you should totally buy. Maybe we’ll publish some plays or novels if our friends write things that should get an audience but don’t get picked up by a proper publisher.
SHAKESPEARE’S TROPES IS AVAILABLE NOW! RELEASED ON SUNDAY 23 APRIL 2023!
We currently have one title available, Shakespeare’s Tropes. Here’s a picture of it sitting on a table and yes, it’s deliberately meant to look like an old battered secondhand paperback. YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK; it’s great and fun and informative and will look sexy on your shelf. It costs $40NZD and we’ll post it to you anywhere in the world, within reason (it’s 540 pages and weighs 0.9kg so postage might be expensive depending on where you are but maybe we can organise some sort of drug mule if you’ve got a friend about to travel to/from New Zealand? e-mail us and let’s see what can be sorted out; we’re real humans and not internet robots!). There will hopefully be an e-book version in the not-too-distant future which may be the easier option for overseas folk, but the physical book is so beautiful and a Kobo or Kindle version will never live up to it!
About Shakespeare’s Tropes
Shakespeare’s Tropes is a chronological companion to the canon. It goes through all of Shakespeare’s plays from The Taming of the Shrew in 1589 through to Cardenio in 1613, charting the narrative development of Shakespeare’s plays and their recurring themes and motifs. On one level it’s an academic textbook exploring how all of Shakespeare’s plays are fundamentally about the dead coming back to life; on another level it’s a fun pop-culture analysis of how the whole canon can be explained by way of The Beatles, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, the Star Wars films and the Mountain Goats. Whether you’re a hardened director or teacher looking for new inspiration or a young student or actor encountering the plays for the first time, this book has something for everyone! except TERFS; those guys can bite my bum.
David Lawrence has been called “the Nick Cave of NZ classical theatre” by Salient and “NZ’s foremost authority on Shakespeare” by Taika Waititi, although he’d like to think of himself as the Don Draper of the scaffolding-reconstructions of-early-modern-playhouses industry. He was the Artistic Director of The Bacchanals and the Associate Artistic Director of Pop-up Globe. He is a Hunter Fellow of Victoria University, whatever that means. Maybe you’ve seen some of his productions, which include directing over two thirds of the Shakespeare canon; maybe you used to listen to him talking to Kim Hill on Radio NZ about plays and stuff.
How do I buy Shakespeare’s Tropes?
Self-publishing niche-interest books in this age of tech giants running everyone out of business with their online monopolies is no easy matter. And if you hate surveillance capitalism, there’s the additional concern of tech giants getting hacked or selling your information to advertisers. THE EASIEST WAY OF BUYING SHAKESPEARE’S TROPES IS TO E-MAIL US DIRECTLY USING THE CONTACT FORM here and we can send you an invoice & direct deposit details. That way any proceeds from the sale go directly to us!
You can also buy PHYSICAL COPIES of Shakespeare’s Tropes IN PERSON and online from The Open Book on Ponsonby Road, Auckland and Time Out at Mount Eden Village, Auckland. That way you’re supporting a local business AND ensuring that both the bookstore and the author gets some dosh out of the sale, instead of helping Bezos buy another ivory back-scratcher. The Open Book has a wonderful curated collection of top quality secondhand books at affordable prices, a comfortable quiet garden where you can have a cup of tea, and lovely and knowledgeable staff. Time Out is a gorgeous independent bookstore with a huge and diverse range of the latest new books, and they used to have a cat there too.
If you’re outside of Auckland, you can buy physical copies from Unity Books in Wellington, Scorpio Books in Christchurch, Wardini Books in both their Napier and Havelock North locations, from Paper Plus in Morrinsville, Books & Co in Otaki, The Martinborough Bookshop, the Otago University Bookshop, and the Twizel Bookshop. If you’re a library or school (or a school library!) you can buy Shakespeare’s Tropes from Wheeler’s Books and Abacus Educational Books. If you’re anywhere else in Aotearoa or the world in general, why don’t you ask your local bookstore if they’ll stock Shakespeare’s Tropes so you can have the human interaction of buying a book from them?
Or, you can go to our online store here using your credit card to buy it, whereby other entities start taking their pounds of flesh out of things. Aren’t those companies rich enough already?! It’s up to you, of course, but honestly, if you know us, just send us an e-mail and we’ll sell you a book!
Surveillance Capitalism is Evil, but let us track you!
Contact Us
The easiest way to buy a book is to send us an e-mail and we’ll send you an invoice! Maybe you’ve got a question about international postage or the book or whatever; send us an e-mail and someone on the team will get back to you. Maybe you want to order 30 copies for your class! that would be great. Do you want to commission us to write something? Or even pitch a book to us? (be warned, we don’t have any money)