Bovine University Press
We are a boutique publishing company based in Aotearoa, specialising in arcane and academic books about theatre and theatre-adjacent subjects. Our latest title is The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four (or Shakespeare, Star Wars and The Beatles) which you should totally buy. Our previous book, Shakespeare’s Tropes, is still available in print form and an eBook version is coming soon. 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.
THE BARD, THE FORCE AND THE FAB FOUR WILL BE RELEASED ON FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER AND PRE-ORDERS ARE OPEN! SHAKESPEARE’S TROPES IS AVAILABLE NOW!
We currently have two titles available, Shakespeare’s Tropes (2023) and The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four (2026). Here’s a picture of the two books hanging out together like an old battered secondhand textbook and a shiny airport kiosk paperback having a Bumble date. YOU SHOULD BUY THESE BOOKS; they’re great and fun and informative and will look great on your shelves or it could possibly be a unique gift for your Bumble date. Shakespeare’s Tropes costs $40NZD and The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four costs $35NZD (or you could even buy them together and get a special discount!) and we’ll post them to you anywhere in the world, within reason – postage can 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 e-book versions in the not-too-distant future which may be the easier option for overseas folk, but the physical books are so beautiful and Kobo or Kindle versions will never live up to them!
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.
About The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four
The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four (2026) is a historiographical study of how Shakespeare, Star Wars and The Beatles represent the same pop-cultural revolution within their respective industries and art forms. It analyses the surprising similarities between the three, from high- to low-brow, in ways you might find compelling, amusing or just plain ridiculous. How did the reconstructed Globe, the reconstructed Cavern Club and an underground hotel in Tunisia all become sites of cultural pilgrimage? How did Shakespeare, Lennon & McCartney and George Lucas adapt and transform their source material? Do Othello, Anakin Skywalker and John Lennon epitomise the same kind of toxic masculinity? Why were Will Kempe, Pete Best and David Prowse all ostracised from the franchises they’d played foundational roles in? How is the way Shakespeare is presented on stage in the 21st century changing and what will his plays mean to us after the apocalypse?
How do I buy these wonderful-sounding books?
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 THE BARD, THE FORCE AND THE FAB FOUR OR SHAKESPEARE’S TROPES IS TO E-MAIL US DIRECTLY USING THE CONTACT FORM here and we can send you direct deposit details. That way any proceeds from the sale go directly to us!
After its release on October 9, The Bard, The Force and the Fab Four will be available IN PERSON and online from The Open Book on Ponsonby Road in Auckland. If other vendors get on board, we’ll update this sentence to include links and addresses and a general plan for world domination.
You can current also buy Shakespeare’s Tropes from The Open Book 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 of Shakespeare’s Tropes 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 either Shakespeare’s Tropes or The Bard, the Force and the Fab Four 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 books or whatever; send us an e-mail and someone on the team will get back to you. Maybe you want to order 30 copies of Shakespeare’s Tropes for your class or course! 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) Web Developers and Paid Partnership spammers: your stuff goes straight in the bin!