Crowds with flags and streamers on Lambton Quay, Wellington.

Please see Alexander Turnbull Library, Timeframes Conditions of Use for this image.

Ferguson and Osborn were a famous Lambton Quay printing and bookselling firm with a 100-year unbroken history. They began as Brown, Thompson and Company, a thriving nineteenth century printing business which was absorbed into the partnership of Ferguson and Osborn in 1912. From 1931 the firm was solely run by the Osborn clan of Reginald, William and Vera. The Lambton Quay retail outlet boasted 14,000 book titles at any one time, and did a roaring trade in stationery, newspapers, and magazines; it was the oldest shop in continuous business along the Golden Mile. "Personal Service" was the corporate motto, and William Osborn often despaired of the "bargain basement" trends in book retailing. In 1979, he bemoaned the fact that "fiction is a dead letter today. Nobody buys it. They get it from the library." Upstairs at The Terrace end of the firm, the long-standing printing business amassed one of the city's best collections of printing presses, types, and equipment. When the printing side of the business was auctioned off in the early 1980s, it was billed as the letterpress sale of the century, second only in historical significance to the stock dispersals of William Colenso and Robert Coupland Harding.

Further reading:

• Evening Post, 1 August 1979