Wild & Woolley
former Australian small publisher
Wild & Woolley is an Australian small book publisher founded by Pat Woolley and Michael Wilding in 1973.
Woolley bought a corner tenement in Chippendale, Sydney, in 1975 for $23,000.
Starting in 1973 with the iconoclastic All About Grass on marijuana smoking, Wild & Woolley became immersed in Sydney's literary and bohemian culture of the 1970s. They published more than 70 books by authors including Charles Bukowski, Dennis Altman, Robert Adamson, Vicki Viidikas, Kris Hemensley, Michael Wilding, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Lee Cataldi, Antigone Kefala, Stephen Knight, Rudi Krausmann, Jack Lindsay, Jon Silkin, Fred Cress, Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, David Foster, Billy Jones, Ayshe Talay-Ongan, Glenn A Baker, Claire Dan, Rudi Krausmann, Dal Stivens, Tim Anderson, Albie Thoms, Bruce Petty, Joshua Tickell, Faith Bandler and many others.
As well as books, Wild & Woolley published several popular volumes of underground comix from Ron Cobb and others, in 1975, 1977 and 1981.
Wilding resigned as director in 1979.
The press grew considerably through the 1970s and 1980s, and became the Australian agent for American small publishers Black Sparrow Press, City Lights Bookstore and New Directions Publishing.
In 1991 Woolley established Fast Books, which focused on short run book production catering to self-published quality paperbacks.
In 2011, Wild & Woolley and its associated trademarked entity Fast Books were incorporated into Aveekee Pty Ltd, which was run by Pat Woolley with help from Ted Roberts, to produce new audio formats for the international audience. All of the companies ceased to operate after 2017.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8000460. VIAF identifies the subject as 147086581. The Library of Congress control number is no2010199587. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1975, 1977 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wild & Woolley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.