Inbox: Cartoon champion

The extraordinary contribution to New Zealand media, and in particular cartooning by Ian Grant was recognised at the recent Canon Media Awards.
The Masterton resident was presented with the Print Industry 2012 Outstanding Achievement Award and honoured for his influential role in preserving and enhancing New Zealand’s cartooning heritage.
Grant, former director of Profile Publishing, previous publisher of NZ Management, is the founder of the New Zealand Cartoon Archive, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.
He said 20 years ago one day’s newspaper cartoon was the next day’s fish and chip paper – but over those two decades the Cartoon Archive has preserved 50,000 cartoons for future generations.
“Most satisfying to me is the increasingly serious attention cartoons get from historians researching and writing the country’s history. Twenty years on, the value of cartoons as sources of valuable insights about the attitudes and prejudices of earlier eras is firmly established.”
Grant was founding director of the National Business Review in 1970 and since then has written 15 books and is currently working on his 16th, which documents the history of New Zealand newspapers. He and his wife, Diane, are also partners in Fraser Books, which has published about 150 books including all 18 produced by the Wairarapa Archive. M