Stanley Horwitz continued to nurture his company's growing network of transnational relationships in the first half of the 1960s. As well as importing overseas titles for Australian publication, Stanley focused on further expanding international markets for local Horwitz authors. The breadth of these interactions illustrates the centrality not only of Horwitz in the expansion of Australian paperback production following the lifting of import restrictions, but Stanley's growing role as an entrepreneurial driver of Australia's engagement with vernacular modernity in the publishing space. In addition to increasing the range of its pulp paperback offerings, the first half of the 1960s also saw Horwitz pulp become more noticeably ‘Australian’ – as opposed to the 1950s, when, as previously discussed, its pulp was largely characterised by its faux-American nature. While what defines an Australian text is open to multiple interpretations, for my purposes, ‘Australian’ books are taken to be those written by locally based authors and containing predominantly Australian settings, preoccupations, and characters, even if the style and genre were imported from overseas and adapted for the local market. Two categories of Horwitz pulp to emerge in the early 1960s that illustrate not only the way that the company's output became more Australian, but how these books tapped into tendencies and debates on local identity underway in the 1960s, discussions often only partly articulated in mainstream discourse, are fiction set in Sydney's Kings Cross, and war fiction.

Chasing the ‘Jackpot of Gold at the End of the Horwitz Rainbow’

The shift to more Australian content is hinted at in the company's listing in the 1962–1963 edition of The Writers’ Marketing Guide, which describes Horwitz as seeking ‘dramatic stories with highly topical settings also romances and humorous stories with Australian settings, war stories dealing with the Australian army, the RAN, or RAAF, mysteries and topical non-fiction.’ The ‘Australianness’ or otherwise of Horwitz's publishing list also comes up in press reports related to the company in the early 1960s, forcing the mostly media-shy Stanley Horwitz to comment publicly on the issue. A 1960 magazine story commented that ‘Horwitz is essentially an international concern based in Sydney, but not principally concerned with published Australian authors’.