About S&P, this blog, etc

This blog is intended to keep members of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) informed concerning the progress of each issue of Script and Print. It is also intended to provide a place for informal updates on, or extraneous or miscellaneous information about, articles published in Script and Print. (For information about the Society and its publications, see below). These posts are interspersed with bookish news stories that may be of interest to BSANZ members (many of which have been brought to the attention of the editor by BSANZ members).


Who am I?

The reviews editor of Script and Print: Dr Patrick Spedding, Monash University, Melbourne. I can be reached at the following email address:



What is a blog?

"Blog is the contraction universally used for weblog, a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order" (for more information, see the Wikipedia entry here).

This blog offers a less formal, and more regular, method of communication than Script and Print itself. As stated, it will contain updates on the progress of Script and Print, sneak previews of upcoming articles and reviews, informal opinion pieces, and miscellaneous news and information that may be of interest to members and accidental visitors.


Concerning the BSANZ

The BSANZ was founded in Melbourne in February 1969. Modelled on the Bibliographical Society (UK; see here) and the Bibliographical Society of America (here), the Society has as its province all the studies that form part of, or are related to, physical bibliography: the history of printing, publishing, bookselling, type founding, papermaking, bookbinding; palaeography and codicology, writing, editing and textual bibliography. No countries or periods are excluded from its preoccupations. The Society encourages the interdisciplinary study of these subjects, which are often described, collectively, as Book History or Print Cultures.

The Society seeks to encourage scholarly enquiry and thereby to improve the quality of bibliographical work being done in Australia and New Zealand. To this end, the Society has been closely associated with the Australia and New Zealand Early Imprints Project (revived as the Australian Book Heritage Resources Project) and with the on-going History of the Book in Australia projects (see here).

The membership of the Society is predictably diverse: academics drawn from a wide range of disciplines (literature and history; increasingly also: communications, sociology and psychology); rare book and special collection librarians; antiquarian booksellers; book, print and ephemera collectors; and printers and publishers interested in the history of their craft. Provision is made for students as well as ordinary members, while institutions interested in the Society's publications have available to them a special membership category. The bond uniting all these members is concern for and interest in serious and scholarly bibliographical research.


BSANZ publications

Script and Print (ISSN 1834-9013) is the new title for the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin (ISSN 0084-7852). The journal, first published in March 1970, is issued quarterly to all paid-up members of the Society. Script and Print is a refereed scholarly journal of international standing.

The Society's Occasional Publications series offers a variety of research. Recent publications include Stephen J. Herrin's The development of printing in nineteenth-century Ballarat and a collection of 35 essays ranging across Australian, French and English book history: The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop.

The Broadsheet functions as the Society's newsletter. It appears irregularly.

ESTC now available for free

The 'English Short Title Catalogue' (ESTC) is an international project established at the British Library in 1977. Its aim is to create a machine-readable bibliography of books, serials, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1473 to 1800, based on the collections of over 1,600 institutions world-wide.

For almost three decades this tremendously useful database has only been available to fee-paying subscribers; it is now available for free. Apparently, there will be a ceremony in London on 30 October to celebrate this event.

For more information on ESTC, see here.

For access to the ESTC database, see here.

University of Madrid joins Google Print

The Complutense University of Madrid is becoming the first library in a non-English-speaking country to join Google's bid to scan every book in print, as the controversial project extends its global reach. The university's library, the country's second largest behind the National Library, houses three million works, including thousands of Spanish-language public domain books, including those of Cervantes and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. It also contains thousands of volumes in French, German, Latin, Italian and English.

"We already have other non-English-language books, but this will be a huge boost to our Spanish-language content, as well as other languages," a Google spokeswoman says.

More than 400 million people speak Spanish around the world.

Madrid joins Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the universities of Michigan and California and the New York Public Library for the project being run by the world's most popular search company. The US Library of Congress is involved in a similar effort with Google. The Internet giant is funding the scanning of titles as part of a nearly two-year-old effort to make the library collections searchable online.

Authors and publishers' groups in the United States, France and Germany have sued Google over the programme as it relates to books still under copyright, claiming that by digitising them it might tempt consumers to stop buying printed works. Google argues that it is simply creating an electronic index and that it only will publish full texts of books whose copyrights have expired. It recently began allowing users to download and print public domain books for free, including works by Charles Dickens and James Joyce. For works still protected, Google publishes only a few sentences based on a user's search query.

Publishers maintain that scanning the books in the first place is a violation of copyright law. Many of them have launched their own digital scanning projects in a bid to lure consumers to their own Web sites. Following the legal threats, some of Google's library partners said they would only allow scanning of public domain works, and delay anything still protected by copyright until the issue was resolved by the courts. Only the University of Michigan said it would proceed with scanning all works.

Jeffrey Goldfarb

ABC via Reuters: Tuesday, September 26, 2006. 11:07pm (AEST)

Google Print is available here.

Information concerning the Complutense University of Madrid is avaialble here.