CFP: The European Book in the Antipodes

The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 2008 conference will be held at the University of Sydney on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 October. The conference convenors (Lawrence Warner and Nathan Garvey) invite abstracts for papers exploring the topic of The European Book in the Antipodes.

Papers on all aspects of manuscript and print cultures related to this theme are welcomed; subjects might include, but are not limited to:

Physical bibliography of European books in Australia and New Zealand

The history of reading and readerships

Book collecting, collections, and library history

Aspects of publishing and the book trade between Europe and the Antipodes

Please send a 250-word abstract, with a brief biographical note, by 30 April 2008, to the conference convenors at BSANZ2008@gmail.com, or to

Nathan Garvey,
Woolley Building A20,
University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW, 2006.

John Noone, Photolithographer

Shortly before S&P 30.1 went to press, containing an article by Pam Pryde under the title "John Noone, Government Photo-lithographer, 1861–1888," Pam had the good fortune to meet Dr Val Noone. Val is a descendant of Julia and John Noone, who married in Williamstown one hundred and fifty years ago last November (i.e., 28 November 1857/2007).

Val has a wealth of information about John, some of which relates directly to his activities as Government Photo-lithographer in the 1860s, 70s and 80s which will be of interest to BSANZ members. In a booklet that was published to celebrate the Noone's 150th wedding anniversary, Val reproduces the following image of John Noon taken when he was about 60 (ca. 1880).

Val also reproduces the following images from the Museum Victoria website, of a medal Noone won for photographic and photolithographic work at the Bengal Photographic Society exhibition of 1874.

Apparently, Museum Victoria has seven such medals, though most are from Australia.

Val also sent me the following image of the certificate that accompanied the silver medal John Noone was awarded at the Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880–81, "For Photo-Lithographic and Photo-Zincographic reproducton of Manuscript, Lithographed or Engraved Maps."

BTW: Val (below) is a Fellow of the School of Historical Studies at Melbourne University and edited the now-defunct Tain: the magazine of The Australian Irish Network [archived here]. There is a 2005 article on Val in The Age here.

The Library Hotel

The sixty-room Library Hotel in New York City is, as its website explains, "the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the [Dewey Decimal Classification]" system. Located on “Library Way” at Madison Avenue and 41st Street, just steps from the New York Public Library and the Pierpont Morgan Library, the hotel was designed to feel like a private club.

Each of the ten floors honors one of the ten categories of the Dewey system and each of the sixty rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to. Guests can request a room based on personal interests. The ten floors/subject divisions are as follows:

Third Floor: Social Sciences
Fourth Floor: Language
Fifth Floor: Math and Science
Sixth Floor: Technology
Seventh Floor: The Arts
Eighth Floor: Literature
Ninth Floor: History
Tenth Floor: General Knowledge
Eleventh Floor: Philosophy
Twelfth Floor: Religion

The individual rooms on the Eighth Floor (Literature) are:

800.001 Erotic Literature
800.002 Classic Fiction
800.003 Poetry
800.004 Dramatic Literature
800.005 Fairy Tales
800.006 Mystery

(A full list of rooms is available here).

A lengthy review of the hotel by Margo Hammond, St. Petersburg Times Books Editor, appeared in December 2002 and is available online here. A more recent review, by Carol McCabe from The Washington Post, appeared in April 2007 under the title Your Room Is Booked.

BTW: The hotel owners were sued in September 2003 by the owners of the Dewey Decimal Classification system (OCLC), but the two parties reached an agreement the following month, enabling the hotel to continue using the system. See the press release here for more details.

(Thanks to Meredith for sending me the link to this hotel).

Ten Amazing Bookshops

Every bibliophile has a favourite bookshop. In this story in The Guardian Sean Dodson chooses the ten bookshops from around the world which he considers to be the fairest of them all. The following are four of them. (Thanks to Rebecca for bringing this story to my attention).

El lugar de la Mancha in Mexico City, Mexico

Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, The Netherlands

El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal

Update for January 2008

S&P 31.1 has finally returned from the printer! Copies were delivered to the Baillieu Library yesterday, almost exactly a month after I delivered the printing files to BPA. They will be stuffed into envelopes over the (long) weekend and posted early next week. Subscribers should receive copies by the end of next week.

I am very disappointed that we did not manage to get this issue out in 2007; not least because we plan on producing even more issues this year than last year! The good news is that it looks beautiful and is packed with a series of important articles. (The final form of S&P 31.1 is outlined below.)

Work has started on our first issue for 2008 (S&P 31.2). This issue will contain the article by Paul Eggart pushed out of 31.1 due to lack of space, plus impressive work by two early-career academics from Monash: Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario (ECPS) and Paul Watt (Musicology). We also have some fine reviews from Peter Shillingsburg and Shef Rogers and a Bibliographical note from Brian McMullin. Full details of the contents of this issue will appear shortly.

S&P 31.3 and 4 have already started to fill up; and work has begun on S&P 32.1–2, the Harold Love memorial issue, which will be co-edited by Wallace Kirsop, Brian McMullin and Meredith Sherlock. With luck, we will manage to issue S&P 32.3 in December, making six issues for 2008. If we manage this, it should be a breeze to produce five more issues in 2009, bringing S&P back up to date by the end of my term of office (NB prospective editors!).

Contents of S&P 31.1

Article 1: Elaine Hoag, "The Earliest Extant Australian Imprint, With Distinguish Provenance"

Article 2: Nathan Garvey, "Selling a Penal Colony: The Booksellers and Botany Bay"

Article 3: Robert Jordan, "The Barrington Prologue"

Bibliographical Note: Wallace Kirsop, "Search for George Hughes"