Script & Print

ERA and Journal Ranking: A Modest Proposal

2011-05-20T10:43:00.000+10:00

Check out this very amusing response to journal ranking madness: increase your journal's ranking by rejecting everything!

Update for May 2011

2011-05-19T02:02:00.004+10:00

Script & Print 35.2 (2011 is now with the printer. It should be delivered to Shef by the end of this week and will be distributed by him shortly afterward.

* * * * *

Contents of S&P 35.2

Article 1: Jason D. Ensor, “Angus & Robertson and the Case of the ‘Bombshell Salesman’”

Article 2: Mark J. Ferson, “Harrie P. Mortlock and the Beacon Press, Sydney”

Article 3: B. J. McMullin, “Forty Years On: The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand and its Journal”

Article 4: Carlo Dumontet, “Bibliographical Note: An Unrecorded Position of Watermarks in Early Nineteenth-Century English Paper”

Bibliographical Note: B. J. McMullin, “Printing on Silk in Malta”

Reviews: Studies in Bibliography, vol. 58 (reviewed by Keith Maslen); Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall, 1710–1818 (reviewed by Shef Rogers); The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (reviewed by Paul Tankard)

Contents of Script & Print, vol. 34 (2010)

2011-04-11T14:14:00.010+10:00

Here is a complete contents-list for Script & Print, vol. 34 (2010)

Articles and Bibliographical Notes:
•Keith Adkins, “Convict Probation Station Libraries in Colonial Tasmania” [S&P 34:2: 69–86]
• Keith Adkins, “The Ferrar Diaries: William Moore Ferrar and his Books” [S&P 34:3: 197–215]
• Jim Cleary and Catriona Mills, “‘Ariel’ and Australian Nineteenth-Century Serial Fiction: A Case of Mistaken Attribution” [S&P 34:3: 162–74]
• Carlo Dumontet, “An Eighteenth-Century Italian Indulgence Printed on Mezzo-Median Paper by Giovanni Radix of Turin, with a Checklist of his Printing” [S&P 34:2: 93–118]
• Jason D. Ensor, “A policy of splendid isolation”: Angus and Robertson, George G. Harrap and the politics of co-operation in the Australian book trade during the late 1930s [S&P 34:1: 34–42]
• Edmund G. C. King, “Alexander Turnbull’s ‘Dream Imperial’: Collecting Shakespeare in the Colonial Antipodes” [S&P 34:2: 87–92]
• Helen Hewson, “Richard Bentley: Publishing Godfrey Mundy’s Our Antipodes” [S&P 34:3: 175–86]
• Wallace Kirsop, “An avowal of stop-press correction in 1817” [S&P 34:1: 8]
• David Levy, “Pirates, Autographs, and a Bankruptcy: A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist by Edmond Hoyle, Gentleman” [S&P 34:3: 136–161]
• Ruth Lightbourne, “I wish you to send it to Zaehnsdorf in London for binding”: Alexander Turnbull and his bookbindings [S&P 34:1: 9–33]
• Kevin Molloy, “‘Cheap Reading for the People’: Jeremiah Moore and the development of the New South Wales Book Trade, 1840–1883” [S&P 34:3: 216–39]
• Roger Osborne, “‘Temper democratic; bias offensively Australian’—Published in Chicago: The American Edition of Such is Life” [S&P 34:3: 240–49]

Obituaries
• Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, 1919–2010 (by Wallace Kirsop) [S&P 34:3: 187–90]

Reviews:
• The British Book Trade: An Oral History (Brian McMullin) [S&P 34:3: 254–56]
• The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI: 1830–1914 (Nathan Garvey) [S&P 34:1: 43–49]
• The Celebrated George Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade and Botany Bay (Des Cowley) [S&P 34:1: 53–55]
• The Decline and Fall of BBB: A Valedictory Volume. Bibliographie der Buch- und Bibliotheksgeschichte (Wallace Kirsop) [S&P 34:3: 252–54]
The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720–1920 (Patrick Spedding) [S&P 34:2: 119–121]
• Freedom to Read: A Centennial History of Dunedin Public Library (Ian Morrison) [S&P 34:2: 123–125]
• Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario) [S&P 34:1: 56–57]
• A Nation of Readers. The Lending Library in Georgian England (Patrick Spedding) [S&P 34:1: 49–53]
• Portuguese Writers and English Readers (John N. Crossley) [S&P 34:3: 250–52]
• Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe (Wallace Kirsop) [S&P 34:2: 121–123]

Update for April 2011

2011-04-11T13:16:00.010+10:00

Script & Print 35.1 (2011)—an issue dedicated to Teresia Constantia Phillips’s Apology (1748–49)—is now with the printer. It should be delivered to Shef by the end of this week and will be distributed by him shortly afterward.

It appears that we are still only close to having our new website going live. Many members were first delighted, and then disappointed, when news of this website was prematurely reported in our last Broadsheet. So, I won't be reporting it here, or offering any links until it does go live!

An extended call for papers for the BSANZ 2011 Conference "Textual Manipulation" was circulated in March. The conference is at the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide, from 3 to 4 November 2011.

The conference website is here (see also here); enquiries and offers for papers can be sent to Cheryl Hoskin (cheryl.hoskin@adelaide.edu.au), who can also be contacted on 08 83035224.

Conference themes include:
• Textual transmission – translation / editing / anthologising / rewriting / parody / plagiarism
• Censored/censured texts
• Medium of the message - cultural, political, religious, economic, aesthetic, psychological impacts
• Reception studies / reader response / how printing, publishing and graphic design affect reading
• (Re)shaping the book - text as art / textual art / artist books / novelty texts

* * * * *

Contents of S&P 35.1

Editorial: Shef Rogers, "A Brief Editorial"

Article 1: Caroline Breashears, “Justifying Myself to the World” : Para-textual Strategies in Teresia Constantia Phillips’s Apology

Article 2: Patrick Spedding, The Publication of Teresia Constantia Phillips’s Apology (1748–49)

Update for December 2010

2010-12-15T06:04:00.005+11:00

Script & Print 34.4 (2010) is now with the printer. It should be delivered to Shef by the end of this week and will be distributed by him shortly afterward. This means that some of you will get your final issue for the year before xmas, some after, but everyone should get their issue in 2010. For this, all BSANZ members should be thankful. The first year as editor is emphatically the most difficult, and I think Shef has done an outstanding job, both in terms of content, and keeping the issues coming. I think we can look forward to another great year for S&P in 2011.

Contents of S&P 34:4

Article 1: Keith Adkins, "The Ferrar Diaries: William Moore Ferrar and his Books"

Article 2: Kevin Molloy, "'Cheap Reading for the People': Jeremiah Moore and the development of the New South Wales Book Trade, 1840–1883"

Article 3: Roger Osborne, "'Temper democratic; bias offensively Australian'—Published in Chicago: The American Edition of Such is Life"

Reviews: Portuguese Writers and English Readers (reviewed by John N. Crossley); The Decline and Fall of BBB: A Valedictory Volume. Bibliographie der Buch- und Bibliotheksgeschichte (reviewed by Wallace Kirsop); The British Book Trade: An Oral History (reviewed by Brian McMullin)

Update for September 2010

2010-09-23T07:47:00.007+10:00

Script & Print 34.3 (2010) is now with the printer. It should be delivered to Shef by the end of next week and will be distributed by him shortly afterward.

Shef had hoped to get this issue out earlier, but there was no paper to print it on at the printers. Printing was delayed while the printers scrambled for replacement paper, delivery of which was blocked by the landslips caused by the Christchurch earthquake! Which must be the first time Script & Print (or the BSANZ Bulletin) has been delayed by earthquake.

The next issue, which will contain reviews, should appear in late November. I have now handed over the post of Reviews Editor to Nathan Garvey but will continue to post news on this blog until our new website is up and running.

Contents of S&P 34:3

Article 1: David Levy, "Pirates, Autographs, and a Bankruptcy: A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist by Edmond Hoyle, Gentleman"

Article 2: Jim Cleary and Catriona Mills, "'Ariel' and Australian Nineteenth-Century Serial Fiction: A Case of Mistaken Attribution"

Article 3: Helen Hewson, "Richard Bentley: Publishing Godfrey Mundy’s Our Antipodes"

Obituary: Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, 1919–2010 (by Wallace Kirsop)

BSANZ 2010 Conference Roundup

2010-07-18T12:50:00.004+10:00

The 2010 BSANZ Conference in Melbourne—To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books—was a resounding success. For those of you who missed the fun here is a roundup of links publicising and reporting on events. (They are, for the most part, in chronological order.)

Jane Sullivan's lead article on "Censorship and Sensibility"—prompted by the conference—appeared in Saturday's A2 section of The Age (see here). I reported this on my academic blog here.

Caroline Breashears and I were interviewed for ABC radio's Bookshow by Ramona Koval on the subject of "Lewd and scandalous books of the 18th century" (you can download the show here). I reported this on my blog here.

Both Monash and Melbourne University rare book libraries put on exhibitions about banned books. Each exhibition was reported on institutional blogs and in newsletters (here, here and here).

Tom Ellis did a blog entry on both exhibitions here. I wrote a couple of posts about the Monash exhibition and on my first plans for both the conference and exhibitions (here and here).

Kevin Patrick—a keynote speaker at the conference discussed his paper and the conference here and here. Megan Burke, who attended Kevin's entertaining keynote, discussed it in her Literary Life blog here.

And a colleague of ours at the Centre for the Book at Monash, Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario—who attended the conference—says a few nice things in passing about the conference on her blog here.

If I missed anything, please let me know!

More on the 2010 Conference in Melbourne

2010-04-28T18:19:00.005+10:00

Online registration is now available for the BSANZ 2010 conference, "To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored books". To resister, go to the conference website here.

We now have a final version of the conference poster (which, unfortunately, hides/censors the wonderful shoes of this particular French reader, which were visible in the first poster):

Please feel free to distribute this poster as widely as possible.

After weeks spent wrestling with the programme we managed to fit in twelve parallel sessions—almost all of which contain three papers each—an opening address, a closing roundtable, two keynotes, and two exhibitions! The number of papers we managed to schedule is large but, unfortunately, we still had to decline many excellent papers.

The draft titles of the twelve parallel sessions are:

• 1A Islam and Censorship
• 1B Censorship and the Long 18th Century
• 2A Touching Books in Medieval and Early Modern England: Demons, Sedition and Prohibition
• 2B Asian Print Cultures
• 3A Histories of Australian Literary Censorship
• 3B Grey Areas: ‘Political Correctness’, Heteronormativity and Plagiarism
• 4A Somebody Think of the Children: Censorship and Schools
• 4B Politics of Metadata: Indexes, Cataloguing and BookScan
• 5A Constructing the 19th-century Obscene
• 5B Open-access and New Publishing Cultures
• 6A Women, Expatriates and Famous Banned Books
• 6B Covert Means: Translation, Selection and Self-censorship

As you can see, there will be something for everyone. Full details of the papers and presenters will be posted on the conference website (here) as soon as all the papers have been confirmed.

Contents of S&P 33 (2009)

2010-04-28T18:14:00.001+10:00

Here is a complete contents-list for Script & Print, vol. 33 (2009)

Articles and Bibliographical Notes:
• John Burrows, “Mulgrave, Dryden, and an Essay upon Satire” [S&P 33:1–4: 76–91]
• Mary Jane Edwards, “William Kirby’s The Chien D’Or / The Golden Dog / A Legend Of Quebec: Translation and Transformation” [S&P 33:1–4: 234–50]
• Paul Eggert, “Advice for Scholarly Editors of Australian Literature: ‘Just Push On’” [S&P 33:1–4: 251–63]
• John Emmerson, “The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642” [S&P 33:1–4: 45–60]
• Nicholas Fisher, “Mending What Fletcher Wrote: Rochester’s Reworking of Fletcher’s Valentinian” [S&P 33:1–4: 61–75]
• Felicity Henderson, “Robert Hooke’s Archive” [S&P 33:1–4: 92–108]
• Robert Jordan, “Australia’s Worst Actor? The Life, Art and Business Practices of Mr. Henry Kemble of Drury Lane, Monopolylogist” [S&P 33:1–4: 185–216]
• Wallace Kirsop, “Adelaide Ristori’s Friends and Admirers in Sydney in 1875: The Story of an Illuminated Address” [S&P 33:1–4: 217–21]
• Wallace Kirsop, “An Essay on Horne” [S&P 33:1–4: 222–33]
• B. J. McMullin, “Queene Mab whats she?” [S&P 33:1–4: 32–44]
• Judith Milhous & Robert D. Hume, “Theatre Account Books in Eighteenth-Century London” [S&P 33:1–4: 125–35]
• Clive Probyn, “Players and Scrapers”: Dean Swift Goes Shopping, for Music” [S&P 33:1–4: 109–24]
• Meredith Sherlock & Brian McMullin, “Harold Love: A Bibliography” [S&P 33:1–4: 9–27]
• Peter Shillingsburg, “Editing Lectures as Performance or Publication: Thackeray’s The Four Georges” [S&P 33:1–4: 161–75]
• Patrick Spedding, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Manuscript Publication and the Vanity of Popular Applause” [S&P 33:1–4: 136–60]
• Lurline Stuart, “Harold Love: A Personal Memoir” [S&P 33:1–4: 28–31]
• Elizabeth Webby, “Harlequin in Van Diemen’s Land” [S&P 33:1–4: 176–84]

Update for April 2010

2010-04-25T07:10:00.003+10:00

Script & Print 34.2 (2010) is now with the printer. It should delivered to Shef by the end of next week and will be distributed by him shortly afterward.

A few people noticed that the cover of 34.1 had a tendency to curl. So the cover stock has been increased to 300 gsm. Even at this weight the cover curls a bit, so Shef has asked the printers to double-check the grain. Hopefully, this should deal with the issue.

Contents of S&P 34:2

Article 1: Edmund G. C. King, "Alexander Turnbull’s ‘Dream Imperial’: Collecting Shakespeare in the Colonial Antipodes"

Article 2: Keith Adkins, "Convict Probation Station Libraries in Colonial Tasmania"

Article 3: Carlo Dumontet, "An Eighteenth-Century Italian Indulgence Printed on Mezzo-Median Paper by Giovanni Radix of Turin, with a Checklist of his Printing"

Reviews: The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720–1920 (Reviewed by Patrick Spedding); Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe (Reviewed by Wallace Kirsop); Freedom to Read: A Centennial History of Dunedin Public Library (Reviewed by Ian Morrison).

Brief Update on the 2010 BSANZ Conference

2010-03-29T08:07:00.003+11:00

The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) 2010 conference, "To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored books" has now got a website here.

Interest in this year's conference has been intense. Our Call for Papers received over fifty responses, including many from overseas. With so many submissions—uniformly interesting and worthy—there is simply no way we can run them all. We are presently trying to narrow the number and are doing everything we can to program as many papers as possible. At this stage it is clear we will certainly be running parallel sessions from start to finish.

In the next week or so we expect to send out confirmations and then we can update the Dates, Venues and Program details on the official website and here. While we are at it we will fill in other details, provide a longer list of Invited speakers etc.

Stay tuned!

Update for January/February 2010

2010-01-28T08:29:00.003+11:00

Script & Print 34.1 (2010) is with the printer and should delivered to Shef by the end of the week. Shef is aiming to distribute copies next Monday (1 February). Please keep in mind that this issue is being posted in New Zealand, so it will take a little longer to arrive than the issues distributed from Melbourne over the last three years.

Per Henningsgaard's paper at the State Library of Victoria was very well attended and prompted a health discussion of the future of books, e-books and e-readers (For my own short post on the latest technology, see here). The recording of this paper will be published online as a podcast.

We hope to organise one more seminar between now and the mid-year BSANZ 2010 Conference in Melbourne. Details will be published here.

Planning for the 2010 Conference is in full swing. The administrative core-component, the budget, is set to be finalised this week. And the academic core-component, the abstracts, are already piling up, even though the final date for abstract-submission is still a month away.

Occasional Publications and Special Issues

2010-01-21T15:12:00.003+11:00

The latest version of the list of Script and Print Occasional Publications is available for download here.

The latest version of the list of Script and Print Special Issues is available for download here.

MBC Event for 21 January 2010

2010-01-18T16:48:00.002+11:00

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday, 21 January 2010 at 5.45PM, off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, Per Henningsgaard will present a paper on "Book Publishing, E-books, and the Production of Literatures of Social Reform."

Predictions abound about the future of the book. Most of these, however, are about the future of the codex rather than the book. Furthermore, most predictions will be outdated within a matter of months, since they are often preoccupied with detailing the specifics of the latest e-book and e-reader technology. In spite of their almost compulsive accounting of the ‘specs’ of this technology, these predictions are notoriously unspecific in their discussion of books—as evidenced by the failure to distinguish between "the book" and "the codex," but also in their neglect of more conventional (and specific) categories such as "fiction," "poetry," and "non-fiction."

This seminar presentation will attempt to chart a remedial course by considering the (possible) effect of e-books on one specific literary category—more specific even than "fiction" or "non-fiction," though in fact crossing these two categories. This category is literatures of social reform. That is to say, books which inspired social reforms of one type or another.

This category of books, most of which were undeniably "popular" at the time of their publication, will be used as the basis for yet another prediction about the future of the book. This prediction, however, will recognise the differences between book and codex; it will also be informed by a clear understanding of the role of book publishers in the production of literature.

Finally, this seminar presentation will consider the prospects for literature functioning as an agent of social change in an e-book future.

Per Henningsgaard is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). He went to UWSP from Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, where he was employed as a Sessional Tutor following the completion of his PhD in 2008 at The University of Western Australia. Originally from Minnesota, Per moved to Australia in 2005 under the auspices of a Fulbright Grant. His research interests include Australian and other postcolonial literatures, as well as publishing and book history.

Members who attended the 2007 BSANZ Conference in Hobart may remember Per because, in that year, he won a Postgraduate Conference Travel Award to present a paper on the "Fremantle Press and the Cultivation of a Regional Press in Australia."

Our New Editor: Shef Rogers

2010-01-13T16:16:00.003+11:00

About Shef

Shef Rogers, our new editor, is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Otago in Dunedin. His areas of interest are eighteenth-century British publishing practices and analytical bibliography. More recently, he has also become involved in a collective attempt to compose a single-volume history of book culture in New Zealand. And he is rapidly developing an expertise in the details of Chicago style!

A Word from Shef

Script & Print has moved yet again across the Tasman, but this time further south. All going well, the move will reduce both printing and postage costs of the journal, but not alter the quality. Keeping up the high standard and rapid-fire pace of Patrick's editiorial work is proving a challenge already, but subscribers will have to judge for themselves in February, when the first issue under the new editorship should arrive.

Script & Print continues to welcome essays relevant to the journal's scope, which is generally broad and bookish and not confined to Australasian topics. Indeed, the next issue will include a note on stop-press corrections in a nineteenth-century French book, a beautifully-illustrated essay on the bookbindings of a major New Zealand collector, Alexander Turnbull, and an archival study of trade relations between an Australian and an English bookseller in the 1930s.

[Script & Print 34:1 (2010)]

Unlike many bibliographical journals, Script & Print welcomes illustrations. We can always include one in full colour on the cover, and we do pretty well with grayscale images in the text, so we encourage contributors to think about which images might be worth a thousand words. Because each issue is limited to sixty-four pages, articles of four to seven thousand words are ideal, though we have run longer pieces in several parts.

Contributors need not be members of the Society to have their work considered, though they will no doubt want to subscribe in order to see their work in such elegant and engaging print.

Reviews of relevant titles are also welcome and should be sent to the reviews editor, Patrick Spedding.

2008 S&P/BSANZ Stories

2010-01-13T16:14:00.000+11:00

MBC Event, 9 Dec. 2008

Update for November/December 2008

MBC Event, 18 Sept. 2008

MBC Event, 30 Sept. 2008

The European Book in the Antipodes

BSANZ Occasional Publication for 2008

Update for July–August 2008

Nathan Garvey on The Book Show

MBC Event, July 2008

Extended deadline for BSANZ Conference

Update for June 2008

Bibliographical Presses

Update for March 2008

CFP: The European Book in the Antipodes

John Noone, Photolithographer

Update for January 2008

2008 News Stories

2010-01-13T16:09:00.002+11:00

Robert Darnton podcast

University of Toronto Book History podcasts

Jay Walker's Library

Destruction of Cardiff Central Library

Literary Tattoos: Writing on the Body

Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets

Notebooks and Note-Takers Symposium

Rare Book Summer School 2009

Bibliographical Circle Meeting

'Creative' Bookshelf Designs

Will Ashford's Recycled Words

Richard D. Altick (1915–2008)

The Library Hotel

Ten Amazing Bookshops

MBC Event for 10 December 2009

2009-11-26T15:14:00.005+11:00

The last BSANZ/CftB Melbourne Bibliographical Circle Event was in late May, when Dr. Felicity Henderson presented a paper on the Royal Society Library. Since that time—as some of you are aware—considerable changes have occurred at the Centre for the Book at Monash University, changes that necessarily interrupted our schedule for events. We are now back on track and we expect that—in future—we will be able to continue our series public events at the SLV.

Today, I am pleased to announce that on Thursday 10 December 2009 at 5.45PM, off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, Paul McShane and Simone Murray will present a joint-seminar on Book Towns & Writers’ Festivals.

Paul McShane will speak on "The International Book Town Experience: An Australian Perspective"

The Welsh village Hay-on-Wye is usually credited with being the first book town and it has certainly directly inspired many imitators around the world over the past forty years. This presentation will review the growth of the book town movement both internationally and in Australia, discuss the factors that seem key to success or failure, and the prospects for the future of book towns in a digital age of e-books, print-on-demand and Google Book Search.

Simone Murray will speak on "The Book Beyond the Page: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks"

Books have a rich public life beyond the printed page. This paper will consider three key fora through which book content circulates: international book fairs; screen festivals; and writers’ weeks. In particular it will investigate how these phenomena incubate the adaptation of book content into other media, and how such adaptations are then marketed back to book-centric audiences.

Paul McShane was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2002 to visit and study fifteen book towns around the world. He is the Convenor of BookTown Australia and was a founder of Australia's first formal Book Town project in the NSW Southern Highlands in 1999. Paul created the BOOKtrail concept in the Southern Highlands and is assisting others in Australia and worldwide to develop similar projects to promote their bookshops and the literary heritage of their regions.

Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies and Director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University. Her research focuses on the interface of the book with other communications media, particularly via digital multiformatting of content. Her book Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (Pluto Press UK) was awarded the 2005 SHARP DeLong Book Prize for the best book on print culture published during 2004. Her current research focuses on the industrial substructures of book-to-screen adaptations of literary prize-winners, and how such research can combine book history, print culture and media studies perspectives.

Update for November 2009

2009-11-20T10:30:00.004+11:00

Script & Print 33.1–4 (2009), a Special Issue edited by Meredith Sherlock, Brian McMullin and Wallace Kirsop under the title Superior in his Profession: Essays in Memory of Harold Love, went to press as planned. Copies will be stuffed into envelopes on Monday and should reach members by the following week. The contents is the same as I outlined in September.

Preparations for the 2010 BSANZ conference are gathering pace. Our CFP is ready to be released and we have had confirmation of interest from two invited speakers. I will post more details about this next week.

Our speaker for the final CftB/BSANZ seminar of the year has also been confirmed: Paul McShane, Convenor, BookTown Australia will review the history of the booktown movement from Hay on Wye and its international growth, talk about what has happened in Australia and reflect on the actual and possible impacts of new technology and the changing marketplace for books with the internet and POD and e-books. I will post more details about this on Monday also.

2010 BSANZ Conference in Melbourne

2009-11-04T14:29:00.007+11:00

A few people have asked me for details about next year's BSANZ conference. Here is what I can tell you.

The conference title is "To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books."

The conference is co-sponsored by The Centre for the Book at Monash (CftB) and the UNESCO Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas (CBWI).

The location is the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

The dates are 14–16 July 2010.

The poster is above.

The first call for papers for the 2010 BSANZ conference will be released later this month.

More details will follow soon. Stay tuned!

My New Blog

2009-10-21T08:45:00.003+11:00

Even though I have not yet succeeded in cloning myself, or splitting myself into two, I have started another blog for research notes and informal academic writing not directly related to Script & Print.

Having a second blog has provided me with a place to post texts, links, news etc and discuss some of the book history and print culture related material that I was posting here (which may explain the sparse posting on this blog of late), but I also get to blog about my other research interests: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature (erotic, gothic, fantastic), pop-culture and so forth.

I opted for a blog title as blindingly obvious as this one: my name! Anyone interested in dropping by will find it here, or you can simply Google my name, and the word "blog."

Doing Something for Australia Published

2009-10-21T08:26:00.009+11:00

The BSANZ Occasional Publication that I foreshadowed last year is now available thanks to the tireless efforts of Roger Osborne, 2007–9 editor of the Occasional Publications series.

Jennifer Alison, Doing Something for Australia: George Robertson and the Early Years of Angus and Robertson, Publishers 1888-1900 (BSANZ O.P. no. 9).
ISBN 978-0-9751500-3-0 [9780975150030]; RRP A$55.00

Angus and Robertson holds a significant position in the history of Australian publishing, bookselling and literary culture. Jennifer Alison's study draws on the extensive company records held at Sydney’s Mitchell Library to show how George Robertson managed Angus and Robertson as a business and as a cultural institution. Robertson’s relationship with authors such as Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson are described in detail in conjunction with the authors of a variety of literary and non-fiction titles, providing a unique view of the pressures faced by a colonial publisher and bookseller.

This important, foundational study will be of great interest to scholars in the fields of literary studies and book history. It provides a comprehensive account of Australia’s early publishing history through an exploration of one of Australia’s most significant publishers and the authors and readers it attempted to serve.

Alison gave a preview of her work on Angus and Robertson at the first History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) Conference in 1996 (details here).

Ordering

Anyone wishing to purchase a copy of this book can do so by contacting Pam Pryde, Treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand at the following email address:

Pam can also be reach at the following postal address:

Pam Pryde, Curator,
Special Collections,
Baillieu Library,
University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, 3010,
AUSTRALIA

For more information about BSANZ Occasional Publications, see here.

Rare Books Summer School 2010

2009-10-14T09:30:00.008+11:00

The 5th Australian and New Zealand Rare Books Summer School will take place at the State Library of Victoria 8–12 February 2010.

There are four units to choose between:

[1] Exploring Medieval Manuscripts
[2] The Italian Renaissance Book, and Afterward
[3] The Changing Image in Children’s Books
[4] Handpress Printing

Exploring Medieval Manuscripts:
Traditional And Digital Techniques

Medieval manuscripts are rich resources for the study of the history of the book and medieval culture, and digital technology is revolutionising our access to and understanding of them. This course will provide instruction on the various ways of cataloguing the contents of medieval manuscripts, with particular emphasis on digital methods of manuscript and image reproduction and the state of development in this area worldwide. The course will include the study and analysis of original manuscripts.

Tutor
Professor Emeritus Margaret Manion (University of Melbourne) has published widely on medieval manuscripts. She was guest curator of the exhibition The Medieval Imagination. Illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand at the State Library of Victoria in 2008, and she is working with the Library on a digital catalogue of medieval manuscripts in Australian institutions. Professor Bernard Muir is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Melbourne. He is the editor of a series of digital facsimile editions of medieval manuscripts for the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and is producing a series of films on the making of illuminated manuscripts.

The Italian Renaissance Book, and Afterward

This course will give an over view of the history of the printed book in Italy, focusing on the Renaissance period and the interaction between technology and capital in Venice between the late 15th and early 16th centuries. In this period Italy developed a modern publishing industry, many of whose innovations have survived to today. Italian books were exported all over the known world and became objects of desire for bibliophiles and collectors. The course will look at the history of this dispersion and how Italian scholars are constructing a bibliographical record, particularly of 16th-century books.

Tutor
Professor Neil Harris teaches Bibliography and Library Studies at the University of Udine in Italy, where he is head of the Department of History and the Conservation of the Cultural Heritage. He read English at Balliol College, Oxford, followed by a PhD in Comparative Literature at Leicester and a Perfezionamento at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

The Changing Image in Children’s Books

A specific literature for children emerged in England in the mid-18th century. This course will trace developments in children’s books in England and Australia from the 18th to the 20th century, with special emphasis on illustration, printing and imaging techniques as well as on the Australian children’s book publishing field. Participants will have hands- on access to rare children’s books from the collections of the University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria.

Tutor
Merete Smith, former Curator of Rare Books, Special Collections at the University of Melbourne, is researching the University’s Morgan Collection of Children’s Books for her Doctorate. Juliet O’Conor, Children’s Research Librarian at the State Library of Victoria, is researching Australian Indigenous traditional stories published in the 20th century.

Handpress Printing

This course will provide instruction on how to set and print metal type on both a cylinder proof press and a hand-fed platen press. It will cover the minutiae of handset ting, locking up and makeready, and students will learn how to recognise a tight tympan and to check roller height as well as to understand the finer points of good inking and impression. The course will also provide practical instruction in how to feed the press, maintain ink levels, avoid offset and maintain registration.

Tutor
Carolyn Fraser is the proprietor of the Idlewild Press in Melbourne, which specialises in printing artists’ books and custom stationery, and where she also teaches workshops on handsetting and printing.

Fees

The fee for each course is A$750. Successful applicants must pay the full fee by Friday 18 December, by credit card (Visa or MasterCard) or cheque. Applications Please use the application form here.

Applications close on Friday 11 December. Numbers are strictly limited, and early application is encouraged. Courses will proceed on the basis of applications received by Friday 27 November (to give interstate and overseas participants time to make travel arrangements).

All applications will be acknowledged upon receipt (preferably by email), and all applicants will be notified of their selection or other wise in December.

Harold Love Memorial Issue

2009-09-21T15:22:00.003+10:00

Script & Print, vol 33 (2009) will comprise seventeen articles and an extensive bibliography. All seventeen articles are now in hand, and ten of these have passed the stage of sending final proofs to the authors. (The articles are listed below.)

The editors have not yet decided on a title for this quadruple issue, but we are confident of sending it to press on Thursday 5 November. In fact, Meredith Sherlock has cancelled her holidays to make sure that we will can go to press by this date and be able to distribute copies before xmas.

Of course, given the many unforeseen delays with Script & Print 32:4 there are—obviously—no guarantees, but we will do our best, both for members, and for Shef, who should be able to take over as editor on 1 January 2010 completely up to date. (BTW: Script & Print 32:4 has been printed and delivered to us, and will be distributed as soon in the next week).

Contents of S&P 33 (2009)

1. “Harold Love: A Bibliography” by Meredith Sherlock & Brian McMullin

2. “Harold Love: A Personal Memoir” by Lurline Stuart

3. “Advice for Scholarly Editors of Australian Literature: ‘Just Push On’” by Paul Eggert

4. “Queene Mab whats she?” by B. J. McMullin

5. “The English Pamphlet Trade in 1642” by John Emmerson

6. “Mending What Fletcher Wrote: Rochester’s Reworking of Fletcher’s Valentinian” by Nicholas Fisher

7. “Mulgrave, Dryden, and an Essay upon Satire” by John Burrows

8. “Robert Hooke’s Archive” by Felicity Henderson

9. “Players and Scrapers”: Dean Swift Goes Shopping, for Music” by Clive Probyn

10. “Theatre Account Books in Eighteenth-Century London” by Judith Milhous & Robert D. Hume

11. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Manuscript Publication and the Vanity of Popular Applause” by Patrick Spedding

12. “Editing Lectures as Performance or Publication: Thackeray’s The Four Georges”by Peter Shillingsburg

13. “Harlequin in Van Diemen’s Land” by Elizabeth Webby

14. “Australia’s Worst Actor? The Life, Art and Business Practices of Mr. Henry Kemble of Drury Lane, Monopolylogist” by Robert Jordan

15. “Adelaide Ristori’s Friends and Admirers in Sydney in 1875: The Story of an Illuminated Address” by Wallace Kirsop

16. “An Essay on Horne” by Wallace Kirsop

17. “William Kirby’s The Chien D’Or / The Golden Dog / A Legend Of Quebec: Translation and Transformation” by Mary Jane Edwards

Contents of Script & Print, vol. 32 (2008)

2009-09-07T16:23:00.010+10:00

Here is a complete contents-list for Script & Print, vol. 32 (2008 [issued 2008–9])

Articles and Bibliographical Notes:
• J. McL. Emmerson, “Pamphlets and Pamphleteering: A Review Essay” [S&P 32:4: 240–45]
• Nathan Garvey, “A Dynasty on the Margins of the Trade: The Bailey Family of Printers, ca. 1740–1840, Part 1” [S&P 32:3: 144–62]
• Mark R. Godburn, “The Earliest Dust Jackets—Lost and Found” [S&P 32:4: 233–39]
• Christopher de Hamel, “The Bohun Bible Leaves.” [S&P 32:1: 49–63]
• T. H. Howard-Hill, “W. J. Cameron and the Universal Catalogue of British Literature” [S&P 32:4: 197–211]
• B. J. McMullin, “Patterned Book Cloth: A Review Essay” [S&P 32:3: 163–75]
• B. J. McMullin, “PBSA Turns One Hundred” [S&P 32:4: 219–32]
• Margaret Manion, “Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia: Resources, Research and Opportunities.” [S&P 32:1: 7–20]
• Keith Maslen, “Our Part to Name: The Early Book Trade of Dunedin, New Zealand” [S&P 32:3: 133–43]
• Ian Morrison, “The Writings of Theresa Tasmania: Notes on an Investigation into a Nineteenth-Century Literary Pseudonym” [S&P 32:2: 95–105]
• Bernard J. Muir, “Interrogating a Witness: the Case for MS Crouch 10.” [S&P 32:1: 36–48]
• Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario, “Fforde’s Book Upgrades: Downloaded Errata and Metafictional Cancellation” [S&P 32:4: 212–18]
• Alison Rukavina, “‘This is a Wonderfully Comprehensive Business’: The Development of the British-Australian and International Book Trades, 1870–1887” [S&P 32:2: 69–94]
• Lawrence Warner, “The University of Sydney Statuta Angliae (RB Add. MS 39) and the 45,011 Parish Churches: England’s Most Popular Urban Myth, ca. 1327–1606.” [S&P 32:1: 21–35]

Reviews:
• A Companion to the History of the Book (Roger Osborne) [S&P 32:2: 109–11]
• Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Paul Tankard) [S&P 32:3: 184–86]
• Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade (Patrick Spedding) [S&P 32:2: 112–15]
• The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison (James Raven) [S&P 32:2: 106–9]
• Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (Patrick Spedding) [S&P 32:3: 179–81]
• The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Roger Osborne) [S&P 32:2: 120–22]
• From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (Ian Morrison) [S&P 32:2: 122–24]
• Hitler’s Private Library (Patrick Spedding) [S&P 32:4: 251–53]
• Judging a Book By Its Cover (Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario) [S&P 32:3: 181–84]
• Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (Edmund G. C. King) [S&P 32:2: 115–18]
• The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Angus Martin) [S&P 32:4: 246–47]
• Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Lawrence Warner) [S&P 32:3: 176–79]

Update for September 2009

2009-09-07T15:46:00.004+10:00

Below you will find details of my final issue as editor, which went to press today after an improbable series of delays (technical, medical, administrative… One of the delays was waiting, and waiting, for a couple of photos of a dust wrapper belonging to Friendship’s Offering for 1830 held at the Bodleian Library. When you see the images you will, I hope, think it was worth the wait: an extra month!)

Since my last update a great deal has happened. There has been a very successful conference in Brisbane, at which there were a few changes to the office-bearers of the BSANZ. The updated list of officers are:

President: John Arnold, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, Caulfield 3145.

Immediate Past President: Shef Rogers, Department of English, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054.

Vice-President: Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054.

Secretary: Chris Tiffin, English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072.

Treasurer: Pam Pryde, Curator, Special Collections, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010.

Editor: Patrick Spedding, Department of English, ECPS, Monash University, VIC 3800.

There have also been significant changes to the structure and mission of the Centre for the Book (CftB) at Monash. The CftB has supported the publication of S&P these last three years, has co-sponsored the Rare Book School, the Melbourne Bibliographical Circle seminars and a wide range of other events and activities. As a result of the restructuring, the CftB has a new Director (Simone Murray) and new affiliated Staff (such as Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario). Simone and Rebecca are both members of the BSANZ (they both presented papers at the Brisbane conference) and will be familiar to some members.

Although the changes to the CftB resulted in a hiatus in activity, especially of the Melbourne Bibliographical Circle events, this will only be temporary. It is expected that the restructured centre will soon be active in organising an even wider range of events. Stay tuned for more.

Contents of S&P 32:4

Article 1: T. H. Howard-Hill, "W. J. Cameron and the Universal Catalogue of British Literature"

Article 2: Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario, "Fforde’s Book Upgrades: Downloaded Errata and Metafictional Cancellation"

Article 3: B. J. McMullin, "PBSA Turns One Hundred"

Article 4: Mark R. Godburn, "The Earliest Dust Jackets—Lost and Found"

Review Essay: J. McL. Emmerson, "Pamphlets and Pamphleteering: A Review Essay"

Reviews: The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Reviewed by Angus Martin); The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (Reviewed by Alan Dilnot); Hitler’s Private Library (Reviewed by Patrick Spedding).

Booktrade Terms and Abbreviations

2009-06-22T16:33:00.003+10:00

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) have made the following two very useful reference works available online:

B. M. Rosenthal's Dictionary of Abbreviations commonly used by German and Italian Antiquarian Booksellers and Auctioneers is available in pdf here.

Edgar Franco's Dictionary of Terms and Expressions commonly used in the Antiquarian Booktrade in French, English, German and Italian is available in pdf here.

Online Publication Requests

2009-06-13T11:28:00.001+10:00

I have been asked, once again, to give permission for an article, very recently published by us, to be republished online. I have said no.

In the past, re-publication requests were uncommon. Predominately, they came from scholars wishing to republish an essay, or part of an essay, in a book. Now they come from people wanting to publish their article online.

Although these requests have been arriving with greater frequency over the last three years I am expecting a flood of them to arrive very soon. In fact, this latest request may the first in that flood.

The reason is, that as a part of the new Commonwealth government funding deal and the ERA bibliometric assessment system, the Commonwealth wants a significant percentage of the publications that form the basis of that ERA assessment to be open to public scrutiny, accessible to other scholars and, possibly, to the tax-payer.

Monash, which is participating in the ERA trial, has decided it wants 20% of all C1-publications, journal articles, posted online. Other trial participants want the same, thus the query.

Next year, when ERA goes live, every University in Australia will want the same, and since the bulk of our authors are Australasian academics, very soon almost every author of every article published by S&P will receive a request (more of a demand) to republish their article on a university’s website.

My response, as editor, is “go to the devil!”

The Commonwealth government and Universities are fond of screwing academic journals.

They have created, and they sustain, an academic assessment system that is very heavily dependent on academic journals, but which gives no credit whatever for the editing of such journals. The Universities offer precious little encouragement (read “no material support” and “no workload allowance”) for the editing or publication of academic journals. And now they unilaterally decide that they will republish our content, undermining our subscription base, by making almost all of our recent content available to non-subscribers for free? I don't think so.

Why should we agree to the republication of our recent content? I keep saying “recent” because we are actually quite happy for our deep-backlog to be made available, and are working toward making this deep-backlog being made more freely available, but this is material published in the last year (the last round of DETYA), or in the last five years (the period covered by the ERA assessment).

And, as it happens, all of our content from 2005 onward is available anyway, in almost every academic library, via Australian Public Affairs Information Service (APAIS) on Informit, so there can be no argument based on academic access.

The raw text, as submitted, before edits, without any images, formatting etc, belongs to our authors, to do with as they wish; but why should we give permission for anything we hold the copyright on to be republished?

I have proposed that this policy be discussed at the BSANZ AGM, so if you agree or disagree, and can’t make it to the AGM, leave some feedback, or send me an email.

UPDATE: I have already had two excellent suggestions: [1] allow a PDF of an article to be deposited, but with an embargo until five years from publication, or [2] make a PDF of an article available to any institution that subscribes to S&P, for display within that institution only. Both suggestions require access to be policed by the institution in question, but if they can police access, then we will still have something to offer BSANZ members.

More thoughts on this subject welcome!

2009 BSANZ Conference

2009-06-12T11:31:00.003+10:00

The 2009 BSANZ Conference, "The Limits of the Book," is almost upon us.

In March I did a lengthy post on the conference call for papers (CFP).

The Call has been well-answered. The following roster of speakers is taken from the conference website.

John Arnold, “Expatriate Scholarly Publishing: Eric Partridge and the Scholartis Press”

Victoria Bladen, “Gardens at the Margins: the Limits and Porous Borders of Renaissance Texts”

John Bradley and Frances Devlin-Glass, “Reading, Listening and Watching Country: Text Plus Animation as Co-dependent Partners in Learning Law and Idenitity Construction”

Caroline Breashears, “The Borders of Defense: Paratextual Strategies in Con Phillip's Apology”

Kylie Cardell, “From Page to Screen and Back Again: The Diary in Cyberspace and Beyond”

Jim Cleary and Catriona Mills, “Ariel and Australian Nineteenth Century Serial Fiction: A Case of Mistaken Attribution”

Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, “Lost in Paratext: Jasper Fforde's Online Paratexts, Ugrades and Bibliographies”

Kate Eltham, “The Book As … : Searching for a New Metaphor for the Book in the Digital Age”

Mark Fraser, “Corrupting Reality: the Histories of the Necronomicon”

Stephanie Green, “Relentless Spaces : Book Festivals in Australia”

Alan Loney, “The Limits of the Book as Object”

Brian McMullin, “Forty Years On: The Society, 1969-2009”

Simone Murray, “Cultivating the Reader: Transmuting Loyal Readerships into Screen Adaptation Audiences”

Roger Osborne, “Reading on Page and Screen: Encounters with Books in a Digital Age”

Richard Overell, After-dinner Speaker.

Jeffrey Poacher, “The Limits of the Book Trade: Frank Johnson, Forgotten Middleman of Australian Publishing”

Shef Rogers, “What's at Issue: The Role of Intention in Bibliographical Classifications”

Andrew Schuller, “Digitization and the Scholarly Book”

Patrick Spedding, “The Lost Erotica of James West”

Doug Spowart, “Every Photo Deserves a Book”

Anthea Taylor, “Delimiting Popular Feminism: The Case of Blurbs and Book Covers”

Lawrence Warner, “The Counter-History of Piers Plowman Textual Scholarship, c. 1750-1850: Bodleian Rawl. 272/273 and State Library of Victoria *S 821.15 V”

Jessica Wilkinson, “Out of Bounds of the Bound Margin: Susan Howe's Challenge to the Printed Page”

Richard Yeo, “The Enlightenment Encyclopaedia”

Short bio's and photos will be found here.

Clandestine Rare Book Sales at USF

2009-06-09T16:47:00.001+10:00

A series of clandestine Rare Book Sales at the University of San Francisco Library has attracted a flurry of exchanges on the EXLIBRIS list. One of the longest, and most informative, was posted by Terry Belanger. Here it is:

FATHER BILL

Father William J. Monihan (1914-1996) became head of the University of San Francisco Library in 1947. In 1964, he moved over to become the director of library relations for the university. During his 40-year library career, he acquired more than forty notable collections for USF.

In a recent blog posting (San Francisco Earthquake”), Nicholas Basbanes referred to his 1995 “Gentle Madness” piece on Father Bill. Younger subscribers to ExLibris who did not have a chance to meet this remarkable “penniless Medici” may be interested in the following excerpt from Basbane’s account:

“I got the idea for the Sir Thomas More Medal when I was visiting Europe with the Grolier Club in 1967,” Father Monihan said. “I discovered that the Royal Library of Sweden gives such an award, and I was impressed by the concept. I even borrowed their motto, which translates ‘private book collecting—a public benefit.’ I came back and talked to our library associates and said, ‘Why can’t we do this?’ ” He named the medal for Sir Thomas More, who was the focus of his first major acquisition; the collection now includes about a thousand items, foremost among them a volume of the martyr’s writings annotated in the hand of John Donne. The first person Father Monihan wanted to receive the honor was Norman Strouse [chairman of the board of J. Walter Thompson]. “In 1968 Norman was approaching retirement. We had lunch together in New York, and he said, “I’d like to help your library.’ After we gave him the first medal he said to me, “When I move back out to California, I am going to help make your library great.’ And he has done exactly that....

“I am a Jesuit, and I took a vow of poverty,” Father Monihan explained in our interview. “I have no interest at all in owning anything for myself. But I love books, and I collect them. The difference is that I collect them for an institution, not myself. Early on I knew that I could never have a strong library if I depended upon university funds. They would say, ‘We would love to help you, Will, but we just can’t do it.’ So when I became head of the library in 1947, I went outside. I went out to meet people. And I’ve been doing it ever since. I have created enthusiasm among friends to support us. Now we have an endowment fund of some size, and I’m always getting gifts. So what you are seeing here is largely from friends, with no university funds used at all. This is all outside money doing this.”

Father Monihan has a warm smile, silver hair, and a gentle demeanour. His blue eyes sparkle when he talks about books, and he is unshakably persuasive about his mission. The ability to get so much “outside help,” as he puts it, has been his gift. “I love people and they love me,” he explained, “And that’s all that counts” (“A Gentle Madness” [New York: Henry Holt, 1995], pp. 452-4).

THE MORE MEDAL AS MAGNET

Part of Father Bill’s genius is that he was able to attract significant donations to the Gleeson Library from persons who had little or no previous contact with the University of San Francisco. The recipients of the University of San Francisco’s Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting include

1968 Norman H. Strouse
1969 Wilmarth S. Lewis
1970 C. Waller Barrett
1971 Lessing J. Rosenwald
1972 Elmer Belt
1973 Gordon N. Ray
1974 Frederick R. Goff
1975 Mary Hyde
1976 Otto Schafer
1977 Lawrence Clark Powell
1978 John S. Mayfield
1979 John Dreyfus
1980 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan
1981 Robert H. Taylor
1982 Albert A. Sperisen
1983 Bern Dibner
1984 William H. Scheide
1985 Sanford L. Berger
1986 Mitsuo Kodama
1987 Carlton Lake
1988 Lawrence Lande
1989 William P. Barlow, Jr.
1990 Kenneth E. Hill
1991 Arthur Holzheimer
1992 T. Kimball Brooker
1993 William J. Monihan, S.J.
1994 The Lord Wardington
1995 Albert Shumate
1996 Michael Harrison
1997 Lloyd Edward Cotsen
1998 Virginia & Jenkins Garrett
2000 W. Michael Mathes
2003 Mark Samuels Lasner
2007 Bernard M. Rosenthal

A number of the medallists have been generous to the Gleeson Library, as were a number of regular attendees of an annual symposium that Father Monihan ran in San Francisco for many years. On this and other aspects of his career as a librarian and fundraiser, see Ruth Teiser’s 1988 oral history, produced by the Regional Oral History Office, University of California, and available online here.

APOTHEOSIS

In 1997 (a year after Father Monihan’s death), USF opened an addition to the Gleeson Library called the Geschke Learning Resource Center. Quoting USF’s website: The dramatic glass-enclosed atrium that anchors the east end of the Geschke Center honors Fr. William J. Monihan, S.J. The atrium, located at the heart of the lower campus, features 5,000 square feet of open space punctuated by two handsome balconies. The zinc roof echoes the dome of St. Ignatius Church, clearly visible through the faceted glass walls. The Monihan Atrium provides library users with a quiet place for study and contemplation as well as a centrally located space for occasional University functions. Fr. William Monihan was the founder and driving force of the original Gleeson Library. During his 47 years of service, first as University librarian then as director of library relations, he saw the collection grow from some 20,000 books to one of more than 600,000 volumes. He was instrumental in developing the Donohue Rare Book Room, dramatically increasing the library’s endowment and founding the Friends of Gleeson Library volunteer support group.

Fr. Monihan’s dedication to the University and his deep love of books shone through his modest demeanor. A painting of Fr. Monihan by Furman J. Finck, the father’s personal favorite portrait, hangs in the atrium with the following inscription: Reverend William J. Monihan, S. J. 1914–1996. Jesuit, University Librarian, Bibliophile, San Franciscan, Caring Friend to Many.” (See here.)

DECLINE

In May 2003, the then and current president of USF, Father Stephen Privett, met with the Board of the Gleeson Library Associates (GLA) to ask that the group discontinue its present activities and focus its energies on fundraising to help pay for business and scientific electronic subscriptions for the general library. Within a few months, four directors, including important donors, resigned from the Associates’ board. The GLA continued with its activities, made modest gifts of a few thousand dollars to the general library when it was able, but did not specifically engage in fund raising. In late 2006, a valuable Maynard Dixon painting that had hung for years in the Rare Book Room at USF was secretly consigned for sale at a December auction at Bonhams. Despite last-minute efforts to suspend the sale, it sold and the University netted about $800,000, a sum which (one was told) went into an endowed fund to support general library acquisitions. In a burst of activity in 2007, the GLA celebrated its 50th anniversary, awarding its Sir Thomas More Medal for "private book collecting - a public benefit" to Bernard M. Rosenthal in the spring and holding a Golden Anniversary celebration in the fall. Although the Board made a gift of $10,000 to the general library at this time, it was criticized by the University administration for the money it spent on the event, money that might otherwise have provided a larger gift to the Library.

FALL

The clandestine May 2009 sale of USF’s Rembrandt and Durer prints may be seen as a further—and possibly final—stage in the deteriorating relationship between the GLA, President Stephen Privett, and the current USF administration. Father Monihan’s vision was to form a rare book collection at USF without significant expenditure by the University that would significantly enhance the credibility of the university as a serious institution of higher learning. Surely it was not the intention either of the University library’s earlier donors or of the many benefactors rounded up by Father Bill that their gifts might subsequently be reconfigured to form part of the operating funds of the University. In an email message to Father Privett sent last week, Peter Stansky (Frances and Charles Field Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University), said bluntly: In my view to diminish the collection not only violates the faith of those who have donated to the collection (as I have in a very minor way) but verges towards vandalism and philistinism. It is a panic reaction to a situation that I believe will improve. Forgive me for writing so bluntly, but such a contemplated action requires a strong response. The secret USF sales have not—yet—been the subject of national news coverage (though stay tuned). They are, however, widely known in the Bay Area, and a significant part of the USF alumni body will surely be made aware of any further sales.

CONFIDENTIAL TO FATHER PRIVETT

(One of the really valuable items in the USF collection is Lucubrationes, ab innumeris mendis repurgatae a 1563 volume of Sir Thomas More’s writings, from the library of John Donne and with his annotations throughout. Its call number is PA 8553 .A22 1563 c.2. Note the tail-end of the call number: it is a duplicate; the USF library has another copy of this edition. Copy 2 would fetch a lot at auction. The book was purchased with funds provided for this purpose by William Monihan’s mother and father, early in his career at USF Librarian—but Father Bill’s parents are long dead, as is Father Bill....) [A low blow, but look what we’re dealing with....]

WIDER IMPLICATIONS

I have been following the rare book world with some attention since the late 1960s, but I cannot remember another occasion in the United States where valuable items were removed from a university library’s special collections and sold secretly, without at least some sort of prior discussion within the community affected by the sales. The USF’s actions are causing many donors (and potential donors) of books and other valuable property—far beyond the USF community—to rethink about the terms of their institutional donations (or proposed donations). I think we’re going to start seeing a significant change in the language used in deeds of gift, along these lines: If at any time in the future the University of X no longer wishes to, or is no longer able to, to serve as the custodian of my gift, then I direct that it should be sold at auction for the benefit of the SPCA [or some other charity]. We’ve not heard the end of this one.

Library History Conference, 2009

2009-06-09T15:10:00.002+10:00

The Ninth Australian Library History Conference is being organised jointly by the Centre for the Book at Monash University and the Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria, and will be held from 25-27 June 2009 at the Prahran Campus of Swinburne University. Full details, including Registration, Program, Contributors and Abstracts can be found on the CftB web page (here).

Enquiries should be directed to Donald Barker at donald.barker@arts.monash.edu.au.

MBC Event for 26 May 2009

2009-05-15T08:41:00.003+10:00

The Royal Society of London and its Library, 1660–2010.

I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday 26 May at 5.30pm Dr. Felicity Henderson will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on the Royal Society Library, giving an overview of the Royal Society Library and Archive collections and discussing the importance of these collections in the early days of the Society.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 “for the pursuit of natural knowledge.” The early fellows collected knowledge wherever they could find it—through experiment and personal observation; through conversation with sailors, tradesmen and merchants; and through printed and manuscript texts. They soon began a collection of books and archives which has continued to the present day and is now an unparalleled resource for historians of science. It gives a fascinating insight into the social and intellectual worlds of three and a half centuries of scientists.

Felicity Henderson manages the History of Science programme at the Royal Society. She completed her PhD at Monash University and was the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University in 2003–4. Her current research is on manuscript culture in the early Royal Society.

International Edible Book Festival

2009-04-03T08:58:00.004+11:00

The International Edible Book Festival is held annually around April 1st. To date, the following countries have held this festival: Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, United States of America, Russia.

April 1st is the birthday of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his book Physiologie du goût, a witty meditation on food. April fools' day is also the perfect day to eat your words and play with them as the "books" are consumed on the day of the event. This ephemeral global banquet, in which anyone can participate, is shared by all on the internet and allows everyone to preserve and discover unique bookish nourishments. This festival is a celebration of the ingestion of culture and a way to concretely share a book; it is also a deeper reflexion on our attachment to food and our cultural differences

For more see here and here and a flikr group here. Can you guess the titles of these books?

Update for April 2009

2009-04-01T11:30:00.008+11:00

The latest issue of Script & Print has been sent to press; all going well it will be printed and delivered to the Baillieu Library for distribution before Easter (just). Members should expect to receive their copies mid-April.

The contents of S&P 32:3 is set out below. S&P 32:4, my final issue as editor of S&P, will probably contain T. H. Howard-Hill's essay on "W. J. Cameron and The Universal Catalogue of British Literature," Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario's "Fforde’s Book Upgrades: Downloaded Errata and Metafictional Cancellation," and review essays by B. J. McMullin on "PBSA turns 100" (a review essay on the history of the The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America) and J. McL. Emmerson on "Pamphlets and Pamphleteering."

Contents of S&P 32:3

Opinion Piece: Keith Maslen, "Our Part to Name: The Early Book Trade of Dunedin, New Zealand"

Article 1: Nathan Garvey, "A Dynasty on the Margins of the Trade: The Bailey Family of Printers, ca. 1740–1840, Part 1"

Review Essay: B. J. McMullin, "Patterned Book Cloth: A Review Essay"

Reviews: Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Reviewed by Lawrence Warner); Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (Reviewed by Patrick Spedding); Judging a Book By Its Cover (Reviewed by Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario); Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Reviewed by Paul Tankard)

Blogs: A Return to the Olden Days

2009-04-01T11:03:00.003+11:00

The following clip is taken from a US televison program CBS Sunday Morning. Although presented in a very light and easy style, the claims made in it are sound enough: news sources proliferated in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, narrowed dramatically in the 20th, and have begun to proliferate wildly again. And the factors that drive the rise of blog journalism are not so differemt from those that drove the newspaper boom in the 19th century: low cost, yellow journalism and pretty pictures.

Watch CBS Videos Online

1829 Dust Jacket at the Bodliean

2009-04-01T10:35:00.005+11:00

Mark Godburn, whose research toward an illustrated history of nineteenth-century dust jackets I have mentioned before, reports the discovery of a dust jacket from 1829, three years earlier than the previous record-holder.

The images below are those shown on his website.

Godburn writes: this "sealed wrapping" jacket completely enclosed the book. As the fold marks indicate, one decorative device was aligned over the spine and the other over the long edge of the text block. The two boxed areas of printed text were aligned over the front and rear boards. The overlapping portions were sealed with spots of wax."

The jacket was found in Oxford's archives folded and bound with some booktrade ephemera. It came to light when Godburn enquired for information about a 1833 Keepsake and wrapper (issued in 1832) that was owned by the famous author and bookman John Carter. He sent it to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1952 and it was lost shortly afterwards "somewhere between All Souls and the Bodleian"!

From Clive Hurst, Head of Rare Books and Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian: "The paper is cream mould-made with no watermark; it's fairly heavy, wrapping paper quality. The ink is black. The remains of red sealing-wax show where it was fastened, the holes at the edges of the wrapper lower down were the points of attachment."

For more information see the gallery on Godburn's website here.

Script & Print Indexed by Scopus

2009-03-31T10:07:00.009+11:00

As many of you will know, Scopus is an abstract and citation database that is much-favoured by the authors of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative of June 2008. At the prompting of the editor, Script & Print has been reviewed by Scopus, and has now been accepted for addition by the Content Selection and Advisory Board.

What this means is that articles published in S&P will be indexed by Scopus as soon as they are issued. S&P will thus be in a highly-privilaged position. Few Humanities journals are indexed by Scopus and Thomson ISI and the coverage of book history titles is a long way from complete.

Scopus contains The Library [0024-2160] and Studies in Bibliography [0081-7600] (listed as "discontinued"); but does not contain: Book History [ISBN 1098-7371], The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [0006-128X] or Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada [0067-6896]. Thomson ISI's 2001–2007 Journal Citation Reports "Social Science Edition" do not contain any of these titles at all.

So, despite the scale of these indexing services (Thomson ISI and Scopus index approximately 15,000 journals between them), Book Historians will be seriously disadvantaged if the enthusiasm for bibliometrics in Canberra (journal rankings, citation benchmarks and centile analysis) prompts the imposition of a bibliometric valuation of the work of Australian scholars.

The good news is that, if the value of an article is to be judged by the frequency with which it is cited by other scholars (scholars, that is, whose work is indexed by Scopus and Thompson ISI), the indexing of S&P by Scopus will ensure that the work of Australian Book Historians will be counted, and will have some chance of being properly valued.

We can only hope that abstract and citation database expand to include more of the journals in which the work of Book Historians is discussed.

Back Issues and Occasional Publications

2009-03-21T14:49:00.013+11:00

This is a complete list of BSANZ publications and back-issues that are available from the BSANZ, with prices. (Please note well, however, prices are subject to change. See the latest issue of Script & Print for the most up-to-date information.)

[UPDATE 21 Jan 2010: See here for The latest version of the list of Script and Print Occasional Publications and Special Issues.]

Anyone wishing to purchase back issues of the BSANZ Bulletin or Script & Print (the contents of our back issues are listed in the indexes mentioned here), or BSANZ Occasional Publications, can do so by contacting Pam Pryde, Secretary of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand at the following email address:

Pam can also be reach at the following postal address:

Pam Pryde, Curator,
Special Collections,
Baillieu Library,
University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, 3010,
AUSTRALIA

Availability & Ordering Information:

Back issues.

Back issues, except Special Issues, may be purchased at the following prices:

Volumes 1 (1970) to 14 (1990): A$7.50 each
Volumes 15 no. 1 (1991) to 26 no. 2 (2000): A$15 each
Volume 26 nos. 3 & 4: A$30
Volume 28 no. 3 and 28 no. 4 (2005): A$20 each
Volumes 30 no. 1 (2006) to 32 no. 3 (2009) A$20 each

The following issues are no longer available:

nos. 1–3 (1970), vol. 4 no. 3 (1979), vol. 6 no. 1 (1982), vol. 13 no. 3 (1989), vol. 14 no. 1 (1990), vol. 22 no. 2 (1998), vol. 23 no. 1 (1999)

BSANZ Bulletin Special Issues

Volume 15, number 2, 1991 Fredson Bowers Commemorative Issue.
Contributors include David L. Vander Meulen, Clive Probyn, Hans Walter Gabler, Peter L. Shillingsburg, Paul Eggert. 58pp. A$15

Volume 15, numbers 3 & 4, 1991.
Thomas A. Darragh, Frederick Proeschel: Colonial Map Maker A substantial study of this highly important map maker, active in Melbourne between 1853 and 1864. Proeschel’s publishing output includes maps of the Victorian goldfields, the cities of Melbourne, Geelong, Hobart and Launceston, as well as general maps of Victoria and South Australia, and an Atlas of Australasia published in London in 1863. 72pp., 2 folding maps. A$15

Volume 18, numbers 2 & 3, 1994 John Fletcher Memorial Issue.
Contents include Brian Taylor, “Ossian across the Ocean”; Thomas A. Darragh, “Theodore Müller: Victoria’s German Poet”; Wallace Kirsop, “Bendigo’s Nineteenth-Century German Library”; John Emmerson, “Prince Rupert’s White Dog: An Episode in Publishing History.” 118pp., ill. A$15

Volume 20, number 2, 1996 Papers from the History of the Book in New Zealand Conference, University of Auckland, 29 August–1 September 1995.
Contents include David McKitterick, “Perspectives in Two Hemispheres”; Lydia Wevers, “What’s Hot and What’s Not”; Luke Trainor, “British Publishers and Cultural Imperialism 1870–1930”; Ross Harvey, “The Power of the Press in Colonial New Zealand: More Imagined than Real?” 90pp., ill. A$15

Volume 23, number 4, 1999/Volume 24, number 1, 2000 Local Newspapers—Local Identities. Proceedings of the Newspaper History Conference, Chiltern, Vic., 1–3 October 1999.
Contents include Denis Cryle, “Writing and Local Identity: Old Journalism at Moreton Bay”; Peter Dowling, “Catching up on the News: Local, Colonial and Australia-wide”; Leigh Edmonds, “How Radio Changed the Dimboola Banner”; Rod Kirkpatrick, “Dynasties in the New South Wales Provincial Press”; Peter Knox, “Illawarra Literature in Early Newspapers”; Carol Mills, “Newsprint in the Australian Colonies”; Sonia Mycak, “A Different Kind of Regionalism: Community, Identity and the Ethnic Press”; Wendy Smith, “Keeping them Forever: A Rough Guide to Newspaper Preservation”; Dirk Spennemann & Jane Dowling, “Creating a Media Persona: The Case of Handley Bathurst Sterndale”; Elizabeth Webby, “Australian Literature in Regional Newspapers of the 1840s.” 186pp. A$15

Volume 25, number 1 & 2, 2001 Printers and Readers: D. F. McKenzie Memorial Issue.
Contents include Sydney Shep, “Book History and Material Culture”; J. E. Traue, “The Two Histories of the Book in New Zealand”; Lydia Wevers, “The Sociology of Travel Texts”; Roderick Cave, “John Buckland Wright, Engraver and Book Illustrator”; Macdonald Jackson, “Finding the Pattern: Peter Short’s Shakespeare Quartos Revisited”; Shef Rogers, “Uncovering Wycherley’s Miscellaneous remains.” 166pp., ill. A$30

Volume 25, numbers 3 & 4, 2001 Music Printing and Publishing in Australia. Proceedings of the History of the Book in Australia seminar, Monash University, 17 November 2000. Edited by Georgina Binns.
Contents include Wallace Kirsop, “The Walches as Sellers of Music, and their Customers in the 1840s”; Keith Maslen, “Music Selling in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand”; Prue Neidorf, “The Composing and Publishing Ventures of the Marsh Brothers”; Dianne Gome, “The Church and Music Publication in Australia”; Bruce Steele, “Editing and Publishing the Music of Henry Handel Richardson.” 142pp., ill. A$35

Volume 27, numbers 1 & 2, 2003 The Making and Keeping of Books: Art, Genius and Madness. Papers from the BSANZ Conference, University of Adelaide, 27–28 September 2001. Edited by Ray Choate.
Contents include Wallace Kirsop, “Boulard’s Syndrome”; K. K. Ruthven, “From Imaginary Libraries to Ficto- Bibliography: Performing Fiction as Fact”; Robyn Holmes, “Between the Sheets: Two Centuries of Australian Sheet Music”; Maureen Prichard, “Christine Macgregor’s Illustrated Private Press Books”; John McL. Emmerson, “Two Seventeenth Century Book Collectors: Dan Fleming and John Evelyn”; Patricia Holt, “‘It’s Enough to Drive a Bloke Mad’: Norman Lindsay’s Art and Literature”; Marcie Muir, “The History of Prince Lee Boo”; Susan Woodburn, “Making Books for God: Mission Printing in the Pacific Islands and Australia.” 126pp.; ill. A$35

Volume 27, numbers 3 & 4, 2003 Expanding Horizons: Print Cultures across the South Pacific. Papers from the BSANZ Conference, University of Otago, 10 September 2002. Edited by Ian Morrison.
Contents include Susan Woodburn, “Three Pacifi c Mission Presses”; Linda Crowl, “The Introduction of Text Culture in the Pacific Islands”; Sarah K. J. Gallagher, “‘A Curious Document’: Ta Moko as Evidence of Pre-European Textual Culture in New Zealand”; Ian Morrison, “The Cloth, the Catalogue, and the Collectors”; Louise Wilson, “An Investigation into the Origin of the Tapa Specimens Collected by Captain Cook on his Three Voyages to the Pacific”; Wallace Kirsop, “Writing a History of Commercial Circulating Libraries in the Nineteenth Century”; Ross Harvey, “Sources of ‘Literary’ Copy for New Zealand Newspapers”; Paul Hunt, Serial Fiction in the Otago Witness, 1851–1906”; Sydney J. Shep, “Peddling the Convict’s Tale: James Squire’s Beer Labels.” 132pp.; ill. A$35

Volume 28, numbers 1 & 2, 2004 Books and Empire: Textual Production, Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial Countries. Edited by Paul Eggert & Elizabeth Webby.
Contents include Keith Adkins, “Orger and Meryon: Booksellers to the Colony”; Denis Cryle, “Gordon and Gotch from the 1940s to the Present: Regional Distribution and Integration in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea”; Mary Jane Edwards, “Books in the Bush: The Library of the Langtons of Upper Canada/Canada West”; Evelyn Ellerman, “The Roots of Popular Participation in Literature in Papua New Guinea”; Nirmolini V. Flora, “Nineteenth-Century Libraries in the Hill Stations of British North India”; Nathan Garvey, “Under a Deceptious Mask: H. D Symonds and the Publication of Barrington’s Voyage to New South Wales”; John Gouws, “Deneys Reitz and Imperial Co-option”; Marie-Paule Ha, “Colonizing through French-Language Textbooks in Indochina”; Kerry Heckenberg, “The Nineteenth-Century Australian Inland Exploration Journal and Pleasurable Instruction”; Caroline Viera Jones, “Unfortunate Omission: Editing Women out of the Anzac Legend”; Leonard R. Koos, “Reading and Writing Colonial Women: Publication and Representation in French Colonial North Africa”; Edward Mack, “Marketing Japan’s Literature in its 1930s Colonies”; James McCall, “Books and the Nation: Aspects of Publishing and National Identity”; Sydney J. Shep, “Tobacco, Matches and Writing Paper: Colonial Survival Strategies in Rural New Zealand, 1880–1925”; Jane Stafford, “Immeasurable Abysses and Living Books: Oral Literature and Victorian Poetics in Alfred Domett’s Ranolf and Amohia”; Chris Tiffin, “Just a Weekly Compendium? The Independence of The Queenslander”; Lydia Wevers, “Reading on the Farm: A Study of the Brancepeth Farm Library.” 199pp., ill. A$35

Script & Print Special Issues

Volume 29, numbers 1–4, 2005 Paradise: New Worlds of Books and Readers.
Contents include Alberto Manguel, “How Pinocchio Learned to Read”; Caroline Campbell, “Dancing with Tane’s Children”; Duncan Campbell, “‘Zhang Dai’s Passionate Search for Orchid Pavilion’”; Rimi B. Chatterjee, “Outlines of a Discipline: Book History in India”; Kathleen Coleridge, “‘New Books, Just Received from London’ Access to New Publications in Colonial Wellington”; Nicola Cummins, “The Disruptive Witness: A Dunedin Boilermaker and the Manufacture of Cultural Capital”; Paul Eggert, “The Bibliographic Life of an Australian Classic: Robbery Under Arms”; Robert Fraser, “War and the Colonial Book Trade: The Case of OUP India”; Nicola Frean, “Paradise: Your Own Castle and Books from a Catalogue”; Michele Grossman, “Reciprocal Bonds? Re-thinking Orality and Literacy in critical perspectives on Indigenous Australian life-writing”; Nicolas Keene, “Gabriel de Foigny and the Hermaphroditic New World”; Raichel LeGoff, “Greek Island Paradises: Creating a new ‘text’ at the Court of Ferrara”; Edward Mack, “Diasporic Markets: Japanese Print and Migration in São Paulo, 1908–1935”; Peter Marks, “‘And God Saw Everything’: Paradise, Utopia and Surveillance”; Alistair McCleery, “‘Sophisticated Smut’: The Penguin Edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in New Zealand”; Kevin Molloy, “Devotion and Acculturation: Irish Print Culture and the Ethnic–Religious Interface in Colonial New Zealand, 1873–1914”; Brian Moloughney, “Monkey and the Journey Back to Paradise”; Ian Morrison, “Boom-town Picturesque: C. B. Walker’s Photographs of Melbourne”; Brian Opie, “The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation”; Roger Osborne, “Separating the ‘Bookfellow’ from the Bookfellow: A. G. Stephens and the Australian Magazine Reader”; Louise Poland, “‘Sisterhood is Powerful’: Sisters Publishing and Book Club in Australia, 1978–85”; Jane Stafford, “Reading in the Heart of the Bush”; Heidi Thomson, “The Publication of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’ in the Morning Post”; Luke Trainor, “New Zealand Writers Seeking Overseas Publishers, 1870–1914: some issues of Nation and Empire”; J. E. Traue, “A Paradise for Readers? The Extraordinary Proliferation of Public Libraries in Colonial New Zealand”; Noel Waite, “Denis Glover: Printer’s Devil or an Affair with Angels”; Elizabeth Webby, “New Worlds: Australian Readers of the Early 1890s.” ISBN 978 0 9751500 2 3 (pbk) 372pp., 12 colour plates, A$60

Transitus: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia and New Zealand. Edited by James Lowry, Margaret Manion and Patrick Spedding.
Contents include: Margaret Manion, “Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia: Resources, Research and Opportunities”; Lawrence Warner, “The University of Sydney Statuta Angliae (RB Add. MS 39) and the 45,011 Parish Churches: England’s Most Popular Urban Myth, ca. 1327–1606”; Bernard J. Muir, “Interrogating a Witness: the Case for MS Crouch 10”; Christopher de Hamel, “The Bohun Bible Leaves.” I64pp., 8 colour plates, A$25

BSANZ Occasional Publications

1. J. C. T. Oates, The Manuscripts of Thomas Erpinius, and John Fletcher, Pieter Nuyts and his Album Amicorum. (Out of print)

2. K. I. D. Maslen, Victorian Typefaces in Dunedin, New Zealand. (Out of print)

3. Trevor Mills, Rare Books in Australian Libraries: An Annotated Bibliography. 65pp. ISBN 0- 9598271-2-9 (pbk) A$7.50 (Limited stocks available)

4. Rosemary Foxton, “Hear the Word of the Lord”: A Critical and Bibliographical Study of Quaker Women’s Writing, 1650–1700. 77pp. ISBN 0-9598271-3-7 (pbk) A$20

5. Wallace Kirsop, Books for Colonial Readers: The Nineteenth-Century Australian Experience. (Out of print)

6. Ian Morrison, The Publishing Industry in Colonial Australia: A Name Index to John Alexander Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia 1784–1900. Names and brief biographical details of the 2,000 Australian printers, publishers and booksellers who appear in Ferguson’s classic Bibliography of Australia. 174pp. ISBN 0-9598271-5-3 (pbk) A$35; ISBN 0-9598271-6-1 A$55. (Limited stocks of the hardcover edition are still available.)

7. Stephen J. Herrin, The Development of Printing in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat. A study of technical innovation in this important regional centre, at one time the fourth-largest city in Australia. Includes an exhaustive listing of Ballarat imprints up to 1900. 152pp., ill. ISBN 0- 9598271-8-8 (pbk) A$35

8. The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop, edited by David Garrioch, Harold Love, Brian McMullin, Ian Morrison and Meredith Sherlock. Thirty-five essays ranging across English, French and Australian book history. 504pp., ill. ISBN 0-9598271-7-X (cased) A$100

9. Jennifer Alison, Doing Something for Australia: George Robertson and the Early Years of Angus and Robertson, Publishers 1888-1900 (2009). xiv, 318pp. 16 pages of illustrations. ISBN 978-0-9751500-3-0 (cased) RRP A$55.00. (See here and here for more details).

Newspapers Forum, 23 May 2009

2009-03-18T14:22:00.002+11:00

"Newspapers as Medium and Message: A Key to Australian Historical Research"

The State Library User Organisations' Council with the support of the State Library of Victoria are running a one-day forum in the Conference Centre, State Library of Victoria, on Saturday 23 May, 1.00–5.30 pm.

Rod Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Morrison, Eleanor Pugsley, Wallace Kirsop and staff of the State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia will examine ways to obtain historical information from newspapers. They will reflect on major newspaper digitising projects, and on the advances in conservation, management and indexing that have made Australia's newspapers more accessible to researchers.

These innovations make it timely to look again at the medium itself. Some of the questions to be considered include: How did the free press evolve in Australia? Who were some of the main owners and editors and how did they shape what the press recorded? Who ran the local and regional daily and weekly papers and what were the distribution patterns? How does reading a digitised copy of a newspaper change our understanding of the medium?

Bookings: Centre.forthe.Book@arts.monash.edu.au.
Admission: FREE.

Tanselle Bibliographies Available Online

2009-03-18T14:18:00.001+11:00

Terry Belanger posted the following information on the EXLIBRIS-List earlier this month:

G. Thomas Tanselle's Introduction to Bibliography: Seminar Syllabus and Introduction to Scholarly Editing: Seminar Syllabus are comprehensive guides to the literature of these two fields, including suggestions for basic reading and chronological lists of the writings on specific topics. Through the generosity of their compiler, the two volumes are now available free in their entirety on the RBS website (here) in .pdf format, for consultation or downloading:

The two guides have been published in hard copy (as substantial paperback books of 370 and 258 pages respectively) by Rare Book School's publishing wing, the Book Arts Press, since 1990 (for the "Introduction to Bibliography") and 1998 (for the "Introduction to Scholarly Editing"). Hard copies of the latest version of each, dated 2002, may still be purchased from Rare Book School. The online versions also have a cutoff date of 2002; Tanselle hopes eventually to update them.

MBC Event, 19 March 2009

2009-03-18T14:04:00.003+11:00

"By Book or By Crook: The Hidden History of Richard Edward King, Publisher of Victorian Fiction."

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday 19 March at 5.30pm Prof. John Spiers will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on Richard Edward King (1854–1916).

[Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: Richard Edward King, [n.d.])

R. E. King was mainly a reprint publisher of cheap editions of fiction. He issued some 450 reprints, chiefly of English classics. He travelled world-wide, and sold large numbers of books outside the book trade—a part of the market still too little understood. King was an extremely capable, energetic, venturesome and competitive entrepreneurial fi gure. However, he began as a millionaire and ended in a pauper’s grave. He went to gaol for serious fraud, serving with hard labour. There is no known commercial archive of King’s business activities, so Spiers has collected and studied the books themselves as an archive. They provide new insights into how such publishers worked, and how readers obtained these works of fi ction. King’s story, and the stories of his direct competitors, are just one aspect of the enormous changes that occurred in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture.

John Spiers is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities, University of Glamorgan, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Ruskin Programme, University of Lancaster.

FaceOut Books

2009-03-18T13:49:00.005+11:00

BSANZ member Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, who is always on the lookout for bookish sites, has uncovered an absolute ripper: FaceOut Books.

This is a blog—"updated every Monday" as they explain—that explores in considerable details "the practice of book cover design." It is done by insiders who "blog about the challenges and outcomes of each publication project."

The designs are fabulous and the information is very detailed. In a recent post on the Penguin James Bond Collection we are given the following information:

Designer: Michael Gillette
Illustrator: Michael Gillette
Publisher: Penguin Books UK
Typefaces: Hand drawn and adapted from old font books.
Genre: Fans of Bond movies.

The following three images show the Initial sketch, second version and final version of just one cover.

The Limits of the Book

2009-03-18T13:31:00.004+11:00

The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 2009 conference will be held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane on Monday 20 to Wednesday 22 July 2009.

The conference convenors are Prof. Pat Buckridge, Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, Dr Roger Osborne, Dr Lesa Scholl and Dr Chris Tiffin.

The conference website is here.

The CFP (below) has attracted considerable interest, and so BSANZ members can look forward to a full program of papers in Brisbane. A full list of papers and abstracts will be announced shortly.

The 2009 BSANZ Conference will be followed by a one-day meeting (on Wednesday 23 July) of The Australian Rare Book Librarians Group at the State Library of Queensland.

The Limits of the Book

* Paratext and Para-books
* Books Post-production - Libraries, Reading, Bookselling
* Phantom Books, Lost Books and Piracies
* Limits and Limitlessness in the Digital Book

The book has for centuries been a reassuringly definite artefact, although many aspects of its existence and circulation are quite intangible and its ultimate effects seem universal if not limitless. Paradoxically, the physical variations in different copies of a book seem to demand that we understand the book not as precisely defined artifact but as elusive, conceptual "work" or "text". Sometimes too, the value and meaning of the book are seen to reside not in its core content but rather in the aesthetics of its design or book-making. Although the sequentially-read codex has been the normative form of the book for many centuries, alternative physical forms ranging from the scroll to a box of randomly ordered sheets, to a dossier of facsimile documents, to an electronic tablet challenge and extend the category of object we call "book."

Books exist also through their effects on readers, and are limited or liberated by the networks of commercial and personal circulation that develop and change over time. Extreme forms of this tension between object and effect are books that circulate by repute without ever having actually existed, books that seek to escape limitation or appropriate additional cultural capital by misinforming the readership about their contents, genesis or provenance, or books that are known to have circulated, but have since disappeared.

No technological innovation has more sharply raised the issue of the potential and the limits of the book than the development of digital textuality. While the eschatological promises of the late 1980s and early 1990s may seem risible in retrospect, writing and reading digital texts have become thoroughly normalized practices for much of the western world, so that few books today are untouched by digital processes. It remains to be seen whether this digitization will be the destroyer of the book or the infinite extender of its limits.

Helvetica in the New York Subway

2009-01-29T13:19:00.002+11:00

A colleague at Monash mentioned this story to me late last year. He wondered aloud whether subway signage would interest me, and whether the study of tile and mosaic fonts would count in any form of Book History. I was, and it does (I think). What do you think? Below is the opening paragraph and a link to the story.

The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway

There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica. These four strands are woven together … to tell a story that ultimately transcends the simple issue of Helvetica and the subway.

For the rest of Paul Shaw's article, go here.

More on the 2008 BSANZ conference

2009-01-29T12:03:00.005+11:00

Andrew Sergeant, a BSANZ Council member, has provided an excellent over-view of the 2008 BSANZ conference in the the latest issue of the National Library of Australia online journal, Gateways (here).

Andrew's summary is more detailed than that in the latest issue of our Broadsheet, providing a summary of, and some comments on, the papers presented on 1–3 October at The University of Sydney.

* * * * *

The same issue of Gateways contains another piece by Andrew on the retirement of BSANZ member, Margaret Dent, from her position as Exhibitions Curator at the National Library (here).

Margaret joined the National Library in about 1975 and was the Library’s Rare Books Librarian until 1992. After working in various other sections of the Library Margaret joined the Library’s Exhibitions team in 2001.

The photo (above) was taken in 1998.

Robert Darnton podcast

2008-12-01T13:50:00.001+11:00

Comparative Media Studies at MIT hosted a Communications Forum Books and Libraries in the Digital Age with Robert Darnton.

In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.

University of Toronto Book History podcasts

2008-12-01T10:28:00.003+11:00

The Toronto Centre for the Book has started a programme of Podcasts of lectures and talks that they sponsor. The Program for 2008-2009 includes: Richard Landon (University of Toronto) on From Capell to Tanselle: Bibliography and Humanities Scholarship (download here).

In the programme for 2009 are: Paul Nelles (Carleton University) Books, Communication and Exchange: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Early Modern Print Culture and Martha Driver (Pace University) Letter Perfect: A Brief History of Letter Forms and Their Uses in the Period of Transition from Manuscript to Print.

MBC Event, 9 December 2008

2008-11-28T13:28:00.002+11:00

"Splendours of Flemish Illumination in the Late Middle Ages: The Contribution of the Master of Antoine Rolin (fl. 1490–1520)."

I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday 9 December 2008 at 5.30PM Anne-Marie Legaré will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on manuscript illumination in the Low Countries, with the Master of Antoine Rolin (fl. 1490–1520) as a central figure.

Professor Legaré teaches Medieval Art History at the Université de Lille III and is visiting Australia for a conference in Hobart the week before her Melbourne lecture.

Update for November/December 2008

2008-11-28T13:27:00.004+11:00

It has been almost three months since my last update and in that time we have sent two issues of Script & Print to press. Unfortunately one of the two (S&P 32:1) came back to us with a few problems (relating to the saturation of the colour images), but these problems have now been resolved and we expect to be stuffing both issues into envelopes in the next week.

Those of you who make it to Anne-Marie Legaré's lecture at the State Library of Victoria on 9 December (details here) will probably get to see copies before anyone else. Given the confluence of subject-matter it seems appropriate if this event also acts as an informal "launch" for S&P 32:1, which is a Special Issue under the title: Transitus: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia and New Zealand, edited by James Lowry, Margaret Manion and myself.

Close readers of this blog will notice that there has been a shuffling of issue numbers over the last three months, S&P 32:2 originally having been set aside for Transitus. As the two issues were ready for press at almost the same time I decided that it would probably be preferable if our special issue was paginated 1–64 rather than 65–128, and it is partly for this reason that we plan on making the Harold Love Special Issue S&P 33:1–3 (on which considerable progress has been made). In order to avoid confusion in future I will update my previous Update to indicte this change in numbering.

The contents of S&P 32:1 and 32:2 are set out below. S&P 32:3 will probably contain T. H. Howard-Hill's essay on "W. J. Cameron and The Universal Catalogue of British Literature," Nathan Garvey's "A Dynasty on the Margins of the Trade: The Bailey Family of Printers, ca. 1740–1840" (the first of three on the Bailey family) and B. J. McMullin's "PBSA turns 100" (a review essay on the history of the The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America). It is now to late in the year to get S&P 32:3 to press before xmas, so it will go to press and be distributed early in 2009.

Contents of S&P 32:1

Transitus: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia and New Zealand, edited by James Lowry, Margaret Manion and Patrick Spedding

Article 1: Margaret Manion, "Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia: Resources, Research and Opportunities."

Article 2: Lawrence Warner, "The University of Sydney Statuta Angliae (RB Add. MS 39) and the 45,011 Parish Churches: England’s Most Popular Urban Myth, ca. 1327–1606."

Article 3: Bernard J. Muir, "Interrogating a Witness: the Case for MS Crouch 10."

Article 4: Christopher de Hamel, "The Bohun Bible Leaves."

Contents of S&P 32:2

Article 1: Alison Rukavina, “This is a Wonderfully Comprehensive Business”: The Development of the British-Australian and International Book Trades, 1870–1887

Article 2: Ian Morrison, "The Writings of Theresa Tasmania: Notes on an Investigation into a Nineteenth-Century Literary Pseudonym"

Reviews: Wallace Kirsop, ed., The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison (reviewed by James Raven); Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (reviewed by Roger Osborne); Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade (reviewed by Patrick Spedding); Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (reviewed by Edmund G. C. King); Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator reviewed by (reviewed by Shef Rogers); Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (reviewed by Roger Osborne); Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (reviewed by Ian Morrison).

2006 & 2007 S&P/BSANZ Stories

2008-11-28T13:21:00.002+11:00

Photos from Hobart

Bibliographical Circle Meeting

Update for November 2007

Update for October 2007

Meet The Editor

BSANZ Conference in Hobart

Update for September 2007

Pulp Friction in Colour!

Harold Love

Update for July/August 2007

Robert L. Dawson

Paradise volume shipped

Update for May/June 2007

S&P 30.1 issued

Update for March 2007

Update for January 2007

Progress on S&P 30.1 (2006)

The BSANZ logo

Jay Walker's Library

2008-10-21T08:58:00.004+11:00

This is terribly self-indulgent, but I had to do a post on one of the world's most perfect, and perfectly mad, libraries. It belongs to Jay Walker. You do know who Jay S. Walker is don't you? If not, go here and read about the founder of Priceline.com and Walker Digital whose net worth topped USD$4 billion around 2000 before the dot-com crash.

I am not sure how much money Jay spent on his 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, 1535 Coverdale Bible, 1660 celestial atlas by Andrea Cellarius, 1665 Micrographia by Robert Hooke or his Kelmscott Chaucer, but I doubt it was as much as he spent on his very own Sputnik, Enigma code machine and complete dinosaur skeleton (a raptor no less). I think it is also unlikely that their value crashed quite as hard as his Priceline shares. Perhaps this is what encouraged him to build a 335 square meter (3,600 square feet) library....

2006 & 2007 News Stories

2008-09-05T14:26:00.002+10:00

Rare Book School, Melbourne 2008

Creative biblioclast, Brian Dettmer

Beautiful Libraries

How to Operate a Book

Synchrotron To See Hidden Texts

Melbourne Museum of Printing

1796 playbill given to NLA

FSU Book History appointments

Course on Analytical Bibliography

$1m book heist in NZ

Digitised books on Internet Archive

Thieving library staff

Library worker stole rare books

Danish paper wins Prophet cartoon libel case

Blogger book craze

Access to banned books in Australia

Epstein's Books@Google

ESTC now available for free

University of Madrid joins Google Print

Destruction of Cardiff Central Library

2008-09-05T13:57:00.010+10:00

The BBC reports that the Cardiff Central Library is planning to sell in the region of 18,000 books dating from the 15th century to the 19th century, covering literature, history, religion, geography, natural history and politics so they can "buying a computer system". Details here.

An action group, headed by Dr E. Wyn James, Cardiff Welsh Bibliographical Society states, in a press release:

"Cardiff is the only capital city in the British Isles without either a National Library or a National Archives in the city – key institutions for supporting academic research and the resulting economic benefits. However, it is generally recognised that Cardiff Public Library's outstanding humanities collection is one of international significance, befitting a capital city. That collection will be irreparably damaged if this sale proceeds"

(And I note, that a "library name" search on ESTC brings up details of 180 books published before 1800 that are presently in the collection.)

The report recommending the sale of the collections is published on the Council's website. It is titled Disposal of Surplus [sic] Library Stock. Dr James encourages those who object to this action to send a letter saying so to Cllr Howells at the Cardiff City Council.

Councillor Nigel Howells
Executive Member Sport, Leisure, Culture
Executive Support Office
Cardiff City Council
County Hall
Atlantic Wharf
Cardiff, CF10 4UW
Wales, UK

[or online here or send an email to c2c@cardiff.gov.uk or ExecutiveBusinessOffice@cardiff.gov.uk]

Coincidentally, I read this last night:

"Yet what persists in the mind from perusing Fabian's volumes is above all the endless series of disasters that have befallen libraries over the centuries—it is a sorry saga of mischance and of barbarism and cultural philistinism, against which librarians and book-lovers have resiliently put up a valiant fight."

John L. Flood, "Varieties of Vandalism," Common Knowledge 8:2 (2002): 367. [available here, and well-worth reading]

UPDATE 17 September 2008

Ian Gadd, from Bath Spa University, posted the following links from the Welsh media to the SHARP-List:

Minister hits out at rare books sell-off

Academics ‘outraged’ by council’s book sale

Row over secrecy of planned rare book sell-off

Libraries go self-service

A campaign group has been established (Sion Tudur, Peter Keelan, Andrew Prescott, Helen Nicholson, David Skilton, Wyn James, Judi Loach, and Helen Phillips) and a website is in preparation. In the meantime, Andrew Prescott's blog provides fuller details of the campaign.

Ian writes: "The Council cites the cost of maintaining the collections as its main reason for sale but I understand from Helen that Cardiff University Library is willing to house the collection. (See also the story of 15 September, cited above.) The Council is also making making much of the collection's apparently narrow 'readership': its own report claims that the books are 'unsuitable for use by anyone other than academics and specialists' and 'would only ever be used by a very narrow group of interested parties.'"

Helen Phillips would be grateful if copies of any letters or e-mails sent to the Council be forwarded to herself (PhillipsHE@cardiff.ac.uk) or Peter Keelan (Keelanp@cardiff.ac.uk).

Giles Mandelbrote on Booksellers' Catalogues

2008-09-03T08:50:00.004+10:00

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday 18 September 2008 at 5.45pm Giles Mandelbrote will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on Booksellers' catalogues in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753).

This is the third Melbourne Bibliographical Circle event for 2008, jointly organised by The Centre for the Book and the Melbourne branch of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

The wealthy London physician Sir Hans Sloane formed a vast encyclopedic library of some 4,000 manuscripts and 45,000 printed books as the core of collections which also included several thousand natural history specimens, prints, coins and medals. At his death in 1753 his collections were acquired for the nation, leading directly to the foundation of the British Museum. As President of both the Royal Society and the College of Physicians, Sloane's interests and contacts extended through scholarly and scientific networks across the whole of Europe.

Sloane was relatively unusual among his contemporaries not simply because he kept for reference purposes the booksellers' and book auction catalogues which he had used to form his library, but also because he purchased and collected other examples for their own sake. He pursued this on a scale and with a degree of perseverance which makes him unique in the history of English book collecting in this period. One notable example is his purchase, in about 1707, of a group of fourteen auction catalogues dating from the 1680s and 1690s which had belonged to the auctioneer himself, Edward Millington (who had died in 1703), and were annotated with the prices fetched and with the names of all the purchasers.

While it was not uncommon for other collectors to keep auction catalogues of libraries, as a record of an informed selection of books, it was much more unusual for them to take the trouble to retain publishers' or secondhand booksellers' catalogues, which were generally slighter and more ephemeral and were often intended primarily for the use of the trade rather than private customers. Then, as now, these were usually swiftly thrown away.

Sloane's collection reflects his correspondence with booksellers all over Europe and is unquestionably the most important made by any collector in England in this period, as well as one of the most important such collections made anywhere in Europe. Examples of late seventeenth-century booksellers' catalogues in his library range from northern Germany and the Baltic to Venice and Florence. Several of the French examples are unrecorded (as far as is known) in any French library today and this pattern is repeated for other countries.

Sloane's collecting of bibliographical ephemera also extended to the proposals which were issued for publishing books by subscription - a category of material which does not seem to have survived so well among Sloane's books now in the British Library, although they are documented in his own acquisitions register. Some of these prospectuses advertised books which seem never in fact to have been published at all. A detailed study of them might significantly alter our view of the financing of publication in England in the early eighteenth century.

Giles Mandelbrote is Curator of British Collections 1501-1800 at the British Library. He is joint editor of the "Publishing Pathways" series and joint editor of volume 2 (covering 1640-1850) of The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Shef Rogers on Pope's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712/1714)

2008-08-26T11:24:00.012+10:00

I am pleased to announce that on Tuesday 30 September 2008 Shef Rogers will present, at Monash University (exact venue TBA), a paper on Alexander Pope's "Rape of the Locke" (1712/1714).

This is the fourth Melbourne Bibliographical Circle event for 2008, jointly organised by The Centre for the Book and the Melbourne branch of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Shef's talk is entitled "Cancels Less in Sight: Revisioning the Bibliographical Context of Pope's 'Rape of the Locke.'" It offers a bibliographical analysis of the changes made to reissue the 1712 Lintot Miscellaneous Poems and Translations in 1714, drawing on watermark, skeleton, and textual evidence to argue that Pope probably withdrew publication of "The Temple of Fame" in 1712 and that Lintot definitely only inserted "Windsor Forest" and "Ode for Musick" near the end of 1713. These decisions cast light on Pope's own sense of his developing career, and on the marketing pressures Lintot faced in trying to shift copies of the miscellany.

The talk does not presume an extensive knowledge of descriptive bibliography, but does attempt to show its value for literary and historical research.

Shef Rogers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Otago. He teaches eighteenth-century literature and book history and is currently completing an enumerative bibliography of eighteenth-century English travel books. He is also involved as one of the editors of a single-volume history of the book in New Zealand.

[PS: anyone wanting to buy a copy of the 1712 Miscellaneous Poems and Translations in advance of Shef's paper, can do so here for US$4,300.]

Advertising in Script & Print

2008-08-25T13:10:00.006+10:00

Our 2008 advertising rates for Script & Print are:

Rear cover: A$160 per issue; A$450 four consecutive issues
Full page: A$120 per issue; A$350 four consecutive issues
Half page: A$60 per issue; A$150 four consecutive issues
Quarter page: A$30 per issue; A$75 four consecutive issues
Flyers: A$120 per issue

These rates will rise in 2009.

The printing area for a full page is 190mm x 130mm.

Rear cover advertisements are only half-page in size (ca. 120mm x 85mm), but are a gloss laminate in full colour.

Internal, full page colour advertisements can now be offered: these cost $600 per issue (with no discounts on consecutive issues).

We require the text of advertisements in Word, with a pdf of the proposed layout. If any non-type features are required (illustrations, logos etc) we require photographs and similar art to be scanned at 600dpi; line-art must be scanned 1200dpi.

Correspondence regarding advertising in Script & Print should be directed to:

The European Book in the Antipodes

2008-08-11T07:00:00.008+10:00

PROVISIONAL PROGRAM

The Annual Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, at the University of Sydney, 1–3 October 2008

Nathan Garvey and Lawrence Warner, Co-Convenors

Wednesday 1 October

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

5.00–7.00pm: Reception

Thursday 2 October

Woolley Building, University of Sydney

8:30–9.30am

9.30: Opening/President’s Welcome

9.45–11.15 First Session

• Edmund King (Wellington) – “The Shakespearean Book in the Colonial Antipodes”
• Ted Mack (Washington) – “Metropoles and their Antipodes: Japanese Books beyond the Borders of Japan”
• Donald Kerr (Otago) – “Mentelin’s Moggy, or Making a Mark for the Incunables at Otago University”

11.15-11.45 Morning Tea

11.45-1.15 Second Session

• Matthew Stephens (Historic Houses Trust/ UNSW) – “Bug Catchers and Bookworms: The Scientific Libraries of Alexander Macleay and William Swainson”
• Sue Reynolds (RMIT) – “Classics in the Classics Room: Curious Titles in the Collection of the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria”
• Wallace Kirsop (Monash) – “An Artillery Officer and his Books”

1.15-2.45 Lunch and BSANZ AGM

2.45-4.15 Third Session

• Kevin Molloy (State Library of Victoria) – “Big Sellers: Prayer-books and Profitability in the Sydney Irish Book Trade, 1840-1880”
• Helen Hewson (Sydney) – “Richard Bentley and Australasian Travel Writing”
• Patrick Buckridge (Griffith) – “‘Beauty, Mate!’: Harraps’ Democratic Publishing Aesthetic, 1901-1930”

*****

7pm Conference Dinner at "Roxanne", 39 Glebe Point Road, Glebe

*****

Friday 3 October

Woolley Building, University of Sydney

(Registration from 9.00am)

10.00-11.00 Fourth Session

• Catriona Menzies-Pike (Sydney/UWS) – “‘A Moveable Feast’: Modernism, Robert McAlmon, and the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925)”
• Suzanne Bellamy (Sydney) – Virginia Woolf in Australia – modernist texts in the academy, 1942.

11.00-11.30 Morning Tea

11.30-1.00 Fifth Session

• Matthew Fishburn (Hordern House) – [Authorship of the last unassigned Cook Voyage]
• Tim Dolin (Curtin) – “The Victorian Novel and the settler-reader: the diaries of Annie Baxter Dawbin and William Bunn”
• Adrian Mitchell (Sydney) – [publication of George Collingridge’s Discovery of Australia]

1.00–2.00 Lunch

2.00–3.30 Sixth Session

• Pauline Farley (UWA) – English Children’s Annuals in Australia: Pictures of Home
• Dennis Bryans (Specialty Press) – Post-War Reconstruction and Aspects of British Publishing in Melbourne 1944-1950
• Victor Crittenden (Canberra/Mulini Press) – Study of the Texts of John Lang’s book The Secret Police

3.30–4.00 Afternoon Tea and Conference Conclusion

Update for July–August 2008

2008-07-29T11:30:00.015+10:00

I am told that Script & Print 31:4 has returned from the printers and will be stuffed into envelopes in the next few days. Those of you who make it to Nathan's lecture at the State Library of Victoria (details here and here) will get to see copies before anyone else.

Script & Print 32:1 (2008) will be another mixed issue (details below), with lots of reviews which have been squeezed out of recent issues. It will probably be followed by a special, manuscript issue, which is being co-edited by myself, Margaret Manion and James Lowry. If the planets align there might be one last mixed issue in 2008, leaving only five issues for 2009 (three of which will be the Harold Love Memorial Issue).

Contents of S&P 31:4

Article 1: Susann Liebich, “ 'The Books Are The Same As You See In London Shops': Booksellers in Colonial Wellington and Their Imperial Ties, ca. 1840–1890"

Article 2: Sue Reynolds, "Bookbuying at the Victorian Supreme Court Library, 1853–1863: A Tale of Duplicity and Intrigue"

Article 3: John Burrows and Anthony Hassall, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Reply"

Article 4: B. J. McMullin, "Shared Printing: James Flesher’s part in Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum, vol. 1 (1669)"

Article 5: Patrick Spedding, "To (Not) Promote Breeding: Censoring Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife”

Obituary: Marcie Muir 1919–2007 (by Rory Muir)

Reviews: Be Merry and Wise (reviewed byRebecca-Anne Do Rozario); Amassing Treasures for All Times (reviewed by Rachel Salmond); The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, vol. 2 (reviewed by Patrick Buckridge).

Contents of S&P 32:1 [now 32:2]

Article 1: Alison Rukavina, “This is a Wonderfully Comprehensive Business”: The Development of the British-Australian and International Book Trades, 1870–1887

Article 2: Ian Morrison, "The Writings of Theresa Tasmania: Notes on an Investigation into a Nineteenth-Century Literary Pseudonym"

Reviews: Marketing the Bard (reviewed by Edmund G. C. King); From Australia with Love (reviewed by Ian Morrison); Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (reviewed by Roger Osborne); A Companion to the History of the Book (reviewed by Roger Osborne); The Commonwealth of Books (reviewed by James Raven); Print Culture and the Medieval Author (reviewed by Lawrence Warner); Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (reviewed by Shef Rogers); Books on the Move (reviewed by Patrick Spedding)

Contents of Script & Print, vol. 31 (2007)

2008-07-29T10:55:00.006+10:00

Here is a complete contents-list for Script & Print, vol. 31 (2007 [issued 2007–8])

Articles and Bibliographical Notes:
• Craig Brittain, "Steinbeck’s Use of Ledgers in the Writing of East of Eden and Journal of a Novel" [S&P 31:3: 172–79]
• John Burrows and Anthony Hassall, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Reply" [S&P 31:4: 220–29]
• Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, "Don’t Steal a Book by its Cover: The Book Thief and Who Reads It" [S&P 31:2: 104–16]
• Paul Eggert, "Textual Criticism and Folklore: The Ned Kelly Story and Robbery Under Arms" [S&P 31:2: 69–80]
• Nathan Garvey, “Selling a Penal Colony: The Booksellers and Botany Bay” [S&P 31:1: 20–38]
• Elaine Hoag, “The Earliest Extant Australian Imprint With Distinguish Provenance: Playbill Discovered at Library and Archives Canada” [S&P 31:1: 5–19]
• Robert Jordan, “The Barrington Prologue” [S&P 31:1: 39–57]
• Wallace Kirsop, “Searching for George Hughes: A First Report on a New Investigation” [S&P 31:1: 58–62]
• Susann Liebich, “ 'The Books Are The Same As You See In London Shops': Booksellers in Colonial Wellington and Their Imperial Ties, ca. 1840–1890" [S&P 31:4: 197–209]
• B. J. McMullin, "An Unrecorded Title-page Border: The Castle of Knowledge (1556)" [S&P 31:3: 164–71]
• B. J. McMullin, "Shared Printing: James Flesher’s part in Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum, vol. 1 (1669)" [S&P 31:4: 230–32]
• Sue Reynolds, "Bookbuying at the Victorian Supreme Court Library, 1853–1863: A Tale of Duplicity and Intrigue" [S&P 31:4: 210–19]
• Joseph Rudman, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Riposte" [S&P 31:3: 147–63]
• Patrick Spedding, "To (Not) Promote Breeding: Censoring Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife” [S&P 31:4: 233–42]
• Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jon O’Neill, "A Library in Paradise: The deBrum Library on Likiep (Micronesia)" [S&P 31:3: 135–46]
• Paul Watt, "The Catalogue of Ernest Newman’s Library: Revelations about his Intellectual Life in the 1890s" [S&P 31:2: 81–103]

Obituaries:
• Marcie Muir 1919–2007 (by Rory Muir) [S&P 31:4: 243–45]

Reviews:
• Amassing Treasures for All Times (Rachel Salmond) [S&P 31:4: 249–51]
• Be Merry and Wise (Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario) [S&P 31:4: 446–49]
• Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Shef Rogers) [S&P 31:2: 117–18]
• Engines of Influence (Ross Harvey) [S&P 31:3: 182–84]
• Literary Cultures and the Material Book (Jason D. Ensor) [S&P 31:3: 185–89]
• Manon Lescaut de l’abbé Prévost, 1731–1759 (Angus Martin) [S&P 31:3: 184–85]
• Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms (reviewed by Peter L. Shillingsburg) [S&P 31:2: 118–22]
• The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, vol. 2 (Patrick Buckridge) [S&P 31:4: 251–53]
• Ada Cambridge, A Black Sheep (Mary Jane Edwards) [S&P 31:3: 180–82]

BSANZ Occasional Publication for 2008

2008-07-17T11:15:00.002+10:00

The Occasional Publication Series of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand will soon include a study of Angus and Robertson by Jennifer Alison. I have been informed by Roger Osborne, 2007–8 editor of the Occasional Publications series, that full publication details and pricing will be available later in the year.

Doing Something for Australia: George Robertson and the Early Years of Angus and Robertson, Publishers 1888-1900

Angus and Robertson holds a significant position in the history of Australian publishing, bookselling and literary culture. Alison's study draws on the extensive company records held at Sydney’s Mitchell Library to show how George Robertson managed Angus and Robertson as a business and as a cultural institution. Robertson’s relationship with authors such as Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson are described in detail in conjunction with the authors of a variety of literary and non-fiction titles, providing a unique view of the pressures faced by a colonial publisher and bookseller.

This important, foundational study will be of great interest to scholars in the fields of literary studies and book history. It provides a comprehensive account of Australia’s early publishing history through an exploration of one of Australia’s most significant publishers and the authors and readers it attempted to serve.

Alison gave a preview of her work on Angus and Robertson at the first History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) Conference in 1996 (details here).

NB: recent publications in the OP series include Stephen J. Herrin's The Development of Printing in Nineteenth-Century Ballarat (2000) and The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop, edited by David Garrioch et al (1999).

Nathan Garvey on The Book Show

2008-07-14T10:35:00.004+10:00

Nathan Garvey (above), who will be presenting a Bibliographical Circle paper about celebrity convict George Barrington at the State Library of Victoria later this month (details here), was interviewed this morning by Ramona Koval for Radio National's Book Show.

You can download past Book Show programs from the ABC website (here): full details of the segment are as follows:

Spurious and Bogus Botany Bay Literature

Bogus stories about imaginary voyages to the Antipodes were popular in Britain in the eighteenth century. And the most popular story from this time was A Voyage to New South Wales—later just Voyage—and its author was celebrity convict George Barrington, an elegantly dressed pickpocket who moved in exalted circles and who was sentenced to transportation to Australia in 1790.

Charles Dickens, Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe had heard of him, but he didn't actually write a word of these popular accounts of coming to Australia.

Nathan Garvey has been following the trail of where these bogus stories came from.

Subscribe to Script & Print

2008-07-10T08:59:00.014+10:00

A would-be subscriber pointed out to me this morning that it is not immediately clear to anyone visiting this site how to join the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand and, therefore, receive Script & Print. So, here it is what you need to know.

If you join the BSANZ you get [1] Script and Print quarterly, [2] a Broadsheet periodically, [3] discounts on books published in the Occasional Publications series, [4] discounted fees at the annual BSANZ conference, and [5] a warm, inner glow. (More details under BSANZ publications here.)

Membership fees for 2008 are:

A$45 full-time students

A$75 for individuals

A$90 for institutions (in Australia and New Zealand)

A$105 for institutions (outside Australia and New Zealand)

To join the Society you can either download the Membership Application form (here), print it out and post it to Pam Pryde (the Secretary/Treasurer of the Society), or you can email her and she will send you the form and answer any questions you might have about the BSANZ. Pam's email address is:

Pam Pryde, Curator,
Special Collections,
Baillieu Library,
University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, 3010,
AUSTRALIA

Anyone with any questions about Script and Print can send me an email at the following address:

Melbourne Bibliographical Circle Event, July 2008

2008-07-09T10:25:00.010+10:00

I am pleased to announce that on Thursday 31 July 2008 at 5.45pm Nathan Garvey will present, in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on the books spuriously attributed to celebrity convict George Barrington (1755?–1804).

This is the second Melbourne Bibliographical Circle event for 2008, jointly organised by The Centre for the Book and the Melbourne branch of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Barrington’s Voyage was probably the most widely read work on the early years of European settlement in Australia. First published as A Voyage to New South Wales (London, 1795), the text’s combination of plagiarised material and exciting fictional adventures revolving around its supposed author was tremendously popular, and was quickly appropriated and reprinted by numerous publishers of chapbook-style works.

But the publishing history of Barrington’s Voyage was to take more unusual directions. An elaborate expanded edition was published in London in 1802–3, by which time it had been gentrified through scholarly translations into French and Russian. From 1806, an adapted version of the text was included in a canonical French collection of voyage narratives for young readers, which was to provide a model for subsequent translations.

Throughout its convoluted publishing history, the Voyage was particularly open to transformations, since various publishers adapted the work—and the text itself—to suit different markets and readerships. The narrative that had originally been, in some senses, a “translation” of the material of a semi-official travel narrative for a popular readership, was modified over time to reflect its changing audiences.

This paper, illustrated with slides, will explore how and why Barrington’s Voyage was transformed over the course of its publishing history. We hope to see many of you there.

Nathan Garvey is the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales for 2008. He recently completed his PhD, on the publication of the George Barrington books, in the English Department at the University of Sydney. His book, A Deceptious Mask: A Publishing History of the George Barrington Books, is due for publication later this year.

Testimonials for S&P

2008-07-04T12:38:00.004+10:00

In 2002 the eminent scholar Prof. Trevor Howard-Hill wrote, in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 96:1 (2002),142:

"every library of any intellectual pretension whatever should subscribe to the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin”

Having only discovered this quote in the last week I thought I would post it here. In future, I might add to it any other testimonials that I encounter, or which are pointed out to me.

About the S&P Editorial Board

2008-06-24T17:35:00.020+10:00

The eleven members of the Script & Print Editorial Board are listed below. The Board is composed of a mixture of research-focused academics and respected Rare Books librarians from Australia, New Zealand, Britain and North America.

Board members are unpaid (like the editor) and normally serve for a period of five years. Board members advise on refereeing, reviewing, and special issues and, if need be, resolve conflicting referee reports. They also, on occasion, help with long-term planning and promotion of Script & Print. The present incumbents are, in alphabetical order:

Des Cowley is the Acting Collection Services Manager, previously the Rare Printed Collections Manager, at the State Library of Victoria, with more than twenty years' experience working with the library's Rare Books Collection.

Wallace Kirsop is Director of Monash University's Centre for the Book and an Honorary Professor in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. He is also a Principal Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. See my post About Wallace Kirsop.

Brian McMullin is an honorary research associate in the Centre for the Book at Monash University and manager of its Ancora Press. He is also a former editor of the BSANZ Bulletin. See my post About Brian McMullin.

Simone Murray, 2005 winner of the SHARP DeLong Book Prize, is a Senior Lecturer in the Communications and Media Studies program at Monash University.

Richard Overell is the Rare Books Librarian at Monash University Library. From 1981 to 1988 he was a Librarian in the La Trobe section of the State Library of Victoria.

James Raven, Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, one-time Munby Fellow in Bibliography, founding director of SHARP and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust.

Sydney Shep is Senior Lecturer in Print and Book Culture and The Printer at Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington, Editor of SHARP News; she was former President of the Book Arts Society of New Zealand, and editor of the BSANZ Bulletin (during its 2004–5 transition to Script & Print).

Peter Shillingsburg, director of The Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Monfort University, Leicester is General and Textual Editor of The Works of W. M. Thackeray and Associate Editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book (Forthcoming, 2008). Peter was also one-time Visiting Professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of NSW, Canberra. Peter has his own site here.

G. Thomas Tanselle, formerly vice-president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and adjunct professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, past president of the Bibliographical Society of America, the Grolier Club, and the Society for Textual Scholarship, is President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. He has written and lectured widely on the theory and practice of analytical bibliography and textual criticism.

David Vander Meulen, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Vice President of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and editor of Studies in Bibliography, has published widely on descriptive and analytical bibliography.

Elizabeth Webby recently retired as Professor of Australian Literature and Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. She is a member of the editorial board of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature project and co-edited the Academy Edition of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (2006).

Literary Tattoos: Writing on the Body

2008-06-13T08:46:00.007+10:00

Literary Tattoos, undoubtedly an unusual form of publishing, have been in the news of late, or so it seems from Shirley Dent's piece in The Guardian, and the various links she provides. Her essay, Written on the Body: Literary Tattoos, links to A (Not So) Complete History of Literary Tattoos and Literary Tattoos for People who Love Books. To these I can add Written on the Body: The Art of Tattoo Storytelling, a Flickr group (Tattoos of Words Only) and Margot Mifflin's A Blank Human Canvas.

This last article discusses Shelley Jackson (who announced in 2003 that she would publish a 2,095-word short story called “Skin” on participants who agree to be tattooed with randomly assigned words from her text) and goes on to discuss, in fascinating detail, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1991), Brooke Stevens’s Tattoo Girl (2001), Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl (2003), Jill Ciment’s The Tattoo Artist (2005).

Below are a ten images culled from these various sites. (And as Mifflin explains, and as the following images suggest, the literary tattoo has been imagined overwhelmingly by and for women.)

Extended deadline for BSANZ Conference

2008-06-13T08:38:00.003+10:00

As previously noted (here), 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 June 2008 (extended from 30 April 2008), to the conference convenors at BSANZ2008@gmail.com, or to

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

Update for June 2008

2008-06-06T13:42:00.019+10:00

Script & Print 31:3 has finally gone to BPA for printing, a month later than we expected. We were held up by our desire to bundle both Joe Rudman's "Riposte" (see below) and John Burrows' reply to this, in the same issue. In the end it simply wasn't possible to print them this way. The good news is, however, that Script & Print 31:4 should be ready to send to press in only a few weeks time, so members will not be kept long waiting for John's (and Tony's) reply. We expect BPA to return the printed copies to us in about two weeks, so I expect we will post S&P 31:3 by 30 June and S&P 31:4 about two or three weeks later.

The contents of the two issues are as follows

Contents of S&P 31:3

Article 1: Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jon O’Neill, "A Library in Paradise: The deBrum Library on Likiep (Micronesia)"

Article 2: Joseph Rudman, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of
The History of Ophelia: A Riposte"

Article 3: B. J. McMullin, "An Unrecorded Title-page Border: The Castle of Knowledge (1556)"

Article 4: Craig Brittain, "Steinbeck’s Use of Ledgers in the Writing of East of Eden and Journal of a Novel"

Reviews: Ada Cambridge, A Black Sheep (reviewed by Mary Jane Edwards); Engines of Influence (reviewed by Ross Harvey); Manon Lescaut de l’abbé Prévost, 1731–1759 (reviewed by Angus Martin); Literary Cultures and the Material Book (reviewed by Jason D. Ensor).

Draft Contents of S&P 31:4

Article 1: Susann Liebich, “ 'The Books Are The Same As You See In London Shops': Booksellers in Colonial Wellington and Their Imperial Ties, ca. 1840–1890"

Article 2: Sue Reynolds, "Bookbuying at the Victorian Supreme Court Library, 1853–1863: A Tale of Duplicity and Intrigue"

Article 3: John Burrows and Anthony Hassall, "Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Reply"

Article 4: B. J. McMullin, "Shared Printing: James Flesher’s part in Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Criticorum, vol. 1 (1669)"

Article 5: Patrick Spedding, "To (Not) Promote Breeding: Censoring Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife

Obituary: Rory Muir, "Marcie Muir (1919–2007)"

Reviews: The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, vol. 2 (Reviewed by Patrick Buckridge); The Commonwealth of Books (Reviewed by James Raven); Amassing Treasures for All Times (Reviewed by Rachel Salmond); Be Merry and Wise (Reviewed by Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario).

Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets

2008-05-28T08:42:00.005+10:00

Mark R. Godburn is writing a book which will be of great interest to BSANZ members: Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History. Those of you who, like me, have read the first part of G. Thomas Tanselle's "Dust-Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation" in the latest volume of Studies in Bibliography, will be particularly pleased to hear that Mark is planning "at least 200 pictures" for his book (although, he has warned that the publisher "may cut down the number").

BSANZ members will also be interested to hear that Mark contacted me because he was trying to obtain a copy of Brian McMullin's article "Precursors of the Dust Wrapper" in the BSANZ Bulletin, 24 (2000), 257-66, which discusses the "Baring horde" (the small collection of copies of two mid-nineteenth-century books, which were bought at auction—and dispersed—by Peter Baring). Copies are held at the State Library of Victoria and Monash University, and one of the Baring horde was displayed at the 1998 Australian Antiquarian Book Fair, where some members will have seen it.

Anyone interested in this subject should check out Mark's site (here). I strongly encourage anyone who has any nineteenth-century wrappers to get in contact with Mark (bookmarkstore@att.net).

Below are some photos I took that previously appeared on Mark's site. NB: I included the bookmark that was in the volume when I purchased it. The list of titles on the bookmark matches that on the wrapper: suggesting the bookmark was picked up at the time of purchase, placed in the volume, and never moved.

Notebooks and Note-Takers Symposium

2008-05-20T09:49:00.007+10:00

“Notebooks and Note-takers: da Vinci to Darwin” Symposium, 17–19 July 2008

The State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Opening Public Lecture, Thursday 17 July, 6pm: Professor Ann Blair (Harvard University).

Sponsored by the Australian Research Council and the Network for Early European Research (NEER),
with generous support from the State Library of Queensland, and hosted by the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University.

Conference website: www.neer.arts.uwa.edu.au/theme_symposium_2008.

Convenors: Professor Michael Bennett (Tasmania) and Professor Richard Yeo (Griffith).

For registration: Jill Jones +61 7 3735 7338 or j.jones@griffith.edu.au

Confirmed speakers

Peter Anstey (Otago)
‘Remembering and dismembering: John Locke as Note-taker’

Michael Bennett (Tasmania)
‘Case-books and data-sharing: Edward Jenner and vaccination networks in the early nineteenth-century’

Ann Blair (Harvard)
‘The New Status of Note-taking in early modern Europe’

Yasmin Haskell (UWA, Perth)
‘Notes in Prose versus Notes in Verse: a Dutch doctor’s observations of eighteenth-century Italy’

Paul Nelles (Carleton University, Ottowa)
‘Information and Anthropology: Observation and Notation in the Early Jesuit Missions’

Margaret Sankey (Sydney)
‘Writing the Voyage of Scientific Exploration: the notes and journals of the Baudin expedition (1800—1804)’

Jacob Soll (Rutgers)
‘Erudite Notebooks and Absolute Power: The Mechanics of J. B. Colbert’s State Information System’

Lyn Tribble (Otago)
Concluding Commentary

Richard Yeo (Griffith University)
‘Remembering and Thinking with Notes in early Modern England’

Rare Book Summer School 2009

2008-04-11T12:42:00.003+10:00

Shef Rogers has announced that the Australasian Rare Book Summer School will be celebrating its fifth birthday in 2009. Three courses will be offered in Dunedin, New Zealand during the week of 9-13 February, along with an exhibition opening, several public lectures, and Dunedin's tropical summer weather.

Further details are available on the University of Otago website.

The classes for 2009 are:

"Exhibitions: Their Art and Practicalities" by Eric Holzenberg (Director, Grolier Club) and Donald Kerr (Special Collections Librarian, University of Otago).

Exhibitions are one of the best ways to showcase an institution’s collections, especially if the items are usually hidden in closed stacks. However, exhibitions also take a lot of time, effort, talent and knowledge if they are to succeed.

This course will examine a range of exhibition concerns from the planning and design, collection care, and item selection, to practicalities like label layout, promotion, and exhibition scheduling. Digital e-sites as an extension to the physical space will also be covered. Participants will undertake a hands-on practical using rare books from Special Collections.

"Critical Bibliography for Editors and Book Historians" by Michael Suarez, S.J. (Dept. of English, Campion Hall, Oxford and Fordham University).

Intended to make you 'see' books differently, this seminar is about the relationships between materiality and meaning. It emphasizes the practical–what you need to know about how books are made and how to analyze books as the products of those processes. As we examine the physical elements of books, we will come to think about each as an integrated system of linguistic codes (the words) and bibliographical codes (everything else about the book), and we will learn how to read these codes to discover the manifold ways that every book makes its meanings.

Course topics will range from early printing (European and Asian) to the electronic book. If we comprehend the decisions made–paper, format, type, mise-en-page, binding–then we may more readily discern that book’s designs upon its readers.

"Looking Beyond Texts: Using Copy-Specific Evidence" by David Pearson (Director, University of London Research Library Services).

Users of historic books are increasingly interested in evidence within the books themselves showing how the books were used, read, regarded and circulated. We are moving beyond enumerative and textual bibliography to examine the histories of individual books. Marks of ownership, annotations and bindings all provide important insights of interest to researchers and librarians alike.

This class will explore these themes in the context of recent scholarship and professional developments. The main part of the course will be devoted to looking in detail at the different kinds of provenance evidence, and bookbindings, associated with handpress-period books, and learning how to recognise and record such details. Students should complete the week with a better personal toolkit for interpreting the key kinds of copy-specific evidence they are likely to encounter.

Melbourne Bibliographical Circle Meeting

2008-04-11T12:33:00.003+10:00

The Centre for the Book is pleased to announce the first Melbourne Bibliographical Circle meeting for 2008.

Dr Kevin Molloy, Head of Manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria, will talk about "Nineteenth-century Australasian Irish Print Culture, its Extent and Organisation".

Thursday 24 April at 5.45 pm in the McArthur Gallery (Rare Books), off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library.

We hope to see many of you there.

Bibliographical Presses Questionnaire

2008-03-31T10:24:00.016+11:00

We need your help!

In 1977, the BSANZ Bulletin published a census of bibliographical presses operating in Australia and New Zealand (NB: not private presses, as explained below). In the last thirty years, many of the presses then located—thirteen in all—seem to have been disbanded. It is not clear whether any new presses have since been set up to demonstrate hand-press printing methods to English or Librarianship students in universities and libraries. In order to get a definitive answer to this question, Per Henningsgaard has asked me to circulate a questionnaire (link to the 3-page pdf here) and I have transcribed an excerpt of our original article (below), which explains the features and function of a bibliographical press.

I hope anyone who knows anything concerning Bibliographical Presses in Australia and New Zealand will take the time to fill in this questionnaire even—in fact, especially—if all you have to report is that no such press is, or ever has been, active at your institution.

In fact, if this is the case, then the latter half of the questionnaire will be of particular interest to you, since it enquires more generally about the teaching of bibliography in your institution and how this teaching might have changed over time. The results of this questionnaire will be published in a future issue of Script & Print, along with some reflections on the teaching of physical bibliography in Australia today.

Please send replies to Per Henningsgaard via email (phenningsgaard at yahoo.com), fax (08 6488 1030), or mail (5 Megalong Street, Nedlands WA 6009). Please also forward to Per the name of any Australian or New Zealand institution or person that, to your knowledge, presently runs a bibliographical press or teaches bibliography and/or Book History.

What is a Bibliographical Press

By a “bibliographical press” is meant a workshop or laboratory which is carried on chiefly for the purpose of demonstrating and investigating the printing techniques of the past by means of setting type by hand, and of printing from it on a simple press. (P. Gaskell, “The Bibliographical Press Movement,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society 1 (1965), 1–13). The rationale for such “demonstrating and investigating” is explained by R. B. McKerrow’s statement of 1913:

It would, I think, be an excellent thing if all who propose to edit an Elizabethan work from contemporary printed texts could be set to compose a sheet or two in as exact facsimile as possible of some Elizabethan octavo or quarto, and to print it on a press constructed on the Elizabethan model. Elementary instruction in the mechanical details of book-production need occupy but a very few hours of a University course of literature, and it would, I believe, if the course were intended it turn out scholars capable of serious work, be time well spent. It would teach students not to regard a book as a collection a separate leaves of paper attached in some mysterious manner to a leather back, nor to think that the pages are printed one after another beginning at the first and proceeding regularly to the last. They would have constantly and clearly before their minds all the processes through which the matter of the work before them has passed, from its first being written down by the pen of its author to its appearance in the finished volume, and would know when and how mistakes are likely to arise; while they would be constantly on the watch for those little pieces of evidence which are supplied by the actual form and “make-up” of a book and which are often of the highest value, in that they can hardly ever be “faked.” (R. B. McKerrow “Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors,” Transactions of The Bibliographical Society 12 (1911–13), 220).

Oz & NZ Bibliographical Presses in 1977

The University of Auckland, Mount Pleasant Press, Department of English
The University of Queensland, Shapcott Press, Department of English
The University of Otago, The Bibliography Room, University Library
Victoria University of Wellington, Wai-te-ata Press, Department of English
The University of Sydney, Piscator Press, Fisher Library
The University of Adelaide, Barr Smith Library
The Australian National University, Open Door Press, Department of English
Monash University, The Bibliographical Laboratory, University Library
The University of Canterbury, Underoak Press, School of Fine Arts
The University of Tasmania, New Albion Press, Department of English
Massey University, Department of English
The University of Melbourne, Baillieu Library
The University of Canterbury, Department of English

[As details concerning each press arrive, the font colour will be changed from red to dark green]

UPDATE 28 May 08: Per tells me that UNSW at ADFA had a bibliographical press from 1990 until 2000, which (of course) was not featured in the 1977 survey. As details arrive of post-1977 presses these will be added below, similarly colour coded.

The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy

'Creative' Bookshelf Designs

2008-03-17T08:09:00.007+11:00

While searching the net yesterday I found an article on 30 of the Most Creative Bookshelves Designs at freshome.com. Apparently the 'mission' at Freshome is to 'inspire' and 'to give you ideas and make your home a better place to live'.

Some of these designs are undoubtedly pretty; but many would simply destroy the books that they are ostensibly designed to store or display; only a few of the 30 would do minimal or no damage. In fact, the question of whether a pretty design is likely to protect or harm the books seems not to have come into the heads of any of these designers and it seems to be only by accident that a few of them wouldn't destroy the books that they contain.

Here are a few of the worst examples. Imagine what each book that has been placed on these shelves would look like after only one year. Then imagine two, five or ten years!

Contents of Script & Print, vol. 30 (2006)

2008-03-12T08:01:00.006+11:00

Here is a complete contents-list for Script & Print, vol. 30 (2006 [issued 2007])

Articles and Bibliographical Notes:
• Keith Adkins, “John Glover and his Books” [S&P 30.1: 17–30]
• Patrick Buckridge, “Bookishness and Australian Literature” [S&P 30.4: 223–36]
• John Burrows, “Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: A Computational Analysis” [S&P 30.2: 69–92]
• Sandra Burt, “The BSANZ archive” [S&P 30.1: 39–41]
• T. L. Burton & K. K. Ruthven, “William Barnes’s River Flowers and the 1844 Edition of His Poems of Rural Life in The Dorset Dialect.” [S&P 30.3: 138–54]
• John N. Crossley, “One Man’s Library, Manila, ca. 1611—a first look” [S&P 30.4: 201–9]
• Anthony J. Hassall, “Sarah and Henry Fielding and the Authorship of The History of Ophelia: Literary Considerations” [S&P 30.2: 93–100]
• Wallace Kirsop, “Museums, Lyceums, Athenaeums and Mechanics’ Institutes” [S&P 30.4: 210–22]
• Harold Love, “A New Source for Rochester’s ‘My Dear Mistris has a Heart’” [S&P 30.1: 12–16]
• B. J. McMullin, “Dawson Described.” [S&P 30.3: 174–80]
• B. J. McMullin, “J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 50.3R/21, 26, 27 (The Rambler, Hodges’s edition)” [S&P 30.1: 42–44]
• B. J. McMullin, “Silk for Posting: Sir Francis Burdett’s Address to The Constituents of The City of Westminster, 6 October 1812” [S&P 30.4: 237–40]
• Keith Maslen, “The Bibliography Room Press 1961–2005: A Short History and Checklist.” [S&P 30.3: 155–73]
• Pam Pryde, “John Noone, Government Photo-lithographer, 1861–1888” [S&P 30.1: 31–38]
• Patrick Spedding, “A Reading of Gay’s Fables.” [S&P 30.3: 181–85]
• Toni Johnson-Woods, “Pulp Friction: Governmental Control of Cheap Fiction, 1939–1959” [S&P 30.2: 101–15]

Obituaries:
• David Wooley 1924–2005 (by Clive Probyn) [S&P 30.1: 45–47]
• Harold Love (by Wallace Kirsop) [S&P 30.4: 241–49]
• Henri-Jean Martin 1924–2007 (by Wallace Kirsop) [S&P 30.1: 48–53]

Opinion Pieces:
• George Williams and Edwina MacDonald, “Academic Freedon and the ‘War on Terror’” [S&P 30.1: 7–11]
• Tara McLeod on “The Private Press in New Zealand in the Twenty-First Century” [S&P 30.3: 134–37]

Reviews:
• A Chronology and Calendar of the London Book Trade 1641–1700 (Harold Love) [S&P 30.1: 54–56]
• Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury and The London Journal, 1845–1883: Periodicals, Production and Gender (reviewed by Roger Osborne) [S&P 30.4: 255–57]
• Memorial Volumes to Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust (reviewed by Marianne Dacy) [S&P 30.2: 124–25]
• Patrick White: A Bibliography (reviewed by Elizabeth Webby) [S&P 30.2: 122–24]
• Studies in Bibliography, vol. 54 (reviewed by B. J. McMullin) [S&P 30.3: 186–87]
• Studies in Bibliography, vol. 55 (reviewed by B. J. McMullin) [S&P 30.4: 252–55]
• Studies in Bibliography, vol. 56 (reviewed by Keith Maslen) [S&P 30.3: 188–90]
• Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History (reviewed by Roger Osborne) [S&P 30.3: 190–93]
• The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore (reviewed by Dennis Haskell) [S&P 30.2: 120–22]
• The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library (reviewed by Susan Reynolds) [S&P 30.1: 57–58]
• Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (reviewed by Simone Murray) [S&P 30.4: 250–52]

Update for March 2008

2008-03-03T16:28:00.008+11:00

S&P 31.2 went to the printer on Friday (contents below). And by virtue of the fact that 2008 is a leap year, this means that it actually went to the printers in February as planned, though it was the 29th and we have put 'issued March 2008' in the imprint. BPA usually returns bromides in about a week and deliver within two, so copies should be stuffed into envelopes and posted by 17 March. Subscribers should receive copies by the end of that week.

S&P 31.3 will contain an article by Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jon O’Neill on the deBrum Library on Likiep, another by Craig Brittain on Steinbeck’s use of ledgers in the writing of East of Eden and Journal of a Novel and a Bibliographical note from Brian McMullin on an unrecorded title-page border from 1556. We are rich in reviews at present, so 31.3 will include three: Mary Jane Edwards on Elizabeth Morrison's edition of Ada Cambridge's A Black Sheep and Ross Harvey on Elizabeth Morrison's Engines of Influence as well as Angus Martin on Allan Holland's Manon Lescaut de l’abbé Prévost, 1731–1759. Full details of the contents of this issue will appear in April.

Contents of S&P 31.2

Article 1: Paul Eggert, "Textual Criticism and Folklore: The Ned Kelly Story and Robbery Under Arms"

Article 2: Paul Watt, "The Catalogue of Ernest Newman’s Library: Revelations about his Intellectual Life in the 1890s"

Article 3: Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, "Don’t Steal a Book by its Cover: The Book Thief and Who Reads It"

Reviews: Edmund Curll, Bookseller (reviewed by Shef Rogers); Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms (reviewed by Peter L. Shillingsburg)

Will Ashford's Recycled Words

2008-02-28T08:45:00.008+11:00

Will Ashford is another creative biblioclast: an artist who rescues, salvages, and recycles books. On his web site, Ashford explains:

Browsing through garage sales, street markets and used bookstores I search for interesting, preferably discarded, old books. When I find a good candidate I explore every page. Like an archeologist I hunt for the words that speak to me with new meaning. Intuitively, one word at a time, they turn into a kind of haiku or philosophical poetry that I can call my own.

At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.

Richard D. Altick (1915–2008)

2008-02-12T10:21:00.000+11:00

Richard D. Altick, Professor of English at Ohio State University from 1945 to 1982, died (ætat 92) on 8 February 2008. Prof. Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (1957) remains one of the most significant contributions to the study of Book History and Print Cultures in the English-speaking world. The following obituary was distributed by David A. Brewer on the SHARP Listserver on 9 February 2008.

Professor Altick, who was the only faculty member in the Department to be honored with the title of Regents Professor, published a number of books of wide interest and of great influence, including The Scholar Adventurers (1950), The Art of Literary Research (1963), and A Preface to Critical Reading (1949 and 1969). He was an eminent scholar of Victorian studies: among his many other books, to mention only a few, were The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (1957), Browning's Roman Murder Story: A Reading of The Ring & The Book (1968; with James Loucks), Lives and Letters:. A History of Literary Biography in England and America (1969), Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria (1970), The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1699-1862 (1978), Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature (1980), and Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain 1760-1900 (1985). He also frequently wrote essay-reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.

CFP: The European Book in the Antipodes

2008-01-31T20:46:00.002+11:00

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

2008-01-31T20:16:00.003+11:00

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

2008-01-28T01:43:00.001+11:00

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

2008-01-25T12:33:00.001+11:00

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

2008-01-25T11:23:00.002+11:00

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"

Photos from the BSANZ Conference, 2007

2007-11-16T12:05:00.003+11:00

Here are a five photos taken at the BSANZ Conference in Hobart last week; each is linked to a larger version of the same photo. The first one is taken in the Royal Society rooms, the following three in the tea-room; and the last one in the luncheon area outside the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Melbourne Bibliographical Circle Meeting

2007-11-16T12:01:00.000+11:00

Many people will be aware of the fact that, despite other distractions during APEC, the Canadian Prime Minister presented to the Australian Government what appears to be the earliest surviving piece of printing done -- in 1796 -- by George Hughes in Sydney.

A few people in Melbourne have been doing research in recent years on the press in Australia before 1820. Some of them, including Dennis Bryans and Wallace Kirsop, will report informally on their work at the last session of the Melbourne Bibliographical Circle for 2007.

Date: Thursday 22 November 2007
Time: 5.30 p.m.
Place: Rare Book working area of the State Library of Victoria.

Anyone interested is welcome to attend.

Update for November 2007

2007-11-15T11:06:00.001+11:00

S&P 30.4 Issued

Script & Print 30.4 went to the printers before the BSANZ Conference in Hobart last week and will be posted my the middle of next week. The contents are unchanged from what was previewed in the Update for September 2007

Article 1: John N. Crossley, "One Man’s Library, Manila, ca. 1611—a first look"

Article 2: Wallace Kirsop, "Museums, Lyceums, Athenaeums and Mechanics' Institutes"

Article 3: Patrick Buckridge, "Bookishness and Australian Literature"

Bibliographical Note: B. J. McMullin, "Silk for Posting: Sir Francis Burdett’s Address to The Constituents of The City of Westminster, 6 October 1812"

Obituary: 'Harold Love' (by Wallace Kirsop)

Reviews: "Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania" (reviewed by Simone Murray); Studies in Bibliography 55 (reviewed by B. J. McMullin); "Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury" and "The London Journal, 1845–1883: Periodicals, Production and Gender" (reviewed by Roger Osborne).

Progress on S&P 31.1

The contents has not been finalised, but the next issue will contain the following material:

Article 1: Elaine Hoag, "The Earliest Extant Australian Imprint With Distinguish Provenance: Playbill Discovered at Library and Archives Canada"

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

Article 3: Robert Jordan, "The Barrington Prologue"

Article 4: Paul Eggert, "Textual Criticism and Folklore: The Ned Kelly Story and Robbery Under Arms"

Bibliographical Note: Wallace Kirsop, "Printing by Howe and Hughes"

Future Issues

Looking further forward, S&P 31.2 will contain, among other things, an article by Dirk H. R. Spennemann & Jon O’Neill on the deBrum Library on Likiep; an article by Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario on Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005); and a bibliographical note by Brian McMullin on an unrecorded title-page border from 1556.

The Harold Love memorial issue will be S&P 32.1–2. This double issue will be co-edited by Wallace Kirsop and Brian McMullin. Again, further details will appear shortly.

Anyone wishing to contact the the editor with suggestions, submissions etc, for future issues should do so via the following email address:

Rare Book School, Melbourne 2008

2007-10-10T08:13:00.001+10:00

The 4th Australia and New Zealand Rare Book School is on at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne between 11 and 15 February 2008. Four courses are on offer:

Lithography: The Popularisation of Printing in the 19th Century

This course explores a wide range of applications of lithography and is aimed at those concerned with books, prints and ephemera, especially of the first half of the nineteenth century. The instructor is Prof. Michael Twyman from the University of Reading.

The Colonial Book Trade in Australia and Canada

This course aims to develop a comparative approach to the understanding of colonial-era publishing and bookselling in Australia and Canada. The instructors are Prof. Mary Jane Edwards from Carleton University and Des Cowley, Rare Printed Collections Manager at the State Library of Victoria.

The Book in Transition, 1750–1850

The course will deal with the basic elements of analysis and description of books of the hand-press period before moving to look specifically at the period of transition, at the end of which the production of books had been transformed by the application of mechanical methods, in composing, printing, paper-making, methods of illustration, binding and so on. The instructors are Brian McMullin, Honorary Associate in the Centre for the Book at Monash University and Pamela Pryde, Curator of Special Collections in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

Book Collecting

This course is intended to provide a systematic introduction to the skills and techniques required by the book collector in Australia. The instructor is Wallace Kirsop, Director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University.

Tuition

The tuition fee is A$700. Each of the four courses runs for the five full days of the school. It is not possible to enrol in more than one course.

For more information, to obtain application forms, and for advice about accommodation, visit the Centre for the Book site.

Update for October 2007

2007-10-08T11:02:00.000+10:00

Script & Print 30.4 is almost ready to be send to the printers. I am expecting to see and approve the proofs before heading south to Hobart for the 2007 BSANZ Conference.

The articles that have accumulated for S&P 31.1 are all on Australian subjects from the Colonial period. They range from an article on the earliest examples of Australian printing extant to the influence of the Ned Kelly story on Robbery Under Arms (and vice versa). Further details will appear shortly.

Looking further forward, S&P 31.2 will be another miscellaneous issue, while either S&P 31.3–4 or S&P 32.1–2 will be a double, memorial issue (for Harold Love). This double issue will be co-edited by Wallace Kirsop and Brian McMullin. Again, further details will appear shortly.

Creative biblioclast, Brian Dettmer

2007-10-02T08:29:00.001+10:00

As Wikipedia explains, Brian Dettmer is an American artist who is noted for his alteration of preexisting media -- such as old books -- to create transformed works of visual art. Some examples of recent works at the Haydeé Rovirosa gallery will give a good idea of what this means. Don't try this at home folks.

History of Western Europe, 2007

Eye’s Ornament, 2007

Free Impression, 2007

Re Brand Painting, 2007

Script & Print Online Shop!

2007-09-29T09:59:00.002+10:00

Some readers may think it a little sad, but the fact is I want a coffee mug with the S&P logo on it. I also want a book-bag (a tote-bag) with the BSANZ logo on it. And, it also occurred to me that the cover of S&P 30.3 would make a very nice t-shirt, in a nerdy kind of way. I then began to wonder whether there might be other people as unhinged as I am, people who might like a t-shirt, BBQ Apron (!), Mouse mat, Cap, Blank Journal or Messenger Bag with a logo on it.

On the off-chance that there are people this unhinged (and the Internet is a big, weird and wonderful place), I have set up a Cafe Press 'Online Shop' that will allow anyone to buy any one of three designs on a total of 25 selected products. Unfortunately, the free version of Cafe Press only allows one design per product, so you can't have your choice of deign on each product.

The designs I have used are the BSANZ Logo, the S&P Logo, and the cover of S&P 30.2 (the one with the pulp cover). I have tried to do a mix of each image, and a mix of full-size and pocket-size images. I have also tried to include a mix of male and female apparel. With luck everyone crazy enough to want something, will be happy.

Here is a few pictures and a complete list of the products

Using the BSANZ logo
BSANZ BBQ Apron
BSANZ Fitted T-Shirt
BSANZ Golf Shirt
BSANZ Long Sleeve T-Shirt
BSANZ Mouse pad
BSANZ Mug
BSANZ White T-Shirt
BSANZ Women's Long Sleeve Dark T-Shirt
BSANZ Women's Long Sleeve T-Shirt
BSANZ Women's T-Shirt

Using the Script & Print logo
Script & Print Baseball Jersey
Script & Print Cap
Script & Print Dark T-Shirt
Script & Print Journal
Script & Print Large Mug
Script & Print Light T-Shirt
Script & Print Long Sleeve Dark T-Shirt
Script & Print Messenger Bag
Script & Print Organic Cotton Tee
Script & Print Sweatshirt
Script & Print Value T-shirt
Script & Print Women's V-Neck Dark T-Shirt

Using the BSANZ and Script & Print logos
Script & Print Tote Bag

Using the cover from Script & Print 30.2
Script & Print Cover Ringer T
Script & Print Women's Cap Sleeve T-Shirt

Anyone who would like to make a request for a different design combination (or for products I have not selected, such as a stein, thong, or dog-shirt) should contact me about it and I will see what I can organise

If we can ever afford the USD60 to make multiple versions of each product available I will add the cover of S&P 30.3 (the one with the Elephant and the Bookseller on it), but for copyright reasons it is unlikely that S&P 30.1 will ever be available. I will also try to add each new cover as it is released, and I may do some colour variations on the black and white logos.

BTW: I have opted for the uniform 'medium' markup on each product. The piffling amount of money that returns to us from the sale of each item will be spent as credit towards upgrading the store and purchasing our own promotional material for S&P to give away.

A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

2007-09-20T09:25:00.001+10:00

Curious Expeditions has posted a blog entry on beautiful libraries. The images are amazing. So, if you like the look of the Biblioteca Angelica (Rome), the Cathedral Library (Kalocsa, Hungary), the Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura (Rio De Janeiro) or the Rennie Mackintosh Library (Glasgow), below, then you should visit Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries.

How to Operate a Book

2007-09-20T08:55:00.000+10:00

The following video is in Norwegian with English sub-titles; it is from a Norsk rikskringkasting [NRK or Norwegian Broadcasting] comedy show Øystein og jeg. The skit was written by Knut Nærum and is acted by Øystein Backe (helper) and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). It was screened in 2001 and has been doing the rounds on the internet every since. The YouTube video below has already been watched almost half a million times!

Another copy of the same clip is available here, which has larger subtitles, positioned so they don't obscure the book on the desk, but the screen is dark and the ending has been lost.

Synchrotron To See Hidden Texts

2007-09-14T08:52:00.001+10:00

BBC News report by By Liz Seward (based on research presented at the British Association science festival).

'Super-Scope' To See Hidden Texts

The hidden content in ancient works could be illuminated by a light source 10 billion times brighter than the Sun. The technique employs Britain's new facility, the Diamond synchrotron, and could be used on works such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or musical scores by Bach. Intense light beams will enable scientists to uncover the text in scrolls and books without having to open - and potentially damage - them.

Iron gall ink, which is made from oak apples, has been in use from the 12th Century, but causes parchment to deteriorate rendering precious documents unreadable. Both paper and parchment - thinly stretched skins from cows, sheep or goats - contain collagen, which reacts with iron ink to become gelatine. When dry, gelatine is very brittle; but as soon as it gets wet, it turns into jelly, destroying some documents if they are disturbed.

Now, scientists from the University of Cardiff have developed a technique that uses a powerful X-ray source to create a three-dimensional image of an iron-inked document. The team then applies a computer algorithm to separate the image into the different layers of parchment, in effect using the program to unroll the scroll.

Professor Tim Wess, who led the research, said: "We've folded up a real piece of parchment and then done a process of X-ray tomography on it. We've been able to recover the structure where we can see the words that are written inside the document."

The team now plans to use the Diamond synchrotron's powerful X-ray source to penetrate many layers of parchment. The synchrotron, which covers the area of five football pitches, generates light beams that can probe matter down to the molecular and atomic scale. Professor Wess explained:

"The letters have got iron in them, so you shine a band of X-rays through, and you end up with an absorption image, rather like your bones would absorb on an X-ray. This is something we can take forward with Diamond, to try to unravel the secrets inside documents that we're too scared to try to open, or that are beyond the point of conservation."

The National Archives has donated some 18th Century fire-damaged scrolls that have never been unrolled, due to their condition. But the team also has a wish-list of works that they plan to probe. Professor Wess said: "There are some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls which have not been unrolled."

Reading books without opening them was a goal of the project, added Professor Wess. The technique works best with rolled parchment. The flat nature, as well as the thickness of books, presents a challenge. He said: "I know of books which have been damaged by iron gall ink corrosion where the conservators are actually afraid to open the book because of all the letters. You really end up with a stencil rather than the lettering."

Another target of the project is to image documents before they become too damaged, to monitor levels of gelatine. The team can then advise on the most appropriate conservation methods, depending on the state of the parchment.

Professor Wess said: "If you can bring together a £260m ($527m) synchrotron, and the cutting edge science from that, the provenance and the depth of history that you can access when you see these things is actually a revelatory moment."

Thursday, 13 September 2007, 13:43 GMT 14:43 UK

For information on the Monash Synchrotron (below) see Australia's first synchrotron springs to life

Meet The Editor

2007-09-13T18:27:00.001+10:00

It was hard to chose the right animation for this silly Meez version of me, as editor: caffeinated, frantic, and impatient, or smiling, waving, and cheerful. Unfortunately, I can't do both at once, so I have decided to change it periodically from one to the other. On special occasions I might even try the gymnastic, somersaulting, version. We'll see.

Melbourne Museum of Printing

2007-09-13T10:01:00.001+10:00

In the "Metro" section of The Age today, there is an article, "Letter for Letter," by Viviane Stappmanns on Laurie Harding and the Melbourne Museum of Printing (which is at 36 Moreland St., Footscray).

As Stappmanns explains, this is the second incarnation of the Melbourne Museum of Printing, which originally opened in 1990 but closed eight years later due to funding difficulties. In 2005, Isaachsen, "who can passionately explain the history of each and every artefact in his museum, once again wrestled the doors open to the public."

BSANZ 2007 Conference in Hobart

2007-09-12T09:25:00.000+10:00

The BSANZ 2007 Conference, Spaces of Print: Exploring the History of Books will be in Hobart from 7 to 9 November this year. Fifteen papers will be presented on a wide range of subjects, from Lawrence Warner on fourteenth-century manuscripts to Sydney Shep on emoticons: which are these things:

:-)
;-)
:-0
:-(

The full BSANZ 2007 Conference Program is attached here.

[NB for technical reasons the file is temporarily being hosted by a free file host. It will take a few seconds before you will be given the option of downloading].

Update for September 2007

2007-09-11T07:34:00.002+10:00

S&P 30.3 Issued

S&P 30.3 was posted last week and should be arriving in Australian letter-boxes today. The contents are unchanged from what was previewed in the Update for July/August 2007 (here).

S&P 30.4

The contents of our next issue has not been finalised, but will probably be as follows:

Article 1: Patrick Buckridge, "Bookishness and Australian Literature"

Article 2: John N. Crossley, "One Man’s Library, Manila, ca. 1611—a first look"

Article 3: Wallace Kirsop, "Museums, Lyceums, Athenaeums and Mechanics' Institutes"

Bibliographical Note: B. J. McMullin, "Silk for Posting: Sir Francis Burdett’s Address to The Constituents of The City of Westminster, 6 October 1812"

Obituary: 'Harold Love' (by Wallace Kirsop)

Reviews: "Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania" (reviewed by Simone Murray); "Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury" and "The London Journal, 1845–1883: Periodicals, Production and Gender" (reviewed by Roger Osborne).

We are aiming to have S&P 30.4 in the hands of members well before the Hobart BSANZ Conference in November.

Future Issues

Anyone wishing to contact the the editor with suggestions, submissions etc, for future issues should do so via the following email address:

1796 playbill discovered, given to NLA

2007-09-11T07:18:00.002+10:00

Harper to present rare gift, address Parliament in Australia

The oldest known document printed in Australia--a theatre playbill from the former British colony dating back to 1796--is returning home via Canada.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is in Australia this week to deliver a speech to Parliament on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, is expected to present the gift on Tuesday. He is scheduled to address Australian MPs in Canberra in the morning. Harper will then present the historic playbill, which a Canadian government official said lists three plays performed by Jane Shore [sic !; see Comments below].

Australia's national archives currently holds Australian-printed documents that go as far back as November 1796. But the playbill once stored in Canada, coming from a former Victorian British botanist's scrapbook, predates it to July 30, 1796.

Library and Archives Canada rare-book specialist Elaine Hoag found the 211-year-old theatre program, which was printed on a wooden screw press, earlier this summer. Library and Archives Canada acquired the rare piece of Australia's past in 1973, but it's a mystery how it ended up in Canada.

Australian historians and politicians were "absolutely delighted it's coming home," a Canadian official told the Canadian Press, speaking on background. The playbill is of "huge significance," the official said.

"It speaks to the very beginnings of Australia and two very important milestones in the new colony: the capacity to print and the rise of cultural institutions."

CBC News: Monday, 10 September 2007, 8:36AM ET.

See also Pauline Portelance, 'Australians Delight in Canada's Gift of Historic Document' Library and Archives Canada (with video footage [which seems to be not working]), Gloria Galloway, 'Australia's oldest printed document heads home' Globe and Mail.com, 'Harper to return Australia's oldest printed document' from canada.com and 'Canada presents Australia with oldest known Australian printed document' The Canadian Press.

Here are a few snippets:

Printed on July 30, 1796, the playbill is a few months older than what was previously believed to be the oldest printed document in the country - a list of instructions for constables of the country districts.

Hoag found the playbill in the scrapbook of a British banker who lived from 1775 to 1858. While archivists were able to match it up with Australia's first printing press that arrived in Sydney with the first British fleet in 1788, they have no idea how the scrapbook wound up in Canada's national archives. All they know is that the small wooden screw printing press was left unattended for eight years until George Hughes arrived in the colony to establish Australia's first printery behind its Government House.

While it might not have a huge financial value, Canadian government officials say it will be priceless piece of history that speaks to Australia's beginnings as a colony -- the first printed documents and cultural institutions such as its theatre.

"It is a humble and modest document in and of itself, but it tells a great story and it's a very important part of Australia's history," said a Canadian government spokesperson.

Pulp Friction in Colour!

2007-08-22T11:58:00.003+10:00

I have been asked by a few subscribers for colour images of the pulps that appear in Toni Johnson-Woods' "Pulp Friction: Governmental Control of Cheap Fiction, 1939–1959," S&P 30.2, so I thought it might be a good idea to post those images here.

All images are from books in Monash University Library, Rare Books; each image is 400-pixels wide. If you click on the image, you will find a 1000-pixel wide version of the same image.

Harold Love

2007-08-13T10:40:00.000+10:00

I received the following from Clive Probyn this morning:

It is with very great sadness that I tell you that our friend and colleague Harold Love died at 7.00 a.m. this morning, Sunday 12 August.

He will be sorely missed by scholars all around the world, and by his past and present friends, students, but mostly, of course, by his devoted family.

I will let you know when I hear about arrangements.

I am not sure if it is too early for reminiscences. Fortunately, I have little experience in such matters. However, I can't imaging that it would hurt to mention that I first met Harold in June 1993. My honours supervisor at the University of Tasmania, John Winter, had drawn my attention to the BSANZ Bulletin and, since my topic was the manuscript publication of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's poetry, I read Harold's 'Manuscript versus print in the transmission of English literature 1600-1700' (1985) with great interest.

I sent a letter and, when I was on holiday in Melbourne, made the trek out to Monash to meet him. As a result of that meeting, Harold agreed to be an external supervisor to my Honours project. Two years later, I moved my Ph.D. research to Monash and Harold became my main supervisor, continuing in this position until I submitted in 2003. For ten years Harold encouraged my work, and smoothed the way for me through endless administrivia.

In June 1993 at Monash Harold introduced me to Clive Probyn (English), Richard Overell (Rare Books librarian), Ross Harvey (then Librarianship Lecturer and editor of BSANZ), Ian Morrison (then working on the Early Imprint Project) and Brian McMullin (Librarianship Lecturer). Ross gave me a pile of back issues to the BSANZ Bulletin and a subscription form, which I soon returned.

In retrospect, it is clear that my June 1993 visit to Monash was a turning-point in my academic life. Remote and inhospitable as the Clayton campus is, it seemed to be at the centre of bibliographic research in Australia, something I wanted to be a part of. (Long-time members will also realise that in June 1993 I managed to meet four of the past-editors of the BSANZ Bulletin: Harold, Brian, Ross and Ian.)

And so, though the news was by no-means unexpected, it is with great sadness that I read Clive's email concerning Harold this morning. It may be too early to write an obituary for Harold, and it is certainly too late to add one to S&P 30.3, but members should expect something in S&P 30.4.