2014 AU/ NZ Rare Books Summer School Schedule Announced

[The following was posted on the ANZ Rare Books and Special Collections Librarians listserv by Des Cowley, Rare Printed Collections Manager, State Library of Victoria]

The State Library of Victoria is pleased to announce that the 9TH AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND RARE BOOKS SUMMER SCHOOL is to be held at the STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA, 10-14 FEBRUARY 2014

The Domed Reading Room, State Library
of Victoria (Image: Random Photons blog)

From Book to Building: Architecture and Design from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century
(Instructor: Harriet Edquist)

Palladio’s treatise I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture, 1570) was one of the most influential pattern books in European architectural history, setting out rules for architectural design that were transported across the globe and had currency for three centuries. In the nineteenth century Owen Jones’s treatise The Grammar of Ornament (1856) similarly set the fashion for books on design reform.

Drawing on the State Library’s rich collection of architecture and design publications from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, this course will introduce participants not only to the histories of these books and their authors but also how they influenced some of Melbourne’s most iconic buildings and their interiors.

Harriet Edquist is professor of Architectural History and Director of the RMIT Design Archives at RMIT University. She was curator of the exhibition 'Free, Secular and Democratic: Building the Public Library 1853-1913', at the Murdoch Gallery, State Library of Victoria, 2013-2014.

The Paper Museum: Opening Up Natural History Illustration
(Instructor: John Kean)

The desire to better understand the world through the examination of animals at close range has driven scientific discovery since the Renaissance. The images created over the centuries and preserved in precious volumes comprise a vast ‘paper museum’. From Robert Hooke’s humble flea, as seen through a compound microscope in 1665, to the ‘double elephant’ folios of John James Audubon, rare books provide intimate access to the great minds of science and art.

The State Library's collection encompasses scientific treatises, taxonomic monographs and lavish folios. The volumes reveal the story of exploration, colonisation and scientific advance, as well as shining light on the world's biological diversity. This course will take participants through the history of scientific illustration, while focusing on particular classes of animal, geographic regions and printing techniques. Participants will also have the opportunity to learn directly from contemporary illustrators who maintain time-honoured techniques, with a contemporary twist.

John Kean is currently undertaking a PhD in art history at the University of Melbourne. He is the curator of the touring exhibition 'The Art of Science: remarkable natural history illustrations from Museum Victoria'.

The Poetics of Printing on the Iron Hand-Press
(Instructor: Caren Florence)

Participants in this course will combine the mind, hand and eye with a classic printing process to explore the physical qualities of text. They will experience hand-rolling both wood and metal type and printing on fine papers with an iron hand-press. They will learn to use the type creatively, operate the press safely and control the ink when rolling both small typefaces and large surfaces. The emphasis will be on text as image, with poetry as the main focus.

Caren Florance is a Canberra-based printer. She teaches book arts and letterpress at the Australian National University School of Art and operates the private press Ampersand Duck. Her printing output spans both traditional and less structured textual works.

This course will be held at the Ancora Press studio at Monash University’s Caulfield campus.

Applications
Applications will close on Friday 6 December 2013. Due to the rare and valuable nature of the materials that students will have access to, numbers are strictly limited, and early application is encouraged. Courses will proceed if sufficient applications have been received by Friday 22 November 2013 (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 otherwise in December.

Fees
The fee for each course is A$750. Successful applicants will receive a tax invoice and must pay the full fee by Monday 16 December 2013, by credit card (Visa or MasterCard) or cheque. Confirmation of your place will be made upon receipt of payment.

Further information, along with application form, will shortly appear on the State Library of Victoria website.

For more information, email rbss[@]slv.vic.gov.au.

Update: Shakespeare Folios and Senate House Library

[Posted on SHARP-L by Simon Eliot, Professor of the History of the Book at the School of Advanced Study, University of London]

Decision on Shakespeare Folios
The University of London this evening announced that it will not be continuing with its consultation over the potential sale of four Shakespeare Folios. However, the development of its Senate House Library Special Collections remains a priority.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Adrian Smith, said: “The University has decided to focus its attention on examining alternative ways of investing in the collection. The money raised from any sale would have been used to invest in the future of the Library by acquiring major works and archives of English literature.”

Sir Adrian explained that the decision not to continue with the consultation on the proposed sale had been reached in view of the feedback already received from the academic community.

Ends


James Pestell

Director of Marketing and External Relations University of London Senate House

Petition Against Proposed Sale by Senate House Library of Its Four Shakespeare Folios

[Reposted from The Fine Books Blog]

Word circulated on several electronic discussion lists yesterday that London's Senate House Library--the central library of the University of London--plans to sell four Shakespeare Folios at a Bonhams auction this November. The immediate effect of the sale would be to create an endowment in order to attract more readers and push for restoration of government funding lost in 2006.

Professor H.R. Woudhuysen at Lincoln College, Oxford, sent a long letter last week to Christopher Pressler, director of Senate House Libraries, responding to Pressler's request for 'support' in his decision to sell the folios. Woudhuysen, also vice-president of the Bibliographical Society and co-general editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book wrote, "I have come to the conclusion that I am not able to offer the support that you seek and that I am entirely against any such move." He goes on to say, "On the basis of the documents that I have seen, it seems to me that the sale and its implications have not been thought through properly and that the Trustees have already taken a decision to sell the books through Bonhams, making any public consultation merely decorative. The decision will, I hope, attract a great deal of opposition from supporters of Senate House and if executed, it will, I fear, make many who are supporters of the library and possible donors to it turn their charitable interests elsewhere."

Book historians and special collections librarians on the ExLibris and SHARP-L lists (and Twitter) noted that this type of "asset stripping" in collections is hardly new and should be carefully scrutinized. Library-donor relations are a major theme of this conversation, as many wonder how to trust a library that renegotiates the status of a gift fifty and one hundred years on. The folios in question were donated to the university by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956; as a group, the four have been together since the 1830s. The SHL's website calls the Sterling collection, "an unusually integrated resource for research on the transmission of English literary texts from the 14th century to the present day."

While Professor Woudhuysen did receive a "bland reply" from Pressler in response to his letter, the SHL has not issued an official statement on the auction. A request for comment sent to Mr. Pressler yesterday has not yet received a reply. 

Today, The Bibliographical Society joined the debate by starting a petition that urges the SHL to "reconsider the proposed sale of its first four Shakespeare Folios." After signing his support on that page, antiquarian bookseller Laurence Worms commented, "I teach at the London Rare Books School at Senate House. This proposal damages the very basis of all we try to do."

Library Discovery Sheds Light on Indigenous Australian Languages

[By Nate Pedersen, posted on Fine Books Blog]

'Map of New South Wales as Occupied by Native Tribes'

Serendipity has always played an important role in the lives of book collectors and scholars. One day Dr. Michael Walsh, a linguistics professor at the University of Sydney, was browsing through the stacks at Mitchell Library, Sydney, (part of the State Library of New South Wales) when he randomly pulled down an object that looked like a codex, but was actually a box containing two notebooks. After flipping through several pages of "doodles," Walsh stopped at page seven, intriguingly entitled "A short vocabulary of the natives of Raffles Bay." Walsh soon realized he had stumbled across a guide to a lost language from the aboriginal people settled near the coast in Australia's Northern Territory.

The notebook, written by the Victorian colonist Charles Tyres, was entirely unknown to modern scholars.

Using that find as a launching pad, Walsh instigated a two year research project trolling through 14km worth of colonial manuscripts in search of mention of the lost or endangered indigenous languages of Australia.

The Australian government estimates that 145 aboriginal languages are still spoken around the country today, with a further 110 hovering at the edge of extinction. Walsh's research project has contributed to the knowledge of 100 of these native languages. One of his favorite finds was a 130 page, tri-language dictionary in German, Diyari, and Wangkangurru, the later two being aboriginal languages from the north-east part of the South Australia state. 

The next step of Walsh's research project is to disseminate the findings to the aboriginal people around Australia who still speak these languages, or are culturally descended from the native speakers. The Mitchell Library also hopes to digitize the findings, if granted the appropriate cultural approvals, making them accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

'In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections'

[This was a project I was fortunate enough to be involved in before leaving New Zealand. Well done to Tom McLean and Shef Rogers (Department of English, University of Otago) for putting together such a great course based on primary material, and many congratulations to the students, who really took ownership of the assignment.]

Cover design by Elicia Milne and Jon Thom 

In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections
By the Otago Students of Letters
Published by the Department of English, University of Otago, 2013 

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many female authors challenged societal expectations. Everyone knows about Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, but Austen and Shelley’s contemporaries included leading women novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, historians and philanthropists. In Her Hand presents more than fifty previously unpublished letters written by eleven of these women: Anna Barbauld, Hannah More, Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Lucy Aikin, Amelia Opie, Lady Byron, Felicia Hemans, Anna Jameson and Maria Jane Jewsbury. Little known today, most of these women were household names to British readers two hundred years ago. 

But what also makes In Her Hand distinctive is the fact that these letters have been hidden away in public library collections in New Zealand—in Auckland, Wellington, Invercargill, and especially Dunedin. Had they been in US or UK collections, many of these letters would have been published long ago.

Furthermore, the authors of this book are not professional academics but rather eleven University of Otago English honours students who enrolled in the class ENGL404: Writing For Publication. The course was coordinated by Dr Tom McLean, who has published on many of the writers featured in the collection and thus could check the accuracy of students’ work; and Dr Shef Rogers, who edits the journal Script & Print and the New Zealand Colonial Texts series and oversaw the technical and editorial sides of the book’s production.

Over the course of a single semester, students examined the lives and works of their writers, transcribed the letters (often a challenge in itself), and identified important information relating to the letters. When their own research hit a dead end, McLean put the students in contact with expert scholars in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, who generously shared their knowledge of these women writers. Students also shared in the production work: choosing fonts, creating a cover, checking proofs, organizing permissions for images, assembling introductory material and creating an index. As a result, the “Otago Students of Letters” (as they call themselves) have had an amazing opportunity to work with rare, unpublished manuscripts, and to be involved in all aspects of book production.

In Her Hand is the perfect introduction to a group of remarkable and rediscovered British women writers. Each chapter offers a short biography, transcriptions of the new letters and a discussion of their significance. The letters range in theme from publishing and literary endeavours to spiritual and family concerns. Anyone interested in British literature in the era of Austen, Shelley, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron will find these letters fascinating.

In Her Hand is available from the Department of English (order form). Follow this link for a sample of the text.

600 Years of Italian Books Exhibition, University of Melbourne

The latest exhibition in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, is ‘Libri: Six Centuries of Italian Books from the Baillieu Library’s Special Collections’. The display, on view in the Leigh Scott Gallery, is in connection with Melbourne Rare Book Week, and highlights the university’s recent acquisition of the first edition of Aldus Manutius’s typographical masterpiece, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), which takes centre stage.

Polia and Poliphilo (centre) enter the Garden of Venus (Chap. 24)

Among the fifty-two items on display are: an illuminated fourteenth-century Gradual leaf attributed to a follower of the Perugian artist Matteo di Ser Cambio, early editions of works by Machiavelli, Palladio, Vasari and Leonardo da Vinci, and later texts by such authors as Alessandro Manzoni, Italo Svevo and Primo Levi, and the futurists F. T. Marinetti and Bruno Munari. Case themes cover politics, literature and the arts, travel, humanism and futurism, and Italians living in Australia, such as the Melbourne-based visual artists Bruno Leti and Angela Cavalieri, whose respective works Imago Mundi (2002; with text by Alan Loney) and Inri (2005) are on display.

An Italian-themed exhibition would not be complete without a cookbook, in this case a seventeenth-century edition of the great Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera dell'arte del cucinare (Venice, 1610)

It would be remiss (negligente is more appropriate) of me to write a post about an exhibition of Italian books and not note that 2013 marks the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's The Prince and the 700th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Boccaccio, perhaps best known for his allegorical work The Decameron. 

Books relating to both authors are on display, such as Frederick the Great's Examen du Prince de Machiavel (The Hague, 1741), an Italian edition of The Prince (Milan, 1928) with a preface by Benito Mussolini, a sixteenth-century edition of Boccaccio's mythography La geneologia de gli dei de gentili (Venice, 1569), in which he attempts to untangle the genealogy of the Greek and Roman pantheons, and J. M. Rigg's translation of The Decameron, published in Sydney by Angus and Robertson in 1941.

The exhibition runs until 15 September, after which the gallery will be closed for redevelopment. Follow this link to view a selection of the exhibits.

Upcoming Rare Book/ Bibliographical Events in Australia

I'm back with a few announcements. Still settling in and finding my way in Melbourne, but I hope to return to a normal blogging schedule in a few weeks' time. Until then...

The Melbourne Rare Book Week kicks off on 18 July and culminates with the three-day Rare Book Fair (26‒28 July). Over twenty events and exhibitions are scheduled across the city, from book culture in nineteenth-century Melbourne and private press printing, to six centuries of Italian books and collectors/ collecting. Among the many highlights is a public lecture by Travis McDade, curator of Law Rare Books at the University of Illinois, called 'The Book Theft Century: A Lament', hosted by the Melbourne Law School (McDade's latest book Thieves of Book Row was published last month. Review in the Los Angeles Times).

The 2012 Melbourne Rare Book Fair, Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne
Photo from the ANZAAB Rare Book Fair Facebook page

And if that was not exciting enough, on Sunday, 21 July, renowned scholar Professor Ian Donaldson will conduct a two-hour masterclass on the creation and history of the Shakespeare Folios, hosted by the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts and Baillieu Library. On display will be a copy of the Second Folio (1632), courtesy of the University of Melbourne special collections. The registration fee is $80.00 AUD. Spaces are limited and will surely fill up quickly.

Coming up in November...

The annual conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (20‒22 November). Hosted by the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, the theme of this year's conference is 'Bibliography in the Digital Age'. Abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute presentations are now being accepted.

State Library of New South Wales
Photo from Wikipedia