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

Farewell, New Zealand, and Hello, Australia

A quick note to say Antipodean Footnotes will be on hiatus for a while. I am relocating to Melbourne, Australia, on 10 June, and starting in a new position (Deputy Curator, special collections, University of Melbourne) on 24 June.

I'll be back with new posts once settled into my new role.

Samuel Pepys, William Hewer & Ogilby's Bible

On 23 February, I wrote about a copy of Richard Knolles's Turkish History (London, 1687) owned and inscribed by Samuel Pepys (1633‒1703) to highlight the 380th anniversary of the great book collector's birth. 2013 also marks the 310th anniversary of Pepys's death on 26 May 1703. To note the occasion, this week's post describes a second book from the Dunedin City Library's Heritage Collections associated with (but not owned by) Pepys.

Pepys's Final Years

The Dunedin copy of Knolles's Turkish History was inscribed by Pepys sometime in the latter half of 1690 after his brief imprisonment on suspicions of Jacobitism. Eleven years later, he retired from public life and left London for a house in Clapham Common, Surrey. Pepys spent the remaining years of his life there, living with his trusted friend and fellow naval administrator, William Hewer (1642–1715) (Pepys's wife Elisabeth died in 1669). Hewer, who was appointed executor of Pepys's will, was once one of his menservants and is mentioned numerous times in Pepys's diary. Pepys's renowned library (now at Magdalene College, Cambridge) was kept in Hewer's home from 1703 to 1724.

1660 Cambridge Bible

The Heritage Collections holds a book from Hewer's personal library, which was widely dispersed after his death. It is a copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible in folio, printed for John Field and illustrated by John Ogilby ( ESTC R17044). The edition ‘marked the beginning of illustrated Bibles for the high end of the market .… Ogilby first presented a copy to the House of Commons, then extracted a payment of ₤50 for it’ (Van Eerde 46). The engraved title-page of Solomon enthroned is 'blatantly … royalist, for it is difficult not to see the long-haired king as Charles II, and the twelve small lions as twelve apostolic spaniels’ (Norton 148).

The 1660 Cambridge Bible is noted in Pepys’s diary (27 May 1667): 

‘There come also Richardson, the bookbinder, with one of Ogilby’s bibles in quires for me to see and buy, it being Mr. Cade’s, my stationer’s; but it is like to be so big that I shall not use it, it being too great to stir up and down without much trouble, which I shall not like nor do intend it for’ (8:237–8). Indeed, no copy is recorded in the Pepys Library catalogue.

Could the Dunedin copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible be the very one mentioned in the diary, passed up by Pepys, but bought by Hewer? 

Hewer's bookplate, found on the verso of the title-page of the 1660
Book of Common Prayer (issued with the Bible; ESTC R31275)*

It is impossible to know for certain without documentary evidence, but the idea is at least plausible. The large folio was expensive, possibly as much as £25 when published, even in sheets, which would have normally put the book out of reach for a clerk like Hewer earning £30 per annum.

Hewer, however, was not limited by his salary. According to Robert Latham, Hewer may have inherited money from his father, who died in 1665 (Diary, 10:183). His uncle, Robert Blackborne (d.1701), became secretary to the East India Company in December 1666 (ODNB), and Hewer amassed a large fortune built on trade as a result. His gift in January 1668 of a diamond necklace to Elisabeth Pepys worth £40 is evidence enough that the Bible was far from being beyond his means in 1667 (10:183).

Provenance Continued...
Hewer died in 1715. Much of his property, including the house and contents in Clapham Common, passed to his godson, who died without issue in 1728.

Hewer's books were sold in April 1730, along with the libraries of Thomas Hobart M.D. and the Reverend John Hancocke, prebendary of Canterbury. While the auction catalogue records a copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible bound in three volumes with the capital letters illuminated (lot 1178), this description does not match the Dunedin copy, which is bound in two volumes with plain capital letters. It is presumed that the three-volume Bible belonged to either Hobart or Hancocke (the catalogue does not specify the former owners of each lot), and that the two-volume Hewer copy was sold or given as a gift before the sale.

Though the immediate owner after Hewer remains unknown, the Bible did not travel far from its Surrey home. Both volumes include the bookplate of William Brightwell Sumner (1728–1796), a member of the East India Company, who purchased Hatchlands Park, Surrey, from the literary hostess and member of the Bluestockings, Frances Boscawen (1719–1809) in 1770.

Further provenance evidence is sadly lacking until the twentieth century, when the Bible was acquired by Sir Alfred Reed and donated by him to the Dunedin Public Library in 1950. The date and source of acquisition have gone unrecorded. 

--

** Hewer's bookplate was only the second bookpile bookplate designed in 1699. The other was for Sir Philip Sydenham, 3rd Baronet (1676–1739), whose own plate was based on a 1698 bookpile bookplate designed by Pepys for Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford. See Brian North Lee's 'Gentlemen and Their Book-plates' in Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library 1620–1920 edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, England: St. Paul Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996): 42–76.

References
Robert Latham (gen. ed.). Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 6 vols. (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978–1987: 1:14–17 (Bibles).  

Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds.). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970–1983). 

Katherine S. Van Eerde. John Ogilby and the Taste of his Times (Folkenstone: Dawson, 1976). Cited in David Norton, The King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148.

David Norton. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Upcoming Rare Book Auctions - Australia

~ On 27 and 28 May, in three sessions, Australian Book Auctions offers 'Voyages and Travels and other Books and Documents'. The three books bringing the highest estimates are: a large paper copy of Matthew Flinders's A Voyage to Terra Australis (London, 1814), at $80,000 to $100,000 AUD (lot 33); an uncut copy in original boards of James Maria Magra's A Journal of a Voyage Round the World, in His Majesty's Ship Endeavour (London, 1771) with the suppressed Dedication leaf, expected to bring between $120,000 and $160,000 AUD (lot 55); and a first edition of the Second Voyage Round the World (London, 1776), a surreptitious account of Cook's 1772–1775 voyage, bound in red morocco from the Admiralty Office Library, listed at $80,000 to $120,000 AUD (lot 63).

A PDF of the catalogue can be viewed here.

~ The first Sydney Rare Book Auctions sale in their new premises is scheduled for 1 June. More than 400 lots will be on offer, including what is described as a 'clean, bright and crisp' copy of the first complete edition of James De Carle Sowerby and Edward Lear's Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles Drawn from Life (London, 1872), with three plain and 57 hand-coloured plates.

Catalogue not yet available on-line.