cultural sensitivities about the past, albeit in different outworkings: whereas in postcolonial Britain we are coming to terms in our libraries with legacies of slavery, Australia is working on relationships with its Indigenous people, and has developed AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) subject headings to describe collections.
We acquire early printed books from the same English vendors; my favourite purchase in Australia came from London, a copy of The Golden Legend (1527), translated by William Caxton, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and bought both as a major mediaeval text and an example of the work of one of England’s first major printers. As in Glasgow’s copy, the story of Thomas a Becket has been crossed out. I catalogued books with reference to Library Hub Discover, including my own contributions to it. Books once united turn up in both places. Encounter- ing the stamp ‘Bibliotheca Heberiana’ in Sydney was no surprise. Richard Heber’s (1773-1833) library of at least 150,000 volumes overran eight houses in England and in Continental Europe. It took 16 sales to disperse it, and the books are now found everywhere. Opening John Frith’s book about Communion (1548) to find the bold twentieth-century ownership inscription of the London politician John Burns (1858-1943) was less expected and a great thrill. Burns’s books about nineteenth and twen- tieth-century British political, economic and social col- lections came to Senate House Library in 1996, while his collection of early English printing was sold by Sotheby’s 1943-44. The familiar signature was a link with home. Visiting other libraries led to the establishment of fur- ther connections. Sydney University, like Senate House Library and a couple of other English repositories, has a collection devoted to Walter de la Mare. Senate House Library houses the library of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London 1787-1809. When Australia was first colonised in 1788, it fell within the Diocese of London. So material pertaining to Porteus is present in Moore Theological College in Sydney.
Not all the similarities are professional. Cake or chocolates left on tables in staff kitchens to share disappear prompt- ly in both countries. We all have our readers who are reluctant to leave when the library closes – sometimes, disturbingly, because they have no homes to go to. Lifts break down or are taken out of service, including the sole lift that travels from the bottom to the top of the building.
Holdings
One result of coming on a secondment from Britain is to realise as never before how very privileged we are in the United Kingdom. Prior to selecting items for a treasures volume for Senate House Library, I recall leafing through older treasures volumes featuring standard landmarks of human thought, ticking them off in my mind: “Yes, we have that – and that – and that …”. Australia does not. Whereas Senate House Library has two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, with at least eight more within a four-mile radius, there is just one copy in all Australia (minus the title page and the verse by Ben Jonson), in the State Library of New South Wales.
Printing by William Caxton is present in an imperfect copy
of Myrrour of the Worlde at the State Library of Victoria and four leaves from other works, divided between Sydney and Melbourne. There are no copies of the 1491 Euclid in the country, and none of the first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543). Last year the State Library of New South Wales acquired a second edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1778), important for its changes from the first
April-May 2024 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 25
The State Library of New South Wales.
edition. It is one of just two copies in the country. The library also purchased the first printed edition of the comedies of Aristophanes (Aldus Manutius, 1498), which are studied and performed in Australia as they are in Britain. Formerly the closest copy of this book, with significant scholia, had been in Japan.
Considering how late printed books came to Australia, how small the book-buying population was, and how far early printed books have had to travel from their place of origin, the wonder is not that
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