A history of the book in Australia, 1891-1945 : a national culture in a colonised market (original) (raw)

2001, University of Queensland Press eBooks

These volumes of book and publishing history represent one of the most significant contributions to cultural history in Australia over the last decade. They are also part of a remarkable growth in book and publishing history over roughly the same period in a number of other national contexts. Other large book history projects include the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, five out of a planned seven volumes published so far, about how 'our knowledge of the past derives from texts' and the five-volume History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l'imprimé au Canada project going since the early 1990s (http://www.hbic.library.utoronto.ca/home\_en.htm). These biblio-genome projects are all run by dispersed teams of historians, literary scholars, librarians, and information specialists and aim to define Britain's and Canada's places within an international network of book history studies. Such projects, like the History of the Book in Scotland, established at Edinburgh University in 1995, are often aligned with ongoing bibliographical databases. The Cambridge book history covers 1,500 years while the Canadian project, like the Australian one, is divided into the stages of settlement: beginnings to 1840; 1840-1918; and 1918 to 1980. Coeval with these national projects has been the development of the annual journal Book History (from 1998) and the thriving international scholarly forum, The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, created in 1991 to provide a global network for print historians, who up till then had often worked in isolation. SHARP now convenes an annual international conference and has more than 1,200 members in over 40 countries, including 'historians, literary scholars, librarians, sociologists, scholars and professionals working in publishing studies, classicists, bibliophiles, booksellers, art historians, reading instructors, and both university-based and independent scholars'. The SHARP website provides links to more than 80 'Book History Projects and Scholarly Societies' (http://www.sharpweb.org/). It's no coincidence that this moment should also have produced, in what is perhaps the nostalgic autumn of the Gutenberg era, a Companion to the History of the Book (eds Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 2009), Alberto Manguel's loving celebration The Library at Night (2008) and histories of bibliocide like Fernando Baez's A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: from Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (2008), all universal in scope.