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| By-law 7 (1906) |
Our library is an artefact of a time when libraries were
regarded as stores of books established to facilitate access to knowledge and
entertainment.
As libraries become increasingly able to access digital
surrogates to meet those same needs many have taken the opportunity to reduce
their physical stock, repurpose their spaces, and expand their offering. Their
emphasis is increasingly on the creation of social spaces, the facilitation of
information literacy and the provision of aids to the navigation of electronic
resources.
Retrospective digitisation projects, most famously, Google
Books, have the potential to make the contents of any book available anywhere
and at any time.
Taken to its logical conclusion, could this mean that reading
in the future could rely on the preservation of
single copies of traditional printed books – stored somewhere as an
"insurance population" – that all students, researchers, seekers of
information and recreational readers could access via a digital surrogate?
Where would such an outcome leave a collection like ours –
large in comparison to similar surviving collections, but tiny by global
measures?
Our argument has always been that it is the totality of the
collection that gives it significance and its principal research value. The LMI
collection is primarily of historical significance because it comprises the
larger part of the library of a major and enduring mechanics institute in an
important regional city, and thus it illuminates the reading habits,
information sources and interests of a colonial city, as well as its inter-colonial,
British Empire and international connections over a century.
Individual items in the collection provide evidences of subject
interest areas, collecting priorities and biases, reading tastes and organising
principles.
Some of the research could be undertaken simply by reference
to a list of the books in the collection – our series of printed catalogues or
accession registers for example.
But a great deal more can only be revealed by the physical
item itself. A book can sit on the shelf in a public library and never be read,
or it can be heavily used. Inspection of the book can reveal marks of use and
handling, evidence of rebinding, details of provenance such as previous owners'
inscriptions and booksellers' labels, from which the history of that particular
copy may be deduced.
Bibliographers have become increasingly interested in discovering
evidence of how the reader interacted with the book and with the text.
There has been a focus on marginalia in recent years as one
window to those interactions.
The Book Traces project, auspiced by the
University of Virginia, seeks out examples of marginalia with this plea;
Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of
the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left pictures, letters, flowers,
locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help
identifying them because many are in danger of being discarded as libraries go
digital. Books printed between 1820 and 1923 are at particular risk. Help us prove the value of maintaining rich
print collections in our libraries.
Much of the focus in the study of marginalia to date has
been on the privately owned book. One owner, one set of annotations, one
response to the book; perhaps intended to be shared with friends, but most commonly
as an aide-de-memoir or a record of argument for the reader.(1)
Marginalia in a library book is however quite a different
beast. Sometimes it is intended as a signal to the library patron that they
have already read the book – a date, an initial or a secret mark left in a
particular place. But often it is a kind of informal review – a tick, a word or
a comment for the edification of potential readers and indecisive borrowers or
even a word of warning to the gullible or the delicate sensibility. And it must
also be a triumph of conviction over caution, because the reader would surely
know how much the librarian abhors the practice.
And so to an example in our collection noticed recently by
an eagle-eyed cataloguer.
The book is Frederick Selous's Sport and Travel; east and
west (1900) an account of hunting expeditions in Asia Minor and the Rocky
Mountains.(2) The book is well-worn and
has been rebound locally in 1936 using portions of the original cloth pasted on
heavy boards. It continued to be borrowed regularly up to 1951.
At the foot of the final page of text is a pasted label,
interesting in its own right as evidence of Mudie's business model and probably
of the way the book was obtained for the Launceston Mechanics' Institute
collection.
Behind the label, and most carefully concealed by it, is the
following handwritten gloss;
The author of this book has the reputation of killing more
big game than any hunter in Africa. How does he come to write this book, full
of blunders, mistakes, & bad shooting. His past experience had taught him
nothing. His shooting in Asia Minor ... would have been his finish had he
performed likewise in Africa among dangerous game.
Crosshatched in lighter pencil, but still behind the veil of
Mudie's label, is a qualified but more positive view;
Probably more careful with the truth than average writers! Less
prone to sensationalism.
There is perhaps a degree of diplomacy in the placement of the comments at the end of the work. The writer cannot be said to have prejudiced the new reader, even if he or she felt it necessary to make their opinion known.
(3) Or perhaps they did not wish their obtrusion to be easily discovered by librarian? Whatever the reason a need to 'air their knowledge' on the subject was satisfied before the book was returned.
One hundred years on, examples of marginalia are a valuable tool
as we research our collection. They are unmistakeable proof that our collection
was read, that readers interacted with the books, and in some cases we can even
capture the exact tenor of that interaction.
Footnotes
1. In 2016 we purchased for our research collection a copy of H. J. Jackson's "Marginalia; readers writing in books (2001)" at a sale of discarded library books for the bargain price of $2.00. Disappointingly the book appeared to have been little used, and, even more disappointingly, there was not a single annotation in it. While Professor Jackson's principal interest was in privately owned books, it was an interesting speculation on the psychology and motivations of annotators, and above all a celebration of the practice. Her examples reveal great minds, e.g. S T Coleridge, interacting with their copies of important texts.
2. In what was a quite small collection of sporting books (only 132 titles) it is interesting from a modern perspective to analyse the mix of sports represented. Cricket and golf, which dominate today's sports book market in Australia, together account for less than 10% of the total. The great interests of the day were fishing (32 titles) and hunting and shooting (38 titles).
3. Notwithstanding our reviewer's opinion, Frederick Selous was the most celebrated of big-game hunters in Southeast Africa and the inspiration for Rider Haggard's fictional Allan Quatermain, and thus for the film character Indiana Jones.
