Statement about recent changes at the National Library of New Zealand

The National Library of New Zealand recently announced that they are going “to make more room for the New Zealand, Māori and Pacific collection”. While pleased at the emphasis placed on this important local material, the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand is very concerned about and laments the library’s decision to deaccession hundreds of thousands of books from its overseas published collections in the process.

While we understand the increasing pressures faced by libraries and that difficult decisions must on occasion be made, we find the sheer scale of such loss shocking and the criticism levelled at the library’s actions justified.

BSANZ calls for greater funding and support of physical collections throughout Australasia in order to not only ensure such collections are not further diminished and that other collections do not meet a similar fate.

Véronique Duché

BSANZ President, on behalf of the Executive

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 43 No. 2 (2019)

S and P 43.2Contents:

  • Mary Coe — Canaries in a Coalmine: The Index and the Page in Ebooks
  • Jacqueline McMillan — The Rise of the Bibliomemoir in the Twenty-First Century
  • Rachel Solomon — George Ivan Smith and Henry Handel Richardson: The Making of a Reader
  • Wallace Kirsop — Some New Documents on Commercial Travelling in the French Book Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century
  • Nicholas A. Sparks — Another French Translation of Watkin Tench’s Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay
  • Reviews — An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting and Literary Friendships (Amanda Laugesen); Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture (Per Henningsgaard); Great Catalogues by Master Booksellers. A Selection of American and English Booksellers’ Catalogues, 19th–21st Century (Colin Steele)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 43 No. 1 (2019)

S and P 43.1

Contents:

  • Anna Welch — Introduction
  • Wallace Kirsop — BSANZ: Beginnings and Aspirations
  • Chris Tiffin — BSANZ at Fifty Years: An Address Delivered to the BSANZ 50th Anniversary Seminar, 26 February 2019
  • Donald Kerr — Almost a Decade in Control: BSANZ 2011–2018
  • B. J. McMullin — Stephen Leacock as Exemplum
  • Reviews — The Fox and the Bees: The Early Library of Corpus Christi College Oxford (Shane Carmody); Shakespeare’s Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre (Mark Houlahan)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

In Memoriam: Dennis E. Rhodes

Dear colleagues,

It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Dennis E. Rhodes, 97, former Deputy Keeper of Printed Books at the British Library. Dennis was one of the world’s foremost experts in renaissance and early modern bibliography, especially of Italian material. Throughout his long and distinguished career he published many significant studies, including Incunabula in Greece: A First Census (1980), Studies in Early Italian Printing (1982) and several seminal catalogues of incunabula in British collections. In 1993 he was honoured by his colleagues through the publication of a festschrift, The Italian Book, 1465-1800: Studies Presented to Dennis E. Rhodes on his 70th Birthday​. In 2007, Dennis contributed to a volume honouring his colleague at the British Museum Library/British Library, Ian Willison: The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison, edited by Wallace Kirsop (BSANZ founding member).

Several of his colleagues have shared their memories with me of Dennis’ great kindness towards and mentorship of young bibliographers, which was a hallmark of his career: he was unfailingly generous both with his knowledge and his support of students in practical ways, such as through gifts of useful books.

The world of bibliography is so much the richer for his contribution, and we offer our condolences to his family, friends and colleagues, who will miss him greatly.

You will find many of Dennis’ publications in your library of choice, and you can read two of his articles freely via the British Library site: https://www.bl.uk/eblj/authorindex.html#r​

I trust you are all staying well and keeping safe in this difficult time.

Regards,

Anna Welch
Vice President, BSANZ​

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 42 No. 4 (2018)

S and P 42.4Contents:

  • Helen Bones — Accident or Desire? Linked Archives and the Trans-Tasman Literary Scene
  • B. J. McMullin — The Two Eighth Editions of Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel
  • Patrick Spedding and Peter Pereyra — The Huon Mechanics’ Institute Library, 1858–1990
  • Toby Burrows — Addendum: Another Phillipps Manuscript in Australia
  • Anthony Tedeschi — An Additional Phillipps Manuscript in New Zealand
  • Reviews — Books That Changed History (Paul Tankard); Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible (Anthony Tedeschi); Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750: Studies in Social Rank and Communication (Shef Rogers); Early Modern English Marginalia (Patrick Spedding); Peter Koch Printer: A Descriptive Bibliography (Caren Florance)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 42 No. 3 (2018)

S and P 42 3Contents:

  • Rachel Franks — A Life in the Margins: John Rae and the Early Minute Books of the City of Sydney
  • J. E. Traue — Commercial Circulating Libraries and Recreational Reading in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand: A Re-evaluation
  • Janet Hadley Williams — An Annotated Copy of Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia
  • B. J. McMullin and Carlo Dumontet — Cancellation in Thomas Ford’s Singing of Psalmes the Duty of Christians under the New Testament, 1659
  • Wallace Kirsop — An Early Australian Dust-Jacket
  • Dennis Bryans — Dating D. W. Paterson’s Melbourne Monotype Specimen
  • Reviews — What is the History of the Book? (Anna Welch); How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems (Daniel Anlezark); Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Rachel Franks); A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Elizabeth Webby).

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 42 No. 2 (2018)

S and P 42 2

Contents:

  • Kevin Molloy and Katie Flack — James Shanley of Clonmel: Printer to the Population of Port Phillip, 1841–1857
  • Toby Burrows — The Legacy of Sir Thomas Phillipps in Australia and New Zealand
  • Reviews — Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (Patrick Spedding); Librorum Studiosus: Miscellanea Palaeographica et Codicologica Alberto Derolez Dicata (Rodney Thomson); An Analysis of the 1969 Kroepelien Catalogue (Wallace Kirsop)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 42 No. 1 (2018)

S and P 42 1Contents:

  • Martyn Lyons — Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century
  • Sally Bloomfield — Spruiking Van Diemen’s Land: The Long Reach of a Little Bushranger Book
  • Samir Ricardo and Figalli de Angelo — Exhibition of the Material Book as Object in the Northwest Amazon
  • Review — Études bibliographiques à la mémoire de Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer (Véronique Duché)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.

Latest Issue of Script & Print — Vol. 41 No. 4 (2017)

S and P 41Contents:

  • Wallace Kirsop — Editorial: Providing Printed Matter for Multicultural Australia in the Nineteenth Century
  • Naomi Milthorpe — The Materials of Which I Am Made: Evelyn Waugh and Book Production
  • Tim Gatehouse — Plantation House, St. Helena: An Extant Colonial Library
  • Roger Osborne — ‘An Editor Regrets’: R. G. Campbell’s Australian Journal, 1926–1955
  • Nicholas A. Sparks — The Palæographical Society of Australasia A New Learned Society from the Late Nineteenth Century Dedicated to the Advancement of Palaeography
  • Reviews — A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses (Tadashi Kotake); Printed Books of Hours from Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Texts, the Books, and the Survival of a Long-Lasting Genre (Hilary Maddocks); Empires of Print: Adventure Fiction in the Magazines, 1899–1919 (Merete Colding Smith)

You can subscribe to Script & Print by becoming a BSANZ member.

Alternatively, you can read the latest issue of Script & Print at APA-FT.