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Libraries & Culture 37.3 (2002) 292-293



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Book Review

The Culture of the Book:
Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop


The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop. Edited by members of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1999. xxx, 474 pp. $75.00. ISBN 0-95982717-X.

I am happy to report that bibliology is alive and well Down Under. The present volume does honor not only to Professor Kirsop but to the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, of which this is Occasional Publication no. 8. Many famous scholars, and some not so famous but who doubtless will be, have contributed to this rich sampler (the titles have been shortened and are given in English):

J. M. Emmerson, ". . . A Book Is Known by the Company It Keeps"
C. Fahy, "Italian Presses and Printing Techniques in the Hand-Press Period"
H.-J. Martin, "Notes on François Juste"
D. Desgraves, "Simon Millanges, Humanist Printer"
J.-F. Gilmont, "The Survival of Early Calvin Editions"
I. Willison, an essay on the ESTC
F. Weil, "French Printers during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century"
M.-T. Isaac, "A Bibliographical Course Proposed in Mons at the End of the Eighteenth Century"
A. Jammes, "Didot Types"
B. J. McMullin, "Cazin Octodecimos"
A. Rosenberg, "Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes: Preliminary Checklist of [Early] Editions"
M. Sankey and M. King, "Authorship in Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage dans la lune"
J. Barrows and H. Love, "Did Behn Write 'Caesar's Ghost'?"
D. L. Vander Meulen, "Editorial Principles of Martinus Scriblerus"
H. Amory, "Two Versions of Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon"
J.-A. McEachern and D. Smith, "First Editions of Graffigny's Cénie"
D. Kahn, "In Search of the True Songe vert"
G. Barber, "Acquiring Enlightenment: Oxford and the Encyclopédie"
B. T. Brown, "French Geological Research and Richard Kirwan"
P. Davison, "Orwell and the French"
A. Sauvy, "The Story of a Shepherdess"
D. Garrioch, "Reading in Eighteenth-Century Paris" [End Page 292]
C. P. Courtney, "Literary and Book History and Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes"
A. Martin, "Generic Bibliography and French Prose Fiction under Napoleon"
R. E. Stoddard, "A Bibliographical Notebook: E. P. de Senancour"
L. M. David, "Remaindering in the Early Paris Book Trade"
M. Lyons, "Reading and Writing Practices: Love Letters and Intimate Writings in Nineteenth-Century France and Australia"
E. Webby, "[Books] in Early Colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land"
B. Hubber, "John Carfrae in Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Sydney"
I. Morrison, "The Strange History of the Victorian Almanac"
K. I. D. Maslen, "A Nineteenth-Century Regional Library System for Otago and Southland"
R. Harvey, "Some Trans-Tasman Connections in the Book Trade"
M. J. Edwards, "Canadian Books in Australia, Nineteenth Century"
I. Barko, "The Courrier australien, 1892-1905"
P. Eggert, "G. M. Hervey and the Bulletin of the 1900s"

The titles alone whet the appetite. The recurrent theme of this book is the history of the book trades, and there is much in it to interest the readers of Libraries & Culture, whether they deal directly with the topic of book collections or with peripheral subjects centered on Australia and New Zealand and especially Europe. Indeed, the book is nearly exclusively Eurocentric, a comment not meant as a criticism. The "austral lands" are not forgotten, of course, but they are largely viewed through a European lens.

In a review with space limitations, it is impossible to do justice to all of the contributions. I particularly enjoyed Angus Martin's analyses of French prose fiction during the Napoleonic period. His statistics and comments will surely pave the way for renewed interest in the genre during the early years of romanticism, a subject sadly ignored by critics in general and too often misunderstood when broached. Informative is Maslen's study of a nineteenth-century library system that mushroomed after the discovery of gold in Otago, New Zealand, in 1861. Emmerson plunges the reader into the intricacies...

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