1. Why did you want to write about the history of Australia’s oldest university press? I relished the opportunity to write about one of Australia’s most important publishers. Many details of MUP’s history are not widely known, and with the press reaching its centenary, the timing for the book was just right. I’ve always been…
Category: library
From Mao to the CIA, how books have been vehicles and victims of war: Sydney Morning Herald review of ‘The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict’
Andrew Pettegree’s latest offering has a lot in common with his 2021 book, The Library: A Fragile History, co-authored with Arthur der Weduwen … From The Book at War we learn that a young Mao Zedong worked in the Beijing University library, recording the names of people who came to read newspapers. Mao had arrived at Beijing having…
Mildura Library, Mildura, Victoria, Australia
A Library Planet post by Fiona Kells The Mildura Library is housed in the Alfred Deakin Centre. The Centre, which was named in honour of Australia’s second Prime Minister, opened in 1997. Up until that time, the Mildura Library had occupied the nearby Carnegie Centre, a grand old dame of a building that opened in…
Philologists, pedants and obsessives: how crowd-sourcing created the Oxford English Dictionary
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a celebration of words and word-people: authors, editors, publishers, linguists, lexicographers, philologists, obsessives, pedants. Its author, Sarah Ogilvie, was formerly an Oxford English Dictionary editor and wrote the 2013 book Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary….
Library tourism by Mark Dapin
One way to get a sense of a country’s cultural touchstones is to visit its libraries — both the famous and lesser-known ones. BY MARK DAPIN Some years ago I was at a conference of international thriller writers (no, I hadn’t known they were a thing either) when a fellow Australian author suggested we visit…
All the Will in the world: Four centuries of the First Folio (State Library of New South Wales)
The 1623 volume, Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, aka the ‘First Folio’, was 400 years old in 2023. Why is it so special? I should begin by putting all my cards on the table. I’m fascinated by Shakespeare and his books, including the First Folio. In the immediate pre-Covid years, I took my…
Friday essay: the library – humanist ideal, social glue and now, tourism hotspot
Stuart Kells, La Trobe University Last year two Danish librarians – Christian Lauersen and Marie Eiriksson – founded Library Planet: a worldwide, crowdsourced, online library travel guide. According to them, Library Planet is meant to inspire travellers “to open the awesome book that is our world of libraries, cities and countries”. The name of the…
The Kyoto International Manga Museum, Kyoto, Japan
A Library Planet post by Annie Wu. Kyoto International Manga Museum was established to gather, preserve and exhibit manga materials and to be a centre for research into manga culture. The space simultaneously serves as a library and a museum, with around 300,000 manga products in its collection, including books, periodicals and woodblock caricature prints….
Disquiet in the archives: archivists make tough calls with far-reaching consequences – they deserve our support
Stuart Kells, La Trobe University Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world’s archivists are suddenly very busy. Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance, authorship and material culture. Two recent discoveries – a woman’s name scratched in the margins of an 8th-century manuscript, and John…
Library Planet 