BOOK COLLECTORS IN AUSTRALIA, during their book hunting endeavours, will no doubt have encountered books bearing the bookplate or book stamp of a School of Arts or Mechanics’ Institute. These institutions were, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, a most important feature of Australian social and local history.
Category: Geoffrey Burkhardt
IT IS NEITHER RELATIVE nor absolute scarcity which makes collecting Australian school centenary and jubilee histories a challenge for the bibliophile, local historian and educational historian, since stacks of copies of published school histories lie unsold and neglected in school storerooms across Australia.
I HAVE TAKEN the title of this brief perusal of some of the more recent catastrophes which have caused the destruction of books from a reference first published in 1886, The Enemies of Books, written by William Blades, reprinted in 19021. The traditional enemies of books have long been acknowledged to be fire, flood, looters and insect pests.