In these two glossy illustrated books, libraries are represented by Hofer as static works of art, while Barreneche sees museums as “theme parks” competing for a slice of the public’s leisure time and disposable income.
Category: 2006-March Issue
2006-03
Dr Tim Bonyhady, in his Introduction to the National Library’s profusely illustrated catalogue National Treasures, notes that, “exhibitions of ‘treasures’ have a long, though interrupted, history. They were first staged in the 1850s and the 1860s, then again from the 1970s. In both periods the public response has been immense, turning several exhibitions into blockbusters”.
Patrick White (1912-1990) is one of Australia’s greatest writers and was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Hubber and Smith’s excellent descriptive bibliography of this controversial figure, both in letters and politics, has been in preparation for some considerable time. Indeed, it began while Patrick White was still alive. As the authors state in their introduction, White was sympathetic towards the bibliography but it did not assume the importance for him of his biography, namely David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life (Random House, 1991).
The hands that signed the papers could be a subtitle for this extremely attractively presented volume which reproduces correspondence, documents and autographs from a chronological span of over eight hundred years. The book is based on the collection of Brazilian, Pedro Correa Do Lago, President of the National Library of Brazil Foundation, who has been collecting autographs for over thirty-five years.