Wallace Kirsop

GeRMAN SCIeNCe IN NINeTeeNTH-CeNTURY AUSTRALIAN LIBRARIeS

Between Bligh’s disdain for Robert Townson’s books at the beginning of the century and C.W. Holgate’s 1886 commentary on the collections of the Melbourne Public Library, there is evidence of deficiencies in Australian holdings of materials derived from the German states and from the Austrian Empire. Consideration of private collections, of the roles played by individuals in developing research institutes, learned societies and community libraries and ultimately of the efforts made by university leaders to equip and enhance a culture of scientific investigation leads to the conclusion that the German or Prussian model was beginning to dominate by the turn of the twentieth century.

Market Forces and Modernisation in the French Book Trade in the Last Century of the ‘Ancien Régime’ and in the Early Nineteenth Century: Some Reflections on the Emergence of the Publisher’s Series

A resolutely ambitious title needs to be explained, if only in a summary fashion. It must be conceded that it is difficult to do justice in a brief chapter to a cluster of questions about the way in which the book trade in France, and in Western Europe generally, made the transition from a tightly controlled guild structure to more open systems and even to laissez-faire capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century.

Sir Charles Nicholson and his book collections

Sir Charles Nicholson, first Chancellor of the University of Sydney, is known as a major benefactor of that institution both during his time in Australia (before 1862) and afterwards, up to and beyond his death in 1903. The paper looks first at the scattered records concerning the gifts and legacies of printed books and manuscripts. It then turns to the substantial library Nicholson dispersed at an auction sale in Melbourne in May 1861 and what can be discovered about 6,000 volumes bought by private collectors and by Victorian institutions.