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

Citation

Day, A. (2001), "The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 99-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.2.99.7

Featuring 35 scholarly essays, 11 in the French language, all of them adorned with copious notes, citations, and references, this Festschrift was presented to Wallace Kirsop on his retirement from the Department of Romance Languages in Monash University in 1998. It also forms a tribute from the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand to its foundation president. Kirsop’s academic attainments, his scholarly activities, and his panoramic erudition are awesome, enviable, and reminiscent of a time when scholarship was not confined to knowing more and more about less and less. Editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies for 30 years, active in the History of the Book in Australia project, the Sanders Readership in Bibliography at Cambridge, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, founder editor of Explorations, the biannual journal of the Institute for the Study of French‐Australian Relations, his university teaching embraced French literature and language, publishing in Australia, and bibliography.

The Festschrift opens with a personal and professional appreciation of Kirsop by Harold Love, one of his colleagues at Monash and a fellow academician. This is followed by a list of his publications, 260 in all, ranging chronologically from an article in Ambix: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (1961) to some reflections on recent research in Book History (1998) providentially encapsulating the broad range of his academic interests. The diverse essays focus on the role of the book in the culture of the day (Fiction, Readers and Libraries in Early Colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land) but also admit French printing history (Les Caractères Typographiques “Didot”. Hégémonie d’un Style), unusual first editions (The First Edition of Madame de Graffigny’s Cénie), and literary history (The Peregrinations of Sam Slick; or, Glimpses of Canadian Books in Australia in the Nineteenth Century).

But the two essays the reviewer turned to first were Peter Davison’s “Orwell, France and the French”, and Ian Willison’s “The English Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue in the Context of the International Programmes for Universal Bibliographic Control and Universal Availability of Publications”, both fields which, at one time, were of strong personal interest. One by the co‐editor of the 20‐volume Collected Works of George Orwell, the other blazing a trail through an acronymic jungle as ESTC interfaces with the modern world or, in Willison’s words proving “that sustained effective collaboration between scholar and research librarian is the one thing needful for the advancement of learning”. As Festschriften go this has to be one of the most erudite and readable examples published in the last few years. Full marks to the contributors, the editors, the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand and, not least, the distributors, Oak Knoll Press. Wallace Kirsop must be delighted with it.