National Library of Australia - Gateways>

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 51| June 2001


100th Birthday BookSearch

To mark the National Library of Australia’s 100th Anniversary, the Library is conducting a 100th Birthday BookSearch, in association with The Australian newspaper, to identify the whereabouts of key items not yet held in the Library’s Collection.

The Library has identified missing items and placed them on a desiderata list which is divided into nine sections:

· Australiana 1875–1950

The history of publishing in and about Australia is comparatively short—spanning just over 200 years of white settlement and including earlier speculation about the Great South Land and European voyages of discovery. While the National Library has the largest collection of Australian printed material in the world, there are some books which are missing from the collection, and which it would like to acquire and preserve.

· Australian sheet music

The Library’s collection of printed music is particularly strong in Australian music, with an outstanding collection of nineteenth-century materials. The Library is continuing to build a comprehensive collection of 20th-century music published in or relating to Australia.

· Books by Rosa Praed

Rosa Praed (1851–1935) was a prolific author and ‘a most unusual woman’. Born into frontier Queensland at a time when settlers lived in isolation, she was to spend her adult life in the literary, artistic and political circles of London. As a young woman, moving in the squattocracy circles of Brisbane, and later in London, as a member of Oscar Wilde’s bohemia, Rosa kept notes of the characters and conversations around her. Her 45 books show evidence of her keen and intelligent observation.

Rosa’s story is a rich and dramatic one, full of psychological interest. The Library holds many of Rosa Praed’s books (sometimes attributed as Mrs Campbell Praed), but there are a number that it has been unable to obtain, and would like to have.

· Children’s books

· Magazines and journals

Does your home have Australian Style? Are you a connoisseur of Australian Good Taste? Do you read Elle (Australian edition)? Are your bookshelves bending under the weight of Gardening Australia? The National Library collects all magazines published in Australia. The publishers provide them to the Library free of charge under the legal deposit provisions of the Copyright Act, 1968. However, when issues are missed, lost or damaged, gaps result in the Library’s collection. With shorter print runs and the passage of time, the Library finds it increasingly difficult to obtain replacement copies of missing issues.

· Menus

Those interesting items everyone enjoys reading. Menus are produced for many occasions and tell us about our society through their design and the types of food and wines offered on them. The Library is interested in acquiring special occasion menus, menus from restaurants in other countries with an Australian flavour, shipping line menus, airline menus and restaurant menus in general.

· Maps

WANTED!!! Camel, bridle and stock route maps, early exploration plans and town plans of towns and cities across Australia. The movement of stock, goods and people across Australia during the nineteenth century happened on the backs of horses and camels. Tracks of these routes can still be found, but do the maps exist? Or the glorious poster maps, many in bright colours, of the early land developers around Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Adelaide and Perth and their hinterlands? The Library is currently seeking both published and unpublished Australian maps, or maps published overseas relating to Australia.

· Multicultural materials

These include publications produced by multicultural organisations or by individuals from ethnic backgrounds. These publications may be in the ethnic language and may be works of fiction, poetry, prose, or memoirs. In addition, the Library collects multicultural/ethnic newspapers, journals and newsletters produced by various organisations and overseas publications, usually in the ethnic language, written by persons resident in Australia, or published overseas and about life in Australia.

· Overseas rarities

Specific items the Library is searching for can be found on the Library’s web site at www.nla.gov.au/collect/booksearch.html.

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au

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