AustLit

'John Rae (1813–1900) was an extraordinarily innovative and talented public servant, author, painter, and photographer. A self-taught artist, he became a well-respected figure in colonial Sydney, Australia, as both an art practitioner and as a teacher. Rae was also highly-regarded as a very competent and levelheaded bureaucrat, and so was an important (and rare) figure in the early halls of Australian politics and power. His capacity as well as his determination to provide clear and strategic leadership were on display when he was appointed Town Clerk for the new City of Sydney in 1843 to act as secretary, administrator, and as chief advisor to the City’s Council. In this role he undertook a vast array of activities including the taking of minutes for all of the Council’s meetings.' (Introduction)

'The present decade has brought us major contributions to the history of dustjackets, notably G. Thomas Tanselle, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use and Mark. R. Godburn, Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets. As one might expect, Tanselle's monograph is an exhaustive, admirably informed and impeccably organised introduction to a subject that is now regarded as of central importance in the history of publishing over the last two centuries in the English-speaking world. Predictably Australia plays a minor role in this study, as in Godburn's. Australian sources, individual and institutional-Brian McMullin, Patrick Spedding, Hordern House, Monash University Library and State Library Victoria-, are duly acknowledged for information about items produced in the United Kingdom. One genuine Australian imprint-J. H. Maiden, The Useful Native Plants of Australia (Sydney: Turner and Henderson, 1889)-is listed from a copy in the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Reference is also made to the loan exhibition "Australian Dustwrappers" curated by Jonathan Wantrup for the 25th Australian Antiquarian Book Fair held in Melbourne in November 1998. This included a sole example from the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century: Edward Dyson, Rhymes from the Mines (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1896). Dust-jackets are not mentioned in Jennifer Alison's account of this book, including the detailed statement of costs. One has to assume that their production was subsumed in the printing or binding figure. It would seem that study of the practice of Angus and Robertson and of other Australian publishers of the period has to rely essentially on the very rare preservation-in private rather than public collections-of the material objects themselves. In Paul Eggert's analysis of the advertising of While the Billy Boils he is reduced to conjecture about the exact nature of the "wrappers" ordered for the book since "none appears to have survived."' (Publication abstract)

'At the end of the nineteenth century metal foundry type used for printing books, newspapers and posters was overtaken by automation to the extent that a keyboard operator could compose pages of type and the machine would set and justify the lines without the need for a compositor to set a text by hand.' (Introduction)

'So begins a journey of looking for the lost by learning from the Register about printed texts that no longer survive. Hill offers several examples of how the Register has informed research before revealing her own findings. A set of four chapters explores five different popular genres. One chapter is dedicated to ballads, many of which (even with the determination of some very enthusiastic collectors) have been lost; and this, despite ballads, of entertainment and news, making up nearly 43% of all entries in the Stationers’ Company Register in the 1560s (35). Another chapter is dedicated to news. This is an excellent contribution as many projects investigating printed news have focused primarily on foreign news. Hill’s work unpacks a “number of news markets in early modern England, both for publishers and consumers,” including “foreign news, domestic news, supernatural tales, serial publications and single-issue news items” (100). A third chapter examines religious print, acknowledging the complexities of such publishing in a period of religious upheaval (130). The last genres explored are those of learning and leisure. These two rich veins of enquiry are handled well and illustrate “the variety of print available for early modern readers in England” (166).' (Introduction)