1999 Arts Handbook - Centre for the Book

Centre for the Book

Centre for the Book
Members of staff and their fields of special interest

Centre for the Book

Director: Associate Professor Wallace Kirsop
The Centre for the Book succeeds the Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, which was established late in 1981 to coordinate and expand long-standing activities in textual editing, enumerative and descriptive bibliography and printing, publishing and bookselling history being carried out within the university. The committee charged with the management of the new centre includes people from the Department of English and from other areas in the Faculty of Arts.
Members of staff associated with the centre are taking major responsibilities in the Australia's Book Heritage Resources Project (formerly the Early Imprints Project, aimed at producing a machine-readable catalogue of all pre-1801 letterpress items held in Australia), in the publications program of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, whose Bulletin has had a long association with the university, and in the working of the Ancora Press, a bibliographical handpress in the basement of the Main Library. The centre is the national headquarters for HOBA, the History of the Book in Australia project, a major collaborative research program for which detailed planning commenced in 1992. The rare book room in the university library and a respectable collection of secondary material, including backruns of the major bibliographical journals, support the centre's research and teaching.
The centre has a publishing program, which includes the management of Naturae, an occasional publication touching broadly upon the history, literature, biography, bibliophily, and fine art of natural history. It is involved in joint publication with other bodies, such as the National Centre for Australian Studies and the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.
The centre organises regular seminars given by visiting bibliographers and 'work-in-progress' seminars for the benefit of staff and students.
Special workshops in bibliography and textual editing are occasionally offered to graduate students from Monash and beyond. The first took place in May 1985.
Graduate students enrolled for the MA or PhD in any associated department or faculty are welcome to participate in the centre's work. In particular they should find in and through it help and advice with problems in textual editing and physical bibliography. Inquiries should be addressed to the head of the centre.

Members of staff and their fields of special interest

JOHN ARNOLD Australian literature; booktrade and publishing history; cultural studies (National Centre for Australian Studies).
PHILIP AYRES Editing of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts; theory and practice of editing; eighteenth-century private libraries; Regency and early Georgian binders (English).
DAVID GARRIOCH The history of reading; European urban history, 1600-1900; social and cultural history of eighteenth-century France; French Revolution (History).
WALLACE KIRSOP Physical bibliography and booktrade history, with reference to France in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; nineteenth-century Australian booktrade history (Romance Languages).
HAROLD LOVE Seventeenth-century literature and drama, with reference to the manuscript heritage; bibliography and textual criticism; the history of authorship and the history of reading; the theory and practice of editing; Australian cultural and intellectual history (English).
BRIAN MCMULLIN Book production, particularly in England and Scotland in the seventeenth to the nineteenth century (Librarianship, Archives and Records, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology).
CONSTANT MEWS Mediaeval manuscript and textual studies; cultural and religious history, especially of the twelfth century (History).
CAROL WILLIAMS Australian music history; mediaeval and Renaissance music; time and music; word-music relationships; early music theory (Music).