Bookcover artwork from 1895

 

Up at the Athenaeum, I've been pressing on with the guerrilla cataloguing exercise, and I came across this rather battered 1895 edition of Dorothy Forster by Walter Besant - popular in his time for his historical romances and more or less forgotten now.

However, the book is interesting for two reasons - the use of colour on the cover and the fact that this is an Australian edition published by George Robertson & Co.

The history of Australian publishing in the 1890's is confusing with two George Robertsons, one of whom at one time worked for the other, but were not related to each other.

The elder George Robertson was the erstwhile partner of Samuel Mullen. Melbourne based, he was primarily a bookseller although he did begin to publish books. The younger George Robertson later went into partnership with David Angus to found Angus and Robertson, which was Sydney based.

This book is published by the Melbourne based publisher by arrangement with the UK publishers.

This is interesting because, at a time when most books in Australia were imported, George Robertson and Co were printing editions of popular novels in Australia, probably from the original stereotype shipped from England to save the cost of resetting the type.

The need to ship the stereotype from England may explain why one or two of the George Robertson reprints have publication dates a year later than the British originals.

The other interesting use is that while most of the books I catalogued today had fairly standard boring late Victorian covers, this one has a colour lithograph stuck to the cover of the book, in much the same way we might expect an illustrated cover on a paperback today.

Not all Victorian publishers listed the date of publication on the title page of their books. Most did, some didn't, and some did when they felt like it. Infuriatingly, while some other books republished in Australia by George Robertson had a publication date, this book didn't.

In an attempt to track down the publication date I searched ebay, as a lot of book collectors but and sell there,   where I turned up a copy of the same book with the same cover illustration, but published by Chatto and Windus in London in 1895.

The Chatto and Windus edition was described as a yellowback, a term I had not come across before. I'd come across cheap paperbound books such as in this copy of An African Millionaire while documenting Lake View House for the National Trust

but I'd never come across the term 'yellowback' before.

Yellowbacks, sometimes called 'railway novels', were cheaply produced mass market books that filled the role of paperbacks in the nineteenth century. Cheaply produced, few survive, and while the early editions had plain covers, later on it became the norm for them to have an illustrated, often lithographed cover.

Unlike clothbound books from the nineteenth century, few yellowbacks have survived due to the cheap materials used in their manufacture. The copy of Dorothy Forster in the Athenaeum's collection is a sort of half way house with a conventional binding but the cover is made of thin cardboard and the spine, which is detaching, is made of something resembling cartridge paper.

Other cheap books from the nineteenth century,  shilling shockers like the one above, are even more cheaply made with heavy gauge paper covers and metal staples used in place of a conventional binding, which can pose conservation problems...

(I have also come across the steel staple method in old Penguin and Pelican books produced in England during the Second World War. I’m guessing that the use of staples was to both reduce production costs and save on materials.)

Mullens circulating library

 Up at the Athenaeum, the guerilla cataloguing approach continues to work well, and I think we have a methodology that works.

And it continues to throw up items of interest, yesterday's discovery being a book with a Mullen's circulating library label on the cover.

Unfortunately, the label is so badly worn it's difficult to read - at first I mistook it for a Mudie's label due to the similarity of design, but playing about with the image improved matters a little

and one can make out the words Mullen's, Collins Street, Melbourne - the rest is illegible. I am of course hoping to find a better example.

Samuel Mullen was an Irish bookseller who migrated to Australia and set up a high class circulating library in Melbourne in conscious imitation of Mudie's in London in 1859 at the end of the gold rush era when the city was awash with money.

The circulating library, combined with a bookshop, was very successful, and served as centre for intellectual life in the city. There's a rather nice woodblock engraving of the inside of Mullen's in 1889 - unfortunately it's not public domain, but it can be found online, including via this link.

So, how did a book from Mullen's library end up at the Athenaeum?

Well, I was looking at the State Library of Victoria catalogue for material related to Mullen's and I stumbled across this

Evidently Mullen's periodically sold off withdrawn stock from the circulating library, and the Athenaeum, or more likely via an intermediary, bought second hand books from Mullen's and elsewhere to add to the collection.

This can also possibly explain why books from Mudie's have turned up at the Athenaeum - that there was someone who imported second hand and remaindered books from the UK for sale in Australia.

Unfortunately the Athenaeum accession registers and minute books from the 1860s and 70s are missing so it's not possible to check to see who the Athenaeum was buying books from.

It may, or may not, be significant that both the Mudie's and the Mullen's stickers are on copies of less well known Mary Elizabeth Braddon novels dating from the 1860's - having identified a demand for Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels perhaps the Athenaeum was trying to buy as many copies as they could and stretching their budget by buying second hand ...

Guerilla cataloguing continued

 

Using Librarything's Overcat works well, but it's not perfect, occasionally failing to find books, even though they turn out to be in other user's collections, I'm guessing because some people have created manual entries for the books concerned from scratch when they couldn't find them via a catalogue search.

However, when I can't find a book, I've been carrying out a manual search of both the British Library and National Library of Scotland catalogues, and then creating a manual entry based on their data and noting the data sources used in the comments section.

Ideally I'd simply rerun the Overcat search from Library Thing against the British Library, but LibraryThing's link to the British Library catalogue is unreliable, so searching manually it is for the moment.

Given that I would guess that around 90% of the pre 1950's items in the collection were sourced from the UK, even though the book in question may have originally been published in the USA, so, so far there's no need to check the Library of Congress catalogue.

However, working with the books directly has benefits - for instance the Treloar's hygenic library label at the top of this article came from a 1930s edition of a Max Brand Western novel, suggesting that perhaps the Athenaeum was sometimes buying books second hand to add to their collection.

It also shows that circulating libraries were still a thing in early 1930s Australia - post depression money was tight and being imported, books were relatively expensive. (Hygenic libraries were circulating libraries that made a point of sterlising books between loans, either by spraying them with antiseptic or placing them in an oven.)

One might have expected that public libraries might have taken up the slack, but only around 15% of Victoria’s population had access to a public library, often housed in a Mechanics Institute or Athenaeum.

For example, the Wangaratta Free Library was originally housed in the Athenaeum, and according to reports of the time was cramped and little used, and it was only due to a sustained fund raising campaign that the 'old' Free Library building on Murphy Street was built in 1909 replacing the earlier building

While  what is now the State Library did send out boxes of books on loan to the Mechanics Institute libraries, the general lack of access meant most people used commercial circulating libraries, especially for fiction and other lighter reading.

Also, sometimes on gets to touch history - in our collection we have an 1863 edition of Alice King's now forgotten three volume novel Eveline.

Forgotten now, but obviously very popular when it first appeared as the flyleaves of each volume - volume 1 is unfortunately missing - are endorsed 10 days allowed  in ink

suggesting that there was considerable demand, and that patrons could only sign the book out for 10 days rather than the more normal fourteen or twenty one days.

Guerilla cataloguing part 1

The nineteenth century Prussian general von Moltke the elder is reputed to have said 'No battle plan survives contact with the enemy'.

Well it wasn't quite as bad as that, but my first problem when I tried out our tentative cataloguing methodology was that LibraryThing's link to the British Library catalogue kept timing out on me.

However the link to LibraryThing's own Overcat database of library records was robust, so rather than using the British Library, our plan has changed to using Overcat in preference.

Not all records of books published in the nineteenth century are perfect, so sometimes a little bit of editing was required, but basically using Overcat with a little bit of cross checking with the National Library of Scotland and the British Library catalogues along the way our plan seems to work well, even if things went a bit slower than we hoped.

With only ten records so far it didn't seem worth doing a MARC export and then using something like FastMRCview to validate the output.

However, actually handling the books was quite valuable. By chance a number of the books we catalogued today were editions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels.

Interestingly they still had paper stickers on the covers saying they were supplied through Mudie's Circulating Library.

George Mudie ran an important chain of circulating libraries in the mid to late nineteenth century in England charging his subscribers an annual fee of a guinea (£1-1s or a little over A$220 today using the Bank of England's inflation calculator) to borrow one book at a time - in comparison Netflix costs $120 a year with ads or $250 ad-free).

Circulating libraries were a middle class thing due to the up front subscribers' fee. They had a possibly undeserved reputation as a supplier of sensation novels to middle class women, and as a place where men and women could interact unchaperoned.

Mudie is also reputed to be responsible for the three volume novel format so common in the Victorian period as it allowed his libraries to lend out the volumes separately rather than have to stock multiple copies of in demand books.

And, as he bought so many copies of books he became an important wholesaler in his own right supplying books to overseas circulating libraries, including, quite obviously, the Athenaeum.

Incidentally the books had green covers with gold stamping. Fortunately they don't turn up in the list of known books where arsenic green bookcloth was used for the cover, but the list isn't exhaustive, so we  followed the sensible course of using nitrile gloves when handling them, rather than cloth gloves, or indeed handling them by hand.

I also learned a little bit about the business of publishing new editions of books in the late nineteenth century.

At that time books were still typeset by hand using movable type, much as they had been in Caxton's time.

However there was one important difference - once set and proofed they printers would make a papier mâché mould which they would then use to cast a single metal plate that they would use to print the page, and these moulds were called stereotypes.

This of course meant that the type could be quickly broken up and reused, and that, if they kept the moulds, they could quickly make a new set of printing plates if a book needed to be reprinted.

Sometimes, if you look at a late nineteenth century book it will have 'Stereotype Edition' on the title page, meaning that the book was printed by reusing moulds used to print a previous edition, rather than having the type reset.

Interesting what you can learn from cataloguing a few old books...

Facebook, again

 

Two and a half years ago I abandoned social media, or more accurately these big behemoths that rule our lives, and I've been a lot better for it.

Sure, I've kept on blogging and post links the mastodon, but I've not really engaged with any of 'the socials'.

Unfortunately a lot of local history and community groups have continued to use Facebook and it has got to the point that I need (reluctantly) to rejoin Facebook, if only to lurk and look at posts ...

(I'm leaving it as an exercise for the interested to find my account and I'm not going to do any friend requests or anything like that - the whole experience of re joining has quite unsettling - people I don't know being suggested as friends and a waterfall of suggested posts, at best irrelevant, at worst, fascist right wing flag waving nonsense)

Cataloguing postcards

 

A few days ago I wrote about a procedure we had developed for cataloguing removable media at the Athenaeum.

I had been quite impressed by the sophistication of  the documentation provided by some of our contributors with human readable and self explanatory directory and file names, but inevitably there are going to be cases where the filenames and directory names are not human readable.

Now obviously we could rename the files and reorganise them but that's probably not sensible, as there may be references to the original filename in the files or accompanying documentation.

So I thought that probably the best solution would be to create a manifest file to be stored alongside the directory listings. 

As an experiment I thought I'd use as an example a German postcard from 1914 that I'd recently acquired

As with the original methodology for cataloguing removable media, making a manifest fil is actually quite easy if you use the command prompt (cmd.exe).

I'm quite systematic about how I document the various Victorian and Edwardian postcards I've collected over time and  store the scans and information about each postcard in a separate directory under an overall Postcards directory.

In this case the listing looks like this

Volume in drive C is Windows-SSD
 Volume Serial Number is 62F4-DEE9

 Directory of C:\Users\doug_\OneDrive\Victoriana\Postcards\Schwerin 1914


28/10/25  03:37 PM         3,141,869 2025_10_28 15_36 Office Lens.pdf
28/10/25  03:55 AM         1,905,786 IMG_0347.JPG
28/10/25  03:10 PM         1,851,390 IMG_0349.JPG
28/10/25  03:31 PM               377 schwerin.mkd
28/10/25  03:15 PM           545,497 schwerin.png
               5 File(s)      7,445,392 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  369,753,280,512 bytes free

Not particularly meaningful. 

However using the  tree command from the command prompt you can create a directory listing with 

tree /f > manifest.txt

This will give you a nice little tree listing in the directory which you can then annotate using Notepad or similar to create something like this

Folder PATH listing for volume Windows-SSD
Volume serial number is 62F4-DEE9
C:\USERS\DOUG_\ONEDRIVE\VICTORIANA\POSTCARDS\SCHWERIN 1914
    2025_10_28 15_36 Office Lens.pdf - pdf scan of postcard
    IMG_0347.JPG - face of postcard showing address
    IMG_0349.JPG - rear of postcard showing message
    schwerin.mkd - description of postcard in markdown format
    schwerin.png - montage of IMG_0347.jpg and IMG_0349.jpg

which gives you a human readable description of the contents stored in the same directory as the material you are documenting.

As always procedure is everything - if you always call the annotated file listing manifest.txt it will be consistent across all examples.

(And as a note for command prompt nerds I deliberately used tree/f rather than dir/b to create the directory listing. Using the tree command makes the process more general purpose and to take accounts of sub directories and their contents if present. 

As the Linux tree command works similarly it makes the procedure more general than relying on the traditional DOS directory command).

The actual procedure under Linux is slightly different

As the Linux version of tree creates its output file before enumerating the file list you can end up with manifest.txt appearing in the listing.

To avoid this use the command

tree -i > ../manifest.txt

which will create the file in the directory above the current working directory. The -i command suppresses the line drawing characters that give a representation of the directory structure. This creates a simple file that can be annotated as before, and once annotated the file can be moved to your preferred location.

Baked beans and digital preservation

 

It was a wet cold Sunday morning here in North East Victoria, so we had beans on toast for breakfast and listened to the radio.

We prefer Wattie's beans, a New Zealand brand, because they are not quite as sweet as some of the other common brands.

Wattie's beans are almost unique in that they still come in a non-ringpull can, meaning that if you don't have the required access technology, in this case a can opener, you can't get at the beans.

And this is the first part of digital preservation - you need access to the appropriate technology to read the media, either by knowing someone with the correct kit, getting hold of a suitable access device, such as a floppy drive, a CD drive or a suitable card reader.

And of course, you need how to use them.

Which is why events like the Cambridge Festival of Floppies are important. Old buggers like me who have worked with digital preservation and file format conversion almost all their working lives, are either retired or getting close to it - after all 3.5" floppies dropped out of use roughly twenty five years ago and computers stopped coming with CD drives sometime in the early 2010s. And we won't mention Apple and the weird variable speed floppy drives in pre OS X macs.

So, somehow, the message needs to be passed on, which is why technology workshops are valuable. I might remember about how to cable up a floppy disk controller and access the media, but I'm not going to be around for ever, as are these super convenient USB based floppy drives you can find on ebay

Some day they're going to stop selling them as there's no profit in them, and anyway, no one makes 3.5" drives any more, meaning most of the external USB 3.5" drives you can buy are made using recycled components. (5.25" and these weird 3" drives used by some Amstrad word processors in the nineties in the UK, are another problem entirely - recycled 5.25" and 3" drives in working condition are almost impossible to find.)

Once you've recovered the files there's also the problem of file format.

For more recent content it's not really a problem - the use by digital cameras of JPEG format, and the dominance of Microsoft's file formats and Adobe's pdf have created a monoculture - if you can read the device you can almost certainly access the content.

And if you can't, both Libre Office and AbiWord between them support a wide range of legacy formats.

But that's by no means the whole problem. What do we do with the content once we have recovered it and have assured ourselves we can read it?

This is actually a live problem, up at the Athenaeum we are increasingly receiving donations of people's family history research material on removable media - almost all on USB sticks, although we do have a few CD's and external hard disk drives.

As we are a volunteer organisation with fairly minimal external funding we have the whole problem of being able to preserve the data long term, at least the format monoculture means that we are able to read the scanned letters and look at the old photographs without difficulty.

So, we can read the data, look after the media, and try and find a long term storage solution. And, while the content may be digital, it's mostly derived from non digital sources.

The future, of course, will be different.

As we know, no writes letters any more, and everyone's photographs are saved to the cloud somewhere, which makes will make the whole business of family history and biography rather more difficult.

In fact, there was an article on the ABC's website this morning bewailing the death of the biography, exactly because no one writes diaries or letters and of course there is the question of what happens to our digital content when we die.

What this means is that there is no assurance of long term access to digital content as it increasingly moves to the cloud. 

For people working in the field of family history this increasingly means that all their material is stored in the cloud. Even if it was originally in a non digital format it will have been scanned, indexed and stored.

If someone does some oral history work the recordings will be digital, as will any transcriptions. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Creating a portfolio of your work and writing it to a USB stick and giving it to a memory institution such as the Athenaeum is not a solution - we don't have a long term preservation solution of our own, and if we found somewhere to lodge the work, that somewhere will of course be dependent on external funding for the foreseeable future, and as we have seen with the failure of projects like the Florence Nightingale digitisation project to deliver, even funding does not guarantee either access or continuity of access...