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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/22/melbourne-rare-books-expert-wallace-kirsop>
"The last time he counted, Prof Wallace Kirsop and his wife, Joan, had about
20,000 books. The floor-to-ceiling shelves lining all possible walls of their
125-year-old Melbourne house are packed full, and those volumes that don’t fit
in them sit in stacks on every other available surface. Over the road, in a
two-bedroom apartment the couple also owns, there are even more.
Some of these books are hundreds of years old. But Kirsop, 92, is not a
collector for collection’s sake. This is a working reference library.
“The rare books are something of an extension of that. They’re mostly things
I’ve worked on,” Kirsop says.
Kirsop speaks to
Guardian Australia from a comfortable wicker chair in his
study dotted with stand-alone rotating bookcases, as Monty, their
honey-coloured longhair cat, saunters past.
Kirsop’s work concerns not only the contents of books but books as physical
objects: who they belonged to, where they were bought and sold, the paper,
watermarks, bindings, bookplates, inscriptions and annotations – all of which
can illuminate history and help us understand people and the world.
In English, this speciality is called bibliography – “an unfortunate term”,
Kirsop says, “because people understand that just as a list of books”. His
French-speaking colleagues have come up with a more apt description, he says,
“archaeology of the printed book”."
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
