Last week was one of the more absurd public holidays we have here in Victoria.
Not content with giving us a day off for the Melbourne Cup in November, the powers that be give us a day off for the AFL Grand Final - actually they don't, as the Grand Final is played on a Saturday, we get the Friday before off in lieu.
As the Athenaeum is technically a council facility, we were officially closed, which of course meant no cataloguing.
However, today we were open, on a morning when in rained with a capital 'R'.
And I can say that H. Rider Haggard was incredibly popular with the late Victorian and Edwardian readers of Stanley.
As well as early editions of the works he's best remembered for today, King Solomon's Mines, She, Ayesha, all of which have been almost read to death - in fact in a couple of cases we have newer editions as well as the old original editions, and editions of a lot of his less popular novels. Originally seen as boy's own tales of derring do, more modern critics take a more nuanced view with some suggesting that both She and Ayesha can be read as tales of female empowerment.
If you want to make your own mind up, almost all his books are available via Project Gutenberg as ebooks, or if you prefer a paper copy, second hand copies of his main novels can be picked up for a few dollars.
Otherwise it was a fairly standard day's cataloguing, though I did find a 1950's romance novel which the Athenaeum had clearly acquired second hand from a commercial circulating library that still had the date stamps from the previous owner inside, suggesting that hygenic circulating libraries that regularly fumigated their books persisted into the mid 1950's in Melbourne
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