Guerilla cataloguing (part 93)

 Well, the guerilla cataloguing exercise is continuing to bear fruit.

I think I now have an understanding of the shoestring nature of the Athenaeum's library with books bought second hand from larger circulating libraries in the 1920's and 1930's

and earlier in the nineteenth century from Mullen's and from as yet unidentified importers of second hand books from the UK.

Likewise I think I now have a handle on that 1920's phenomenon, the hygenic library, 

And, working with the collection, one can start to see how the Australian publishing and printing industry developed from the 1880's onwards with locally produced reprints of books printed in England, sometimes under the British publisher's name, or sometimes by an Australian publisher in agreement with the original UK publisher.

The one thing I havn't quite got my head around yet are Imperial and Colonial editions. Often produced by UK publishers, and printed in England, they usually have a statement on the flyleaf something like 'This book is only for sale in India and the Colonies and must not be imported or sold in the United Kingdom'.

The wording varies from publisher to publisher, but the intent is clear - these editions were not for domestic (ie UK) use.

At first I thought they might have been printed cheaply in India, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The books often seem to be produced using materials of similar quality to those of the UK editions, and are often printed in England. 

My current hypothesis is that they are editions of books published in the UK a few years earlier, which are being reprinted and sold in a cheaper edition, but to be honest, I don't really have enough evidence as yet.

So, I guess from here on in, the fiction collection will be more of the same, triple decker suspense novels and yellow backs from the Victorian era, murder mysteries and westerns from the 1920s and 30s, with the westerns being mostly replaced by romance and spy novels in the 1950s.

This isn't hard and fast - for example this morning I catalogued a Mills and Boon novel from the 1920s - but it is true that the classic murder mystery novels and western novels seem to appear after world war one, and it's not true to say that this is a reflection of growing American influence - most of the murder mysteries are English, and quite a few of the Western type novels are set in Canada, though I suspect the rise of silent movies might be behind the increasing popularity of Western novels.

But life is not all about cataloguing - I managed to get better network performance out of my old AMD Ryzen based machine by adding a wireless repeater into the equation, as well as spending my pocket money not on sweets, but on a refurbished Microsoft Surface in my quest to find an ideal lightweight machine to carry about.

Really what I'm trying to do, I realise, is to come up with something that had the performance of my old and now deceased 2012 Macbook Air, but which runs either Linux (preferably) or Windows.

I've come close, but I've never quite hit the sweet spot ...

(oh, and I did a blog post to mark the 125th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria)