And how's the cataloguing going?

Over the past year I've been posting updates about my little project to recatalogue the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

 I havn't done so for the last few weeks, not because I've become bored with the project, but because most of what I've found in the collection confirms my earlier suppositions about the Athenaeum buying second hand books, especially in the nineteenth century, to build up the collection as economically as possible.

So, same old, same old. But I do now understand why the original catalogue dating from the late nineteen nineties lists Marian Halcombe as the author of Wilkie Collins' Woman in White.

In the collection we have two very similar looking volumes which at some point have been rebound by the Beechworth Athenaeum - now the Burke Museum.

As books were expensive in colonial Australia, it was not uncommon for very popular books to be rebound locally to extend the life of the book if the original binding became worn out.

And the Woman in White was incredibly popular in its day - something you can see as even the replacement binding is distinctly worn, especially on the covers just where you would hold the book to read it sitting in an armchair.

Whoever did the rebinding stamped the spines with the title of the book  but not the author's name, and also stamped the spine of one volume with a '2' to show it was the second volume in a two volume set.

Now, both volumes have lost their title pages - when books get old and have been well read, the spines become loose and quite often they lose pages from the beginning and the end of the book.

In this case, the first page of the volume stamped '2', has a heading 'The story continued - as narrated by Marian Halcombe.'

Whoever did the original cataloguing was obviously not familiar with the book, and the way it is put together out of accounts by different narrators so the stories intertwine, and failed to spot that Marian Halcombe is a character in the novel, not the author, and then compounded the error by assuming that the unnumbered volume was volume one of the two volume set when in fact the books are from different editions (the typeface and the paper used is slightly different between the volumes).

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to document this but at least I now know how the error must have happened.

Otherwise, it's the usual mix of mysteries, crime novels, and romances, which shows that reading tastes have been pretty much the same over the last hundred and fifty plus years...