Friday at the Athenaeum...

 

Well it's been an interesting morning up at the Athenaeum.

As I've established, the Athenaeum was buying books second hand from Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne.

Mostly the circulating library labels look like this

and cover the top third of the book. However, this book was different with the label covering most of the front of the book, and the text was different, and said it came from Mullen's Select library.

I need to do a little more digging but it looks like Mullen's, as well as a circulating business were sending out pre selected boxes of books to subscribers to the Select Library living in the country far from any bookseller or circulating library

The other real find of the day was not part of the historic book collection.

Someone clearing out their father's old shed walked in with some old handwritten ledgers and an 1874 copy of Philips Handy General Atlas of the World, complete with the original coloured maps produced by John Bartholemew, the well known Edinburgh map publishers.

That would be interesting enough in itself, but on the backs of some of the maps there are various notes in longhand.

Now, I have not really looked at the notes, but it looks as if they could be tracking a journey from the UK to Australia, which would be rather interesting, especially if there was a connection with someone's family migration story.

At the moment this is all hand waving, and until we photograph and transcribe the notes we won't really know.

Short term, our major concern has been to find a mylar bag big enough for it - the atlas is a bit bigger than B4, and then enough space in a freezer somewhere to store it for a couple of weeks to make sure that any lurking bugs or other nasties have been killed off...