Rare Treats
Ronald T. Ridley, Professor Emeritus, School of Historical Studies
The year I joined the History Department in 1965, a man appeared to talk to the staff, bringing with him a little attache case from which he produced library volumes with many pages damaged or simply cut out, or even limp boards with no contents whatsoever.
This was Dr Orde Poynton, Consulting Bibliographer, who was surveying the entire (not that it was very extensive) collection, almost all at that time on open shelves, selecting books to be put in a ‘research’ collection (later ‘B’ collection) and even volumes for the rare books collection. He came to show the academic departments — which hotly resisted any such division of the collection — the need to protect books against such appalling damage. He was also to be seen regularly sitting next to Mary Lugton, the Reference Librarian, surveying shelf after shelf, book by book, and assessing them for relocation. Dr Poynton was to donate some 15,000 books to the Baillieu Library, many of which joined the rare books.
The nucleus of that collection is, however, owed to another figure, and a tragic one. George McArthur (1842–1903) was the son of a baker and born at Linlithgow in Scotland. He migrated to Australia around 1850 and came to live in Maldon, where he was described as a gentleman. In October 1903, he took his own life.
By his will the library received 4,000 to 5,000 volumes, particularly rich in early Australian travels, bibles, Burnsiana and works of fine arts. The library at this time was in the ‘northern annexe’ of the Quad, and the Council instantly conducted a dental examination of the bequeathed equine: ‘The addition of this collection to the library has seriously taxed the already overcrowded accommodation of its shelves and has necessitated the removal to the Biology School and the Engineering School of the books bearing on the work of those schools.’(1) There is no mention of McArthur in either Scott’s or Selleck’s history of the University.(2) The vicissitudes of the ever-peripatetic collection had begun.
The segregation of rare items from the main collection was initiated in 1961 by the librarian Axel Lodewycks: books published before 1800 and Australiana before 1900. These were housed in the Leigh Scott Room in the new Baillieu Library, opened in 1959. After the move of the library from the northern annexe to the main northern wing of the Quad in 1926, the need for a new library had been planned since the 1930s — and had taken more than 20 years to eventuate, and only then thanks to the generosity of the Baillieu family. With extensions to the north in the 1970s — but never the originally planned stack block — a new room was built for the rare books.
The major benefactor of this part of the collection, however, was Dr John Orde Poynton (1906–2001), born in London, son of a Harley Street specialist, and a Cambridge graduate. After serving in several London hospitals, he went out to Malaya in 1936 and was a prisoner of war in Changi for more than three years (this was strangely always passed over by him in Who’s Who). He migrated to Australia in 1945 and settled in Adelaide, where after a brief tenure as lecturer in Pathology (1947–1948), he became director of the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Sciences (1950–1961). What was revealed by him in Who’s Who only in the 1990s was that he was also chairman of the Friends of the State Library (1955–1961). Everything indicates that he originally intended to donate his collection to Adelaide, but he was attracted by the plans for the Baillieu Library from 1958 — and his first marriage had broken down in 1957. Poynton was appointed Consulting Bibliographer from January 1963 until 1974 (he dated it 1961–1971). His position was highly anomalous, for he was responsible only to the Vice-Chancellor, not to the appallingly maltreated librarian, Axel Lodewycks. Poynton was given a large office formed from one half of the then staff reading room (yes, staff actually read in the library!) Apart from the rare books, his influence can still be detected in the endless yellow recommendation slips in the still indispensable card catalogue.
The first instalment of the Poynton collection was announced in December 1959. Fundamental to a collector whose tastes were described as ‘patrician’ were Greek and Latin classics. We have, for example, Aldine editions of Lucan (1502, 1515), Cicero’s orations (1546) and Horace (1566). And, it seems, the only volume from Gibbon’s(3) library in Australia: his Claudian (Elzevir 1665). There is a complete set of the Delphin editions of the classics — 60 volumes, so called because they were commissioned for the Dauphin Louis (son of Louis XIV), who never read any of them, because any love of learning was beaten out of him.(4) There is the Nuremberg Chronicle(5) (1493) and a Second Folio Shakespeare (1632), and a large collection of Scottiana. Such collectors were also by definition fundamentally interested in first editions (here mainly 18th and 19th century) and modern private presses: William Morris’ Kelmscott Press and the Golden Cockerel Press among them. There is a catalogue of the collection by, for example, date and publisher, at the end of the card catalogue.
An historian, for his or her part, is fundamentally interested in the human background to events and things. The Baillieu Library possesses a rare book collection which would be hard to equal in the country. It has sprung largely from the gifts of two very different people, whose personal circumstances lie behind those gifts. Their bequests will best be honoured by the gratitude we show, the care we take of them, and the use we make of them.
Notes
1 Melbourne University Calendar, 1905, p. 380.
2 See R.J.W. Selleck, The Shop: The University of Melbourne 1850–1939, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003 and Ernest Scott, A History of the University of Melbourne, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, in association with Oxford University Press, 1936.
3 Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Library of Edward Gibbon: A catalogue, 2nd ed., London: 1980.
4 Ronald Ridley, ‘Un prince accompli’ (English), Quaderni catanesi di studi classici e medievali, 2, 1980, pp. 373–423.
5 Nuremberg Chronicle: A history of the world from creation to 1493, compiled by Hartmann Schedel, and famous for its woodcuts by Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff.