by Stuart Kells
The following general works were helpful compasses: Nicolas Barker (ed.), The Pleasures of Bibliophily, 2002; James Campbell, The Library: A World History, 2013; Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness, 1809; Helene Hanff, Apple of My Eye, 1977; Anthony Hobson, Great Libraries, 1970; Raymond Irwin, The Heritage of the English Library, 1964; Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 1930; Andrew Lang, Books and Bookmen, 1886; Michael Leapman, The Book of the British Library, 2012; Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, 1996, and The Library at Night, 2005; Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Against the Law, 2004; David Pearson, Books as History, 2012; Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf, 1999; Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire, 2007; Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan (eds), A Passion for Books, 1999; and Don Heinrich Tolzmann, The Memory of Mankind, 2001.
My agent, Sheila Drummond, and the team at Text Publishing—particularly Michael Heyward, Elena Gomez and W. H. Chong—did a marvellous job of turning the manuscript into a book. My wife, Fiona, and my daughters, Thea and Charlotte, visited many libraries with me and provided a thousand kindnesses and accommodations. My friends Elizabeth Lane, Louise Lane, Dr Anna Blainey, Dr Lisa Ehrenfried, Dr Ed Schofield, Andrew Schofield, Amanda Wendt, Greg Harbour, Tony Pitman, Charles Stitz and Professor Ian Gow conducted additional fieldwork in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Russia, the United States, Mexico and Australia—and indulged my unrelenting enthusiasm for libraries; many thanks all.
Stuart Kells is an author and book-trade historian who has written and published on many aspects of print culture. His 2015 book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers, won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Stuart lives in Melbourne with his family. His next book, about Shakespeare’s library, will be published in 2018.
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Copyright © Stuart Kells 2017
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First published in 2017 by The Text Publishing Company
Cover design by W.H. Chong
Cover art based on a book sculpture by Nicholas Jones
Page design by Imogen Stubbs
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Kells, Stuart, author.
Title: The library : a catalogue of wonders / by Stuart Kells.
ISBN: 9781925355994 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925410365 (ebook)
Subjects: Libraries.
Books and reading.
Library materials.
