About the Centre for the Book
The Centre for the Book is the lineal successor of the Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, which was set up in 1981 to offer research activities and a Master of Arts programme (now discontinued) within the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. Since 1998 our primary purpose has been to encourage and facilitate research in the history of the book - everything to do with the production, publication, distribution and reception of texts in both printed and manuscript form.
The Centre is self-funding and exists on donations and outside income.
The Director is Wallace Kirsop, Honorary Professor in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. He is also a Principal Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne.
Wallace Kirsop’s research mainly concerns physical bibliography applied to French books between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and book history directed both to France between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and to nineteenth-century Australia. Lists of his publications up to late 2002 will be found in The Culture of the Book: Essays from two hemispheres in honour of Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne, 1999) and Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 39, 2002.
The Associate Director is Dr Patrick Spedding, Research Fellow in the Department of English.
Patrick’s current research project is a study of the publication and distribution of erotica in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In 2006 he won the 2004-2005 “MLA Prize for a Distinguished Bibliography” for his A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004). Patrick is also the editor of Script & Print, the bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.
The Centre’s Project Officer is Meredith Sherlock, who has held this position since its inception. She is responsible for day-to-day administration and for editing, proofreading and book design associated with the Centre’s publications. Meredith also prepares the layout of Script & Print, the bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, and Explorations, the bulletin of the Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations.
In addition, the Centre enjoys the support of the following Honorary Associates:
- Dr Tom Darragh (formerly a Senior Curator at the National Museum of Victoria, with a particular interest in the history of engraving and lithography and the publication of Victorian maps)
- Dr John Emmerson, QC (book collector)
- Brian McMullin (formerly Reader in librarianship at Monash and an earlier editor of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, now Deputy Director of the Centre for the Book and Manager of the Ancora Press)
- Dr Sonia Mycak (Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, with a research focus on multicultural literary production in Australia, and culturally and linguistically diverse writing communities)
- Professor John Barnes (editor since 1998 of The La Trobe Library Journal)
- Dr Nirmolini Flora (former librarian with a special interest in the preservation of library materials and the history of 19th century libraries in India)
The Centre’s work also benefits from participation by several members of the university’s regular staff, especially but not exclusively those within the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies.