140 years of influential books
InReview
They say you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their bookshelf – but what to make of a collection including such diverse titles as Madonna’s Sex, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Don Dunstan’s Cookbook, Kerouac’s On the Road, the cheeky satire Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life?
These are some of the 140 books that special collections librarian Cheryl Hoskin and her colleagues at Adelaide’s University’s Barr Smith Library have assembled for a free public exhibition marking the university’s 140th anniversary.
The goal was to pick one influential book from every year from 1874 to 2014, including fiction and non-fiction, Australian and international authors, and traversing all manner of genres.
“Our criteria was that all the books had to be printed in the year of publication , so they’re nearly all original editions, and they had to all be in the library’s collection,” Hoskin says.
“It was a lot of work but a lot of fun, too – and of course we’ve put in some fun things, like A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [Douglas Adams, 1979] and Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche [Bruce Feirstein, 1982].”
With more than 2.3 million printed books in the Barr Smith Library’s collection, they had plenty to choose from.
The researchers sought out books that had had a great impact, which reflected significant events or inspired change – but they also included titles that were perhaps controversial at the time of publication or were simply immensely entertaining and well-loved. The important thing was that they had left a mark.
Some are perhaps predictable: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1888), AB Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1895), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994).
Others are reflective of their era, such as Radclyffe Hall’s depressingly bleak 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, written at a time when homosexuality was still considered a perversion; titles by Beat generation authors Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Allen Ginsberg (Howl, and Other Poems) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch); and World War I books including The ANZAC Book – written and illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of ANZAC, and Vol 1 of Charles Bean’s The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918.
And then there are the more obscure yet frankly fascinating, such as Reverend EA Abbott’s Flatland – A Romance of Many Dimensions, a science-fiction novella published in 1884 which explores the nature of different dimensions and was made into an animated film in 2007.
“This was a fantasy with people and relationships represented in two dimensions, not three,” Hoskin says of the book.
Her team has included a number of books with a connection to Adelaide University and South Australia, including award-winning novel Hiam, by Eva Sallis, who was the first graduate of Adelaide University’s creative writing course to publish a novel.
There is also 1920’s The World of Sound, by Nobel Prize winner and former university professor of mathematics and physics WH Bragg, and a 1943 publication about the use of penicillin in treating war wounds, which was co-authored by Adelaide University graduate HW Florey.
Sitting between William Nagle’s Vietnam War book The Odd Angry Shot and Marilyn French’s feminist novel The Women’s Room is Don Dunstan’s Cookbook, published in 1976, while he was premier of South Australia.
“He was a great agent for change in South Australia,” says Hoskin, explaining why it was chosen. “He really wanted South Australians to have the best life possible and part of that was introducing us to new experiences.
“His cookbook opened up a lot of people’s repertoire to the Asian fusion cooking.”
Equally enlightening was Madonna’s graphic, spiral-bound coffee-table book Sex, which was published in 1992 amid much controversy and negative reviews, but still managed to top bestseller lists.
“Once again, Madonna was all out to challenge societal norms and she certainly did that with Sex,” Hoskin says.
“It’s one of the most sought-after books today.”
The exhibition of 140 Books – 1874-2014 opened this week in the Rare Books and Special Collections section of the Barr Smith Library on Adelaide University’s North Terrace campus, and will continue until September 28.
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“We have tried to open most of them to an interesting section,” Hoskin says.
“We’ve tried to give people a little snippet of what the books are about in the hope they will seek out more.”
You can see the full list of 140 titles on the university website.
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