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BSANZ : Beginnings and Aspirations single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 BSANZ : Beginnings and Aspirations
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'It is possible to view with some sympathy the complaint made by a recent review in La Bibliofilia that centenaries provoke bursts of not altogether convincing publication about subjects that are then neglected till the next significant date comes around. However, there are stronger reasons for recording at commemorative intervals the work of a learned society and for submitting it to critical analysis. If one takes the two entities on which we have quite explicitly based our own programmes - the Bibliographical Society (London) and the Bibliographical Society of America - it is clear that the members thought it necessary to set down an ample record of achievements and problems at jubilee moments. At the end of World War II the London body issued a volume edited by Frank Francis, The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect. Half a century later, Peter Davison, who taught bibliography amongst other things at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s, edited the more ambitious The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography. Very properly debates and the identification of gaps were not absent from these pages. On the other side of the Atlantic Hope Mayo was working on a history of the Bibliographical Society of America and presented a substantial overview of the topic in her presidential address to the annual general meeting in January 2004. Alongside this one could put Brian McMullin's article four years later on the hundredth anniversary of that Society's Papers.' (Publication abstract)

 

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    y separately published work icon Script and Print vol. 43 no. 1 2019 20034677 2019 periodical issue 'On 17 February 1969, a group of “librarians, scholars, collectors, printers and antiquarian booksellers” met in the board room of the State Library of Victoria to discuss the founding of a bibliographical society for Australia and New Zealand.1 As Wallace Kirsop’s contribution to this issue makes clear, this did not happen out of the blue, but rather as a result of decades of increasing enthusiasm and energy for this field of research in both countries, stimulated in part by the model of—and local participation in—the Bibliographical Society in London (founded 1892). As he also notes, 1969 was a significant year for bibliography for two other related reasons: namely, the death of Sir John Ferguson and the subsequent publication of the last volume of his magisterial Bibliography of Australia, 2 and the publication of A. G. Bagnall’s New Zealand National Bibliography to the Year 1960. 3 Round-number anniversaries always tempt reflection, and so it was that almost exactly 50 years later, on 26 February 2019, a group of BSANZ members met at State Library Victoria (as it is now known) to mark a significant milestone in the history of the Society in an event co-convened by Monash University’s Ancora Press (founded in 1977). We were especially fortunate to have as convenor of this gathering Wallace Kirsop, one of the founding members and indeed the first President of BSANZ, elected that day in February 1969; rarely can a scholarly society have the opportunity to reflect on a 50-year history through the eyes of a single individual, singularly well-placed to lead those reflections.' (Anna Welch, Introduction) 2019 pg. 9-19
Last amended 4 Sep 2020 09:06:39
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