AustLit

'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)