$77 catalogue for the scholar

Press, 26 November 1980, Page 4

$77 catalogue for the scholar

PA Wellington •‘A Descriptive Catalogue of the Milton Collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Wellington, New Zealand,” ail 61S pages of it, will sell in Britain for $77. The result of years of painstaking work, it has just been released in Britain by the Oxford University Press: Turnbull’s chief librarian, Mr J. E. Traue, said he expected it to raise a few evebrows.

The catalogue is the result of 14 years spare-time work by Miss Kathleen Coleridge, special materials librarian at Victoria University. Miss Coleridge said that if she had worked full time on the catalogue it would probably have taken about three years. Mr Traue'said the catalogue listed 224 editions of ?4ilton’s works published up to 1800, and 223 works relating to him.

“It is intendefor the Uterarv and bibliographic-

al scholar and rnaKes no concessions to the genera! reader — in some pans it looks more like a mathematics textbook than a list of books,” he said. The detailed descriptions in the internationally accepted formula for identifying hand-printed books would enable a scholar anywhere in the world to compare a book in his study with the particular copy held in Wellington and note any variations down to the smallest misprint.