Review of New Zealand Print Culture Publications With Special Reference to the Turnbull Library and its Collections

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 30, 1 January 1997, Page 77

Mark Bland

Review of New Zealand Print Culture Publications With Special Reference to the Turnbull Library and its Collections

This review, of three works published in 1995, was printed first in the British periodical The Library (v 01.19 no.l, March 1997, pp.BB-95) and is republished here with an additional coda. The Publications Committee believe that the review is of interest to a wider New Zealand audience than its original appearance provided, and are therefore reprinting it here in full, with the kind permission of the Council of the Bibliographical Society, London. The review considers not only the publications themselves, but places them within a broader New Zealand print culture context, with particular reference to the development and role of the Alexander Turnbull Library. The opinions expressed are those of the reviewer and are not necessarily those of the Editor, the Publications Committee, the Friends of the Turnbull Library, or the staff of the Library itself.

Early Imprints in New Zealand Libraries: A Finding List of Books Printed Before 1801 Held in Libraries in the Wellington Region. Ed. by V. Elliott, R. Harvey, R. Petre, R. Salmond, etal. Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library. 1995. xii + 314 pp. NZ536.50. ISBN 0 477 02756 3. The Turnbull: A Library and its World. By Rachel Barrowman. Auckland: Auckland University Press. 1995. viii +232pp. NZ539.95. ISBN 1 86940 137 9. Government Printing in New Zealand, 1840 to 1843. By Rachel Salmond. Wellington: Elibank Press. 1995. xiv + 210 pp. NZ534.95. ISBN 0 9583496 0 6.

On 28 June 1918, debilitated by an addiction to cocaine, Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull died at the comparatively young age of fifty and bequeathed his library of 55,000 books and manuscripts to George V as representative of the people of New Zealand. It took time both to put in place the appropriate legislative framework and to begin sorting and cataloguing the material, and it was to be two years before Turnbull’s gift finally became the library that bears his name. It was also the last and most important of the principal acts of public benefaction that had established the major research collections in New Zealand. In 1894, Sir George Grey returned to England to spend the last four years of his life there, leaving behind his second collection of books to the people of Auckland (including a first folio of Shakespeare bought from Quaritch as a parting gift on 18 June for £B4) - his first collection he had left in Cape Town in 1861. Then, in 1904, Thomas Hocken offered his library to the people of Dunedin, provided it was suitably housed and maintained. It was not until 1910, shortly before Hocken’s death, that his conditions were met and the collection was housed at the University - leaving George Fenwick to remark that ‘the public at first failed to appreciate - and indeed have not yet adequately appreciated - the generous gift’. Three years later the historian Thomas McNab gave a similarly sized collection of printed books to Dunedin Public Library. Turnbull’s bequest, however, was twice the size of all these benefactions combined, and laid the foundation for a library that is unquestionably New Zealand’s foremost institution for scholarly research in the humanities and the first point of reference for scholars in the international community who wish to consult New Zealand collections.

Amongst the material given by Turnbull were thousands of early printed books and a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript of Boethius’s De Musica. This particular volume, and a small but exquisitely chosen collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that were subsequently acquired by, or given to, the Library during the 1940 s and 19505, were documented along with other New Zealand holdings by Margaret Manion, Vera Vines, and Christopher de Hamel in 1989. The present catalogue of Early Printed Books in New Zealand Libraries addresses the other part of the Turnbull’s holdings of early materials: the scope of the catalogue is admittedly larger than this, including the collections at Victoria University and Wellington Public Library, and those in the Hawkes Bay, Taranaki, Nelson, and elsewhere in the Wellington region, but it is everywhere dominated by the collections in the Turnbull Library. It is well known (particularly since the publication of Kathleen Coleridge’s A Catalogue of the Milton Collection in 1980) that at the time of his death, Turnbull owned the largest private Milton collection in the world. This has been subsequently added to, notably in 1974, so that the collection has a larger pre-1800 Milton holding than the Bodleian. What is less well known, and what the publication of this catalogue makes abundantly clear, is the richness of the Library in other respects. The entry under Milton accounts for only ten of the 609 columns. The Turnbull has a fine collection of English and an

interesting collection of continental literature, a modest holding of incunables, large numbers of bibles and liturgies in more than a dozen languages (including Sir Arthur Howard’s collection also acquired in 1974), an important collection of travel literature, a large number of broadsides, and the intellectual and historical background for all these strengths. It has the only collection of Jonson quartos in the southern hemisphere, including a complete copy of the first edition of Every Man out of His Humour. Yet even where it is comparatively weak, the Turnbull is frequently distinctive. There are five entries under Alciati, four in the Turnbull: of those, three are not in the Bodleian, two are earlier than any edition in the Bodleian, and only one of those is to be found in the British Library. A sample analysis of the entries under A and K indicates that less than sixty per cent of the editions found in the Turnbull were also common to the Bodleian.

Such impressionistic details, and the bare entries, only tell part of the story. Indeed, anyone seriously working on English printed material before 1700 will need to consult this catalogue to ensure the accuracy of their records. For instance the unique copies of The Bokes of Salomon (STC 2757.5) and a Salisbury primer (STC 16002 a), untraced by the editors of the Short-Title Catalogue , are to be found in the Turnbull. The Turnbull also has five half-sheet broadsides of prayers of special thanksgiving issued between 1629 and 1635 (STC 16548.3, 16549, 16550.3, 16550.5, and 16552) that otherwise are only known to exist at the British Library, the Society of Antiquaries, Keble College Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, or the Houghton Library - with twelve copies collectively recorded between those five locations. The Howard Collection of bibles and liturgies includes a unique, though imperfect, folio edition of the book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Jugge in 1572 (STC 16301.5 +) and the most complete copy (lacking only the title) of the earliest English New Testament printed in duodecimo (STC 2864).

The provenance of much of this material is also fascinating. The copy of Walter Colman’s La Dance Machabre (STC 5569), from the Huth Library, was first owned by Frances Wolfreston; an English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron (STC 3172) was once owned by John Payne Collier; there is a gift copy of the Anglo-Saxon gospels from Matthew Parker to John Savile (Sir Henry’s older brother: DNB, xvii, 860-61) dated 9 August 1571 with its original vellum binding (STC 2961); and a fine incunable Salisbury primer (STC 15885) recording the birth of William Bulkeley, son of Roland, on 7 February 1566 - Bulkeley matriculated at Oriel College in May 1582. As with the Turnbull, so with the other libraries in New Zealand: a copy of Guicciardini’s Historie 0f... the Warres of Italie (STC 12459) from 1599, now in the Auckland Public Library, was originally bought by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, for seven shillings; a copy in the same library of Joseph Hall’s Mundis Alter et Idem (STC 12685.3) has the signature of Thomas Knyvett; the Auckland copy of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (STC 20519) once belonged to Francis Freeling, and

there are many books in that collection of another nineteenth-century bibliophile, Frances Mary Currer.

Simple, and with the barest information as the entries in this catalogue are, there is much to be praised about the timely appearance of the volume. It is important both for the information it provides, and also as a preliminary document for the projected History of Print Culture in New Zealand. Such is the politics of funding for special collections in New Zealand, however, that this catalogue and, indeed, the entire Early Imprint Project were the result of the voluntary labours of many people over a great many years. It is to be hoped now that the principal libraries will take a larger view of the desirability of completing the project and publish the records for Auckland, Dunedin, and elsewhere as soon as possible, providing at the same time an errata list of items accidentally omitted from the present volume. For inevitably there are errors and omissions - perfection, as the original editors of the original Short-Title Catalogue realised, is less important than making the information available for the first time. Amongst those items that were not catalogued is an incunable of the Cologne Chronicles (Goff C 476), a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Workes (STC 18076), a very fine copy of Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr (STC 7048), the first and second editions of Richard Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (STC 21361 and 21362), which were lost through the cross reference to Verstegan, all the New Testaments printed in both Latin and English (STC 2815,2816,2816.7, 2817 and 2821), and a fine copy of Congreve’s Works from 1710. The decision to catalogue unknown authors by the first initial (e.g. A., S. rather than S., A.) was decidedly odd and some of the cross-referencing might helpfully have been deleted. Similarly some of the bibliographical references need to be corrected. Also the locations and the references in the preliminary matter could usefully have been separated. These are, however, issues that can be addressed once the second volume of this project has been printed and an integrated catalogue with more detailed information is finally contemplated. Robert Petre, Ross Harvey, Vic Elliott, Rachel Salmond, Kathleen Coleridge, as well as all the other (often silent) voluntary helpers, are to be congratulated on having seen this work through to completion, providing for the first time a means of assessing quite what Turnbull, and subsequent benefactors to that and other libraries in the Wellington region, have left to the people of New Zealand by way of early printed books.

The early printed collections, however, are only one part of the story. The other aspect is the far larger collection of material that Turnbull bequeathed concerned with the early history of New Zealand, and it is unsurprising that ‘the lands and people of New Zealand’ is the principal focus of the current collections policy. Rachel Salmond’s Government Printing in New Zealand, 1840 to 1843 in one sense addresses the other aspect of the history of the book in New Zealand and thus an important concern for Turnbull as a collector, for it describes the origins of the press as a mechanism of political control. More than a decade ago, in his presidential

address to the Bibliographical Society, D.F. McKenzie questioned the received assumptions about the rapid spread of literacy amongst the Maori and explored the connections between the law of contract, ownership of land, the perceived authority of the written word amongst European settlers, and the assumption of political power. Government Printing is, in turn, a consideration of how the earliest administration of New Zealand sought to communicate through the mechanism of the press and of the problems involved.

Although a six-page catechism and some hymn sheets in Maori were printed in Kerikeri in December 1830, it was not until the arrival of William Colenso’s Stanhope press in January 1835 that printing in New Zealand began in earnest. Although Colenso did some job-work, his press was effectively controlled by the Church Missionary Society and was therefore at the service of their wish to provide scripture and Christian instruction for the Maori. Nevertheless, he printed two proclamations and a circular in Maori that Hobson issued within a day of his arrival as the new lieutenant-governor. The Church Missionary Society, however, were not interested in seeing their press diverted for the purposes of political administration, and so the pursuit of a more sustainable relationship became a regular concern for the new government as it sought to exercise control. The history of government printing is also, therefore, the history of early newspaper publication and of the problems that the authorities had in controlling printers who disagreed with their policies. In particular, the economics of the trade required that the printers carried out more than the piecemeal, if regular, work for the government, while land settlement was (as it has remained) a profoundly contentious political issue. Salmond’s work is particularly detailed (with excellent appendices) on the practical aspects of government printing: the economics of the trade, the conditions under which the texts were produced, and the political and personal conflicts between the printers and authorities. Constantly the larger context is alluded to, but there was a need at the end for a richer account of the political implications: the history of the press in early New Zealand is also a history of cultural assumptions about power, belief, and dissent.

In other words, Salmond’s Government Printing suggests an immediate and important connection that links together the two parts of Turnbull’s library. To raise such issues as the freedom of the press and cultural assumptions about power, belief, and dissent in early New Zealand is also to reach across time and cultures to Milton’s Areopagitica and the political debates of the seventeenth century about free will and the authority of monarchs. It also connects to the ways in which more recent forms of dissent have evolved, whether that be the textual element in contemporary painting, the devastating use of newspaper billboard posters as a form of political satire by The Double Standard in the early 1980 s, or the present sites of Howard Scott at ‘www.futurepacific.co.nz’. A great library is, indeed, a place that accepts both dissent and cultural diversity as necessary to its existence. Equally, whatever his

private beliefs, Turnbull was an assiduous bibliophile and took a large and generous view of what New Zealand and it context meant, realising that the country did not exist in isolation, from either its Pacific neighbours or the European culture that had been grafted on to its Polynesian society. It was indeed to be a long time before New Zealand as a society developed a perspective that blended these values together and developed a distinctive cultural inheritance, just as it is presently coming to terms with its connections to Asia and what this might imply for its future. The Turnbull Library with its riches and its recognition of cultural diversity and intellectual freedom has played an important role in shaping New Zealand’s cultural and intellectual history. It is that story that Rachel Barrowman’s The Turnbull: A Library and its World seeks to address.

Although prepared for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Library, Barrowman’s book is more generally a timely affirmation of the Library’s importance. It is a lively and well-written account with a keen sense of the telling anecdote and well-chosen quotation. If at times it is a little dismissive (the claim that Turnbull’s cocaine addiction affected ‘his collecting judgement’ towards the end of his life is not substantiated - he was acquiring English and continental literature at the time), it also serves as a useful corrective to E.H. McCormick’s biography of Turnbull. It is now more than twenty years since McCormick’s work was published. He portrayed Turnbull as a young man of some extravagance and acumen, financed through his family’s commercial activities, who became increasingly reclusive and financially embarrassed by his habits: but his account failed to address, at the most fundamental level, Turnbull’s achievement and its consequence - the foundation of his Library. Thus his portrait of Turnbull was inevitably limited to the extent that it failed to appreciate the breadth of Turnbull’s vision or the consequences of his gift. Indeed, George Fenwick’s comment about the Hocken Library eighty-five years ago remains more disturbingly true of the fortunes of the Turnbull Library and its collections policy since its benefactor’s death. Despite occasional and spectacular bouts of generosity, there has been a lack of recognition at the political level of the broader context. The result has been an impoverishment of strategic vision and an insularity of perception that is entirely inappropriate to the development of the most important research collection in New Zealand.

As Barrowman describes, the problems began almost as soon as the Library was founded. Turnbull’s first librarian, Johannes Andersen, regarded the collection as his personal fiefdom, while the problems of cataloguing the staggering bequest weighed heavily upon him and his small group of assistants. A poet with a particular interest in Polynesian history, he made a valiant attempt to get the Pacific material catalogued as quickly as possible; the rare books had to wait until 1931. He was, however, quick to take advantage of opportunities to expand the collections, most notably with works of art, the papers of some of Turnbull’s associates, and the Mantell collection of literature which included the Jonson quartos, autograph

volumes of Romantic and Victorian literature, and a dictionary that had once belonged to Keats. By 1930, Andersen was also pressing the government to acquire the land next to the Library (that site is now occupied by the Treasury) - its failure to do so resulting in accommodation problems that were to plague the Library for more than fifty years. He also pressed the government to fund the Library properly, but the onset of the Depression only compounded the issue, and the Library was inevitably neglected. Andersen’s successor, Clyde Taylor, was more fortunate. His appointment coincided with the election of a Labour government that was concerned to create state cultural institutions: the Turnbull was inevitably a beneficiary of that policy. Taylor’s twenty-six years as Librarian also witnessed the creation of the Friends, the transformation of literary and historical culture in New Zealand and the rapid expansion of university-based education. The result was the increasing use of the Turnbull by professional scholars, though access to the Library (in the New Zealand tradition) remained admirably open. The collection-building remained focused on New Zealand, but it was during Taylor’s tenure that the Turnbull acquired the Ilott Collection of medieval manuscripts and incunabula as well as, more obviously, its most substantial acquisitions relating to Katherine Mansfield.

The end of Taylor’s incumbency as Librarian, however, witnessed yet another transformation in the fortunes of the Library as the General Assembly Library, the Turnbull, and the National Library Service were merged together to form the National Library of New Zealand, with the Turnbull defined as the research library within that structure. The development provoked profound concern about the future and integrity of the Library and its role. If the concerns were largely unrealised it was, in part, because those in opposition to the plan instead became Trustees of the new institution. One consequence, however, was to curtail further the development of the English literature collection, with the National Library assuming responsibility for English and Commonwealth literature since 1918. Accommodation was another problem that the new structure was intended to resolve with the building of a new library opposite parliament. The saga (which anticipated that of the British Library) dragged on for eighteen years before the new building finally opened in 1987. By the early 19705, however, space was becoming an increasingly awkward problem compounded by an aggressive expansion in the New Zealand manuscript collections. Yet it was also under the stewardship of Turnbull’s fifth librarian, Jim Traue, that the full logic of what it meant for the Turnbull to be a research library was finally embraced. New Zealand scholarship in the humanities was also beginning to ask more profound and provocative questions about the country’s early history and cultural inheritance, while at a political level a reassessment was taking place of New Zealand’s relationship with, and place in, the international community. It is to Traue’s credit that during a period of economic and political readjustment, he perceived the need to make the Library increasingly

independent of government funding, even if events of the late 1980 s prevented the full realisation of his vision. The abrupt dislocation of political and economic policy between 1987 and 1992, however, left Traue’s successor, Margaret Calder, a poisoned chalice. The Turnbull has always been something of a cross between the Newberry Library, the Pierpont Morgan, and the Huntington, though smaller in size. Like the Newberry, it also caters for those who are interested in family history. Its problem, however, was that exponential growth in this area during the 1980 s forced library policy to become reactive to user demands. Both the new information technologies and an increasingly commercial emphasis in government policy suggested that the way around this problem was to deliver the information on-line and charge for it, thus protecting the primary resources. A good idea, however, can easily become both dogma and obsession, and the overall collections policy has suffered accordingly. In fact, it nearly proved disastrous. Barrowman ’ s book ends on the most shameful event in the Library’s history. Late in May 1994, a Wellington newspaper reported that the Treasury were considering selling the Library’s non-New Zealand special collections. The matter was quickly denied by the Minister of Finance, more it is generally believed from necessity rather than as a strict confirmation of the truth, but not before both local and international outrage had been expressed at the folly of such an act. The damage that was done still reverberates and it will take both time, and a new attitude towards the development of the collections, before the Turnbull is perceived as a library no longer under threat. The special collections of the Alexander T umbull Library are central to the history of the book in New Zealand. If their significance has, by the wider community, scarcely been grasped, nevertheless the collections have nourished a distinctive New Zealand contribution to literature, culture, and history, as well as providing inspiration and resources for such distinguished bibliographers as J.B. Trapp, Keith Maslen, and D.F. McKenzie.

The publication of all these volumes is timely, for their appearance coincides with a review of the role and scope of both the National Library of New Zealand and the Alexander Turnbull Library. It is a welcome sign that the preservation and development of the special collections within the Turnbull Library have been affirmed and that their future is, at least for now, apparently secure. On closer inspection, however, there remains much to be deeply concerned about. Funding and storage have always been the predictable and inadequate excuses for the neglect of the non-New Zealand collections. The problem, however, is more endemic, despite the current fiscal surplus. The foreign literatures collection was abandoned by the National Library in 1992 and they are now looking to dispose of the holding to an appropriate institution. It should be obvious that the most appropriate institution to maintain and develop at least the more important part of that collection is the Turnbull Library, for New Zealand, and its literary culture, did not exist in a cultural and intellectual vacuum in the twentieth century. There is an urgent need for the development of a research

collection of Asian literatures (the idea was first contemplated by the third Librarian, John Cole, in 1964) that connects New Zealand to its developing relationship with Asia and provides a scholarly resource for the future. And there is a need for the early printed collections to be modestly funded so that the Library can gradually enhance and enrich its resources. It is an indication of how limited the present notion of what ‘the lands and people of New Zealand’ means that when Sir Karl Popper’s library came up for sale (he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies while living in New Zealand between 1933 and 1949), its acquisition was not even contemplated. Nor is it enough merely to hope for the occasional donation: gifts are made to libraries that actively care about and seek to develop their resources. Those familiar with the New York Public Library will know that on the wall of the right-hand staircase leading to the upper reading rooms is inscribed a statement by Toni Morrison that begins: ‘Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilisations’. Any library that places Milton at the centre of its special collections in effect makes Areopagitica the central document of its existence, for all great libraries are places that transcend the narrow and particular interests of the present through the scope of their resources. Alexander T umbull ’ s gift was conceived in the same spirit. It was conceived with a breadth of imagination and executed with perseverance and determination over astonishingly few years. To be fair, there are those who are concerned with the guidance of the Library’s future who are aware of this. To pick up and look through Early Imprints in New Zealand Libraries, or Barrowman’s The Turnbull is indeed to be aware that ‘books do contain within themselves a potencie of life’. It would be a welcome development to be able to record upon the centenary of the Library that those now responsible for its development had exercised the strategic vision and political skills to ensure that the challenges that the Library faces had been met with the same dedication, intelligence, imagination, and flair as was shown by its founding benefactor.

Early Printed Books: A Coda Libraries are always places which have to negotiate between an impossible hope for as many resources as possible and a fear that, once acquired, those resources will remain under-utilised. Shifts in both scholarly interest and the more general intellectual climate will also affect demands for resources in ways that are difficult for any library to anticipate. Thus, in the 1980 s, cultural and literary theory had little need for rare books, but having now posed a new set of questions, scholarship in the humanities is increasingly turning back towards the evidence that is found in these documents. The incunable Salisbury primer mentioned in the review, for instance, also records the signature of a mid-sixteenth century woman reader and is therefore an important witness to literacy amongst social classes and groups other than the aristocratic and male in this period.

The example is also, in its way, the answer to the problem that this review describes. Suggestions that libraries ought to develop their collections with imagination and vision are often responded to with the imperative that a collections policy needs to be focused and financed. Yet the two are not necessarily contradictory and the financial consequences are often minimal - many seventeenth-century books and pamphlets can still be bought for less than one hundred dollars and many quite important books can be acquired for between five and eight hundred dollars. Such acquisitions are not necessarily luxuries. The acquisition of a handful of books might well help give a collection more focus and make the larger resource more usable. Given the very limited funds available, of course, this needs to be done cautiously, but forty to fifty books a year would significantly alter the shape of the Turnbull’s early printed collections over a decade, making the resources more flexible and of use to the local scholarly community whose discussions of New Zealand culture are informed by these perspectives. Similarly, new strengths could be gradually developed in response to the changing needs of the universities. By concentrating on books written by, dedicated to, or owned by women, for instance, or books with marginalia, as well as more traditional material (such as books from a specific printing-house), important dimensions could be added to the collections that increased appreciation of the Turnbull as a valuable resource. Though this has proved in the past to be a forlorn hope, it is nevertheless one worth affirming.

Turnbull Library Record 30 (1997), 77-86