Objects of desire

Despite several decades of predictions about its imminent death, the book in our culture remains as popular as ever, and more books are being produced and purchased now than at any other time in history.

This is the conclusion of Des Cowley and Clare Williamson, the authors of the recently released The World of the Book, published by the Miegunyah Press in association with the State Library of Victoria.

“In a world where information is available via the touch of a button, publishers are increasingly producing books that are both innovative and desirable as objects,” according to Cowley and Williamson.

“Books have always meant more to us than the information they carry.

“We engage with them intellectually, but also visually and sensually, drawn to their tactile and physical properties – paper, design, font, binding.”

The World of the Book is a stunning book itself. Beautifully illustrated, it contains an illuminated manuscript created for the Medici family of Florence in 1479; masterpieces of early printing, such as Gutenberg’s Bible and Aldus Manutius’s Hypnerortomachia Poliphili; books recording the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton; works by the great botanical and natural history artists, the woodblock books of Japanese artist Hokusai; the productions of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press; literary greats from William Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf; children’s books, beat literature and pulp fiction, graphic novels, artists’ books and contemporary graphic design.

Cowley and Williamson believe that the book has become emblematic of a personal and cultural identity that will not be easily replaced.

“We continue to attach value to the idea of books, and this value is abundantly represented in our ownership of them, assembling them into personal and public libraries, great or small.”

Des Cowley is Rare Printed Collections Manager at the State Library of Victoria and has more than 20 years’ experience working with rare books. Clare Williamson is Exhibitions Curator at the Library. They are the joint curators of the Library’s permanent exhibition Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas.

Cowley and Williamson observe that in the world of books, no individual volume can ever hope to be all-encompassing.

Their book draws largely on the Library’s rich holdings of more than two million books acquired over the past 150 years.

“For Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, a library was both paradise and labyrinth,” Cowley and Williamson say.

“It was in this same spirit that we approached the State Library’s collections.”