British Books

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ traces the history of the printed book in Australia, particularly the production and business context that mediated Australia’s literary and cultural ties to Britain for much of the twentieth century. This study focuses on the London operations of one of Australia’s premier book publishers of the twentieth century: Angus & Robertson. The book argues that despite the obvious limitations of a British-dominated market, Australian publishers had room to manoeuvre in it. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom. This book is the answer to the current void in the literary market for a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade.

How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire argues that within an entangled web of imperial, colonial and book trade networks books, reading and subscription libraries contributed to a core and peripheral criteria of clubbability used by the "select people"—clubbable settler elite—to vet the "proper sort"—clubbable indigenous elite—as they culturally, economically and socially navigated their way towards membership in colonial clubland. As a microcosm for British-controlled areas of the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, this book assesses the history, membership, growth and collection development of three colonial subscription libraries—the Penang Library in Malaysia, the General Library of the Institute of Jamaica and the Lagos Library in Nigeria—during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work also examines the places these libraries occupied within the lives of their subscribers, and how the British Council reorganized these colonial subscription libraries to ensure their survival and the survival of colonial clubland in a post-colonial world. This book is designed to accommodate historians of Britain and its empire who are unfamiliar with library history, library historians who are unfamiliar with British history, and book historians who are unfamiliar with both topics.

Historians have long understood that books were important to the British army in defining the duties of its officers, regulating tactics, developing the art of war, and recording the history of campaigns and commanders. Now, in this groundbreaking analysis, Ira D. Gruber identifies which among over nine hundred books on war were considered most important by British officers and how those books might have affected the army from one era to another. By examining the preferences of some forty-two officers who served between the War of the Spanish Succession and the French Revolution, Gruber shows that by the middle of the eighteenth century British officers were discriminating in their choices of books on war and, further, that their emerging preference for Continental books affected their understanding of warfare and their conduct of operations in the American Revolution. In their increasing enthusiasm for books on war, Gruber concludes, British officers were laying the foundation for the nineteenth-century professionalization of their nation's officer corps. Gruber's analysis is enhanced with detailed and comprehensive bibliographies and tables.

Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.

The remainder of the collection was sold in 1810.

Includes no. 53a: British wartime books for young people.

An international trade emerged between 1870-1895 that incorporated the circulation of books among countries worldwide. A history of the social network and select agents who sold and distributed books overseas, this study demonstrates agents increasingly thought of the world as a negotiable, connected system and books as transnational commodities.