Celebrating the world’s most beautiful books
This week we’re celebrating the book across the ages, from the ancient to the avant-garde with a selection of books from our Mirror of the World exhibition.
Our stories
The Shakespeare Window
Have you ever visited the 6th floor of the La Trobe Reading Room and gazed out over the Dome? Did you notice the Bard of Avon peering over your shoulder?
Cataloguing the Emmerson Collection
In April 2015, we received the most significant and valuable donation of rare books in our 160 year history: The Emmerson Collection. One year on, we look back over the extraordinary work being carried out by our rare book cataloguers Derrick Moors and Richard Overell.
Behind the lens of the Library’s studio photographer
The Library’s imaging studio is home to two full-time photographers and a studio supervisor. We handle the high end digitisation of a variety of collection items for public orders, digitising projects and other library requests. A day in the studio is never dull.
Celebrating Indigenous children’s books
The Legends of Moonie Jarl (1964) was the first Indigenous children’s book published in Australia. Here, Juliet O’Conor explores this extraordinary book and the contemporary diversity of Indigenous children’s literature.
Melbourne’s Joan of Arc
Melbourne’s Maid of Orléans arrived at Port Melbourne from Marseilles on 28 January 1907. Here, Pictures Librarian Gerard Hayes traces Joan’s history from a Francophile rallying point to the mysterious case of a missing crown.
The trial and execution of a King
The Library holds some of the earliest printed accounts of the trial and execution King Charles I. The pamphlets are part of the Emmerson collection, one of the great private libraries of early English books in the world.
The man who shrank the book
Do you like to take your books with you; to read on the train, a park, or in a plane? You have a man named Aldus Manutius to thank for that.… Read More ›
Life behind the stacks
11 kilometres of books, papers and ephemera are hidden beneath the streets of Melbourne. Anyone can access them, but they’ll need a State Library card.
The other side of Shackleton’s Antarctic adventure
When Ernest Shackleton’s 1915 Antarctic expedition ran into trouble, the Ross Sea party that was laying out stores for his team continued unawares, facing harrowing challenges of their own.
