I have spent the past few weeks exploring the archive that is the basis of my research.
The Angus & Robertson Archive (held at the State Library of NSW) is a vast repository of historical records relating to the largest Australian bookseller and publisher of the twentieth century. I have been working with this archive since 2016 but I have still only scratched the surface because it contains over one million items. For the PhD I will be using a set of scrapbooks that contain reviews of books published by Angus & Robertson in the early twentieth century. My Masters' thesis touched on the reviews but I needed a deeper understanding of the collection in order to determine the direction and parameters of my doctoral project.
To scope the collection, I examined a sample of twenty scrapbooks, asking various questions. How many volumes did the collection contain and how large were they? What kinds of materials were contained in the scrapbooks? How were the materials arranged? Approximately how many reviews did the collection contain? How comprehensive was the SLNSW catalogue? What were the temporal and geographic parameters of the materials?
The exercise has provided fruitful, providing some preliminary insights into the nature of book reviewing and A&R's practices. For example, the reviews are not restricted to domestic papers. Many came from New Zealand and some came from the British Empire (particularly in the United Kingdom and South Africa) as well as from North America, Asia, and continental Europe. This has prompted me to think and read more about the transnational nature of the book trade, even in this relatively early period. I have also noticed that most reviews are unsigned. They appear to be brief press notices rather than sustained literary criticism. To understand this phenomenon, I plan to read more about the history of reviewing and review journals.
In exploring the scrapbooks I have also come across some supplementary materials which will provide useful contextual information. These materials include newspaper articles about the book trade, A&R catalogues, circulars, promotional material, letters to booksellers and the trade, and dust jackets. Hopefully other scrapbooks in the collection contain similar materials.
Perhaps most significantly, this exercise has allowed me to gauge the extent of the collection and test the feasibility of my method. Based on my current scope (all genres of books published from 1888-1949) I estimate the scrapbooks contain about 60,000 individual reviews. My planned methodology involves photographing the volumes at the Library, and later entering the details of the reviews into a relational database constructed using Heurist. In working on this sample, the method has proved effective. I estimate photographing will take me 1hour per scrapbook and processing will take 1hour per 100 reviews.
The sheer scale of the undertaking has prompted significant discussions with my supervisory panel and I imagine it will continue to do so. However, we are currently satisfied the work is achievable within the constraints of the doctoral project and no immediate changes to my project design are required. We have established a clear timeline so that we will be able to recognise any unexpected delays and, if necessary, revise the scope. At this stage, I plan to have all the data entry completed by March 2021.
Conducting this preliminary scoping of the archive in the past few weeks has therefore been a productive and thought-provoking task. Importantly, it has ensured that emerging plans for the direction and scope of my research project have been fundamentally informed by the historical record.
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