Books as Gifts: The Meaning and Function of a Personal Library

Much of the evidence used in researching the history of individuals’ reading preferences and practices is elusive and transient. Most individuals do not leave material traces – why should they? – of an activity which nonetheless, in many cases, occupies a significant proportion of their waking lives; and the traces that some of them do leave are often enigmatic or ambiguous. The ‘personal library’, however – by which I mean a collection of books acquired over a period of time by a specific individual (as distinct from a family or an institution) – may reasonably be regarded with some optimism as a potentially rich source of information, at least about that individual’s reading history, and perhaps also about wider patterns of reading behaviour which he or she may exemplify. Such libraries, however, seem harder to come by as discrete objects of study than one might expect, given the pervasiveness of private reading among the book-buying classes through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main reason for this is undoubtedly the difficulty of preserving them as stand-alone collections (and the lack of interest in doing so). In Australia, personal libraries of this kind usually become publicly available by way of bequests to State or university libraries, where they may occasionally be preserved as ‘special collections’. Such decisions are taken, in a framework of acquisition policy, space constraints and bequest conditions, on the basis of the previous owner’s prominence and of the rarity, monetary value or specialist focus of the contents. Bequests that do not qualify – the overwhelming majority – are either dispersed (often without identifying catalogue tags or bookplates) through the receiving library’s general collection, or consigned to usedbook outlets, and thence into the general community or to the rubbish tip. An even