Marginal Notes 31: My Friend Jim Lowden
Late last year I had the pleasure of lunching at Melbourne’s Swiss Club with my old mate, Jim Lowden – we spent an enjoyable two hours reminiscing.
Jim and I met in the early 1970s, when I was a fledgling bookseller and Jim was a fledgling printer/ publisher. We had several adventures together when Jim was promoting his output of books under his Lowden Publishing Co., Kilmore, imprint, and I got to know Jim and his family by attending their annual Kilmore Highland Games and Celtic Festival. (Jim was named Citizen of the Year Shire of Kilmore in 1984). His innovative approach to the use of coloured papers and inks for his publications was impressive and I admit to being influenced by his use of colour when I began issuing commercially printed catalogues in the 1970s, with varying degrees of success and failure.
In 1973 Jim was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship ‘To study methods, material and equipment used by scholarly publishing houses and to contact trade leaders in the printing industry throughout the world’, and his anecdotes of his experiences when travelling abroad on the Scholarship are fascinating. In fact, Jim’s life is one of fascination (and surely deserving of being recorded). Jim was the inaugural secretary of Mechanics’ Institutes of Victoria Inc. [MIV], and, as a life member, he maintains this interest in the stories behind the founding, and continuing history, of Mechanics’ Institutes throughout the world. Jim’s daughter, Bronwyn, has also been involved with the MIV, and in 2006 she was the compiler of Mechanics Institutes, Schools of Arts, Athenaeums, etc.: An Australian checklist, Lowden Publishing Co., Melbourne.
Jim produced several keepsakes for me – usually as a surprise. The first was after I had relayed an anecdote about a meeting with a celebrant prior to my marriage to John Menesdorffer, in 1977. Jim arrived at our wedding with a package of Keepsakes to mark the occasion. The second was a keepsake for our bookshop Christmas Party in 1978. Jim’s rather wicked sense of humour came into play with both keepsakes, as he issued one of each with a ‘mistake’ in the heading, referring to these as ‘the joker in the pack’. The wedding keepsake changed the heading for an extract from Kahlil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’ from ‘Marriage from The Prophet’ to ‘Miscarriage from The Prophet’ and the Christmas keepsake from ‘A Christmas Keepsake’ to ‘A Christmas Mistake’. A third keepsake was issued for the opening of our new premises at Cavendish House – I have no record of a ‘spoof’ copy – perhaps it was unintentionally distributed to a customer! In 2012, Jim anonymously published a keepsake to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of my mother, Muriel Craddock, entitled ‘MRC A Tale of a Century’, this time with no ‘joker in the pack’.
