Marginal Notes 33: A simple question
In 1988 my mother, Muriel, and I were invited by an elderly lady, Miss Pratt, to view a collection of books in her Victorian-era house in Hawthorn. These proved to be unexciting, with many of the books being wet, caused by rising damp seeping through the back of the glazed door bookcases. After explaining that we could not make an offer to purchase her books, we posed the question: are there any other books you would like us to look at? Miss Pratt took us into a spare room at the back of the house where we found, piled high in the hearth under a layer of soot and dust, a number of slim volumes of nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian poetry. They had been collected by her grandfather, William Nathaniel Pratt, himself a prolific writer of mostly self-published poetry broadsides. We were also shown a big bundle of manuscripts of his poetry and essays, which Miss Pratt had felt inclined to consign to a bonfire during a rationalisation of her effects.
Thus, a simple question during a disappointing house-call led to a major purchase. Recognising the scarcity and importance of many of the early volumes, and as a tribute to William Nathaniel Pratt, we decided to build a catalogue around this remarkable Victorian gentleman’s love of poetry. Setting a timeframe of 1854-1950, we added other examples of Australian poetry to the Pratt collection, giving each a full bibliographical entry. The catalogue included a preface and reproduced an unpublished lecture entitled Australian Poets and Poetry which Mr. Pratt had delivered to The Collins Street Literary and Debating Society in Melbourne in 1902. We also included his manuscripts, and our appendices listed bookbinders’ tickets and booksellers’ labels found in the books. Before the catalogue was ready to print, a Sydney customer who was visiting our bookshop showed great interest in the project, eventually purchasing the collection in its entirety. Our participation ended there, but it was a great delight to us, and to Mr. Pratt’s descendants, when the new owner’s enthusiasm for the collection resulted in the publication in 1990 of The Story of William Nathaniel Pratt (1847-1933) and the poems that weren’t published in 1917, by John Fletcher, Book Collectors’ Society of Australia, Sydney 1990. Studies in Bibliography No. 31.
In this publication, John Fletcher wrote a comprehensive and well-researched biography of William Nathaniel Pratt, thus making his story a permanent part of Australia’s literary history.
