Tuesday, May 06, 2025

In the 1960s, Melbourne journalist Stuart Sayers wrote a series of articles for "The Age Literary Supplement”, entitled Melbourne's Book Collectors. As introduction, Stuart wrote: "Book Collecting is not an art, a science or a business, although elements of all these are important in its successful practice. The definition nearest to accuracy may be that it is a way of life. Certainly, above all else, collecting books is a constant - and sometimes ruthless - battle of wits." Amongst the collectors Stuart wrote about, some were both reader and collector, although the two are not necessarily mutually inclusive. Today's book collectors are less likely to accumulate such large libraries, and I am not sure that they need to be quite so ruthless. As suggested by Stuart Sayers, book collecting does continue to be 'a way of life' for those lucky enough to know about it.

The series was reprinted as a collection in the 1970s. The featured book collectors, which we will present over three Marginal Notes, were

1                    Ivo and Rollo Hammet

2                    Dr. H. Boyd Graham

3                    Ian McLaren

The Hammet Brothers

My mother and I did not have any direct contact with Ivo Hammet, but his brother, Rollo, would occasionally call in to our bookshop at 569 Bourke Street, Melbourne. I don’t recall him ever buying a book from us, but I distinctly recall the time he told us why he would not buy from us. His reasons were, first, that we were women, and second, that we lacked a university education, ‘unlike young Peter Arnold’.