Marginal Notes 44: Melbourne Book Collectors 3 – Ian F. McLaren
This is the third in a series of articles about some Melbourne book collectors written in the 1960s by Melbourne journalist Stuart Sayers for "The Age Literary Supplement. The series was reprinted as a collection in the 1970s. We have already featured the first two of the three featured book collectors: Ivo and Rollo Hammet and Dr. H. Boyd Graham.
Ian McLaren is listed in Wikipedia thus:
Ian Francis McLaren (30 March 1912 – 17 April 2000) OBE, F.R.H.S.V., was an Australian politician, accountant, businessman, historian, bibliographer and book-collector.
From 1945 to 1947 he was the independent member for Glen Iris in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. Following his defeat he joined the Liberal Party, and served on Malvern City Council from 1951 to 1953.
In 1965, he returned to the Legislative Assembly as the Liberal member for Caulfield, changing seats to Bennettswood in 1967. He served on 22 committees in the house.[3] From 1973, he was Deputy Speaker. McLaren retired from politics in 1979.
McLaren was recognised in the Australian book world as a major book collector, whose library of some 40,000 books included 35,000 devoted to Australiana. He is quoted as saying A private library should be for use. It should produce something. He put this belief into practice, producing numerous published bibliographies devoted to diverse aspects of Australian history, including aviation, politics, mining, as well as Australian authors such as Adam Lindsay Gordon, C. J. Dennis and Marcus Clarke.
His Australiana collection was presented to the University of Melbourne, with a further 5,000 volumes of local histories, church histories, business and organisational histories donated to the National Library of Australia.
