Knowledge Through Print: A Melbourne Perspective

Image: Frontispiece (vol. 1), in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, 3rd ed., Livourne: de l’Imprimerie des Éditeurs, 1770-1776, 17 volumes. Special Collections, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

Exhibition – Knowledge Through Print: A Melbourne Perspective, 12 June to 2 September 2012, Leigh Scott Gallery, Baillieu Library

This exhibition takes as its starting point – and as a basis for a certain critical distance – the great London event of 1963: Printing and the Mind of Man. Exhibited at the British Museum and Earls Court, Printing and the Mind of Man explored the technical progress of printing as a craft, the finest achievements of printing as an art, and the impact of printing on the development of western thought. A number of titles represented in 1963 are displayed here, but this exhibition also aims, in a much smaller compass, to recognise some of the things that have changed in half a century. Scholarship on print and the history of the book is featured, along with 20th-century works by Australian and New Zealand thinkers and savants.