14 October 2004 - 28 February 2005
The publishers of the nineteenth century produced many beautiful books. Often their beauty lies in the designs and colours of the cloth bindings. Examples in this exhibition were drawn from the fields of literature and romance, children’s books, scientific works, travel accounts and Australiana and included some striking examples of coloured cloth bindings produced in Australia (e.g. The Transit of Venus featured above). Also on displayed was one of the earliest surviving dust-wrappers, from 1860. It was the rise of the dust-wrapper in the years after World War I that saw the decline of the coloured cloth binding.