How the search for an atlas led to a library
“It was Angus Shaw longing for some sort of reference library which started me going” Mrs Gunn wrote in 1955 to her friend Cec Wellington. She had been horrified to hear Angus had gone all the way into Melbourne, from Monbulk in the Dandenong Ranges, to find an atlas and show his son the places he’d been to in the war.
And get going she did to the point where a large and excellent library with 'nothing but the essential' was produced for Monbulk with the assistance of an international book-lovers community. This community is still strong today, as we all know despite the prevalence of eBooks etc.
You can read about the book loving community, how this library was formed, and hopefully be inspired to visit it one day.
Postscript (July 2022):
Our work was to conduct a significance assessment of the collection. Two recommendations we made were to do with best practice collection management and access, so we encouraged the organisation to join Victorian Collections. Monbulk RSL have since taken part in the training, and now have their military collection entirely catalogued and their ‘Gunn collection’ well on the way to a full catalogue.
“Take a look at the website, I am quite excited about it. Thanks for putting me on to Victorian Collections, it has been a lot of work but very satisfying.”
