...legacies of printed books and manuscripts. It then turns to the substantial library Nicholson dispersed at an auction sale in Melbourne in May 1861 and what can be discovered about 6,000 volumes bought by private collectors and by Victorian institutions.

**********

Anybody aware of the University of Sydney sixty years ago, as we were in our academically 'aspirational' selective high school, could hardly fail to have noticed the name of Sir Charles Nicholson, the first Chancellor. Our excursion at the end of our first year of Latin studies in 1945 was to the Nicholson Museum. When in March 1950 we signed the matriculation register in the Great Hall of what had only just ceased to be the only university in our native city, it was inevitably under Nicholson's portrait. This we continued to see--at concerts, examinations and ceremonies and when eventually we graduated--just as we passed the door of the Museum daily (and occasionally entered it). One or two people knew tried their hands at the Nicholson Medal for Latin verse, but by this time I was in thrall to the tradition established by another, unrelated Nicholson, the University's first and most fearsome Professor of French.

In 1960 when I returned to Sydney from graduate studies in Paris, Andrew Osborn was making the University aware of other treasures, medieval manuscripts and incunabula, that its Library had inherited from Charles Nicholson. (1) As a result it was a surprise, when I moved to Monash University in 1962, to find 'our' Nicholson's bookplates (the MD, the knight, the baronet) in volumes in shops and in libraries. It took a while to discover the perfectly legitimate explanation for all of this. It says enough significant things about the Australian book world in the 1860s and about the way some of our more important libraries were built up to be recounted here in some detail.

My title refers to 'collections' in the plural because, as we shall see, there is a post-1861 as well as a pre-1861 component. For various reasons, notably the state of the sources for the later period, I shall say less about what came to the University of Sydney in Nicholson's lifetime and then from his sons. Although there is much that we do not know about the earlier library, I shall give it more attention even if it held fewer 'high spots' of the kind prized by nineteenth-century bibliophiles. As a consequence I shall not be proceeding in the normal chronological order.

Some aspects of the post-1861 gifts are very well covered indeed. For example, the late Keith Sinclair's Descriptive catalogue of medieval and Renaissance western manuscripts in Australia devotes more than fifty pages to its numbers 99-130, the Nicholson manuscripts in the University of Sydney Library, all acquired in 1924 or later from the former Chancellor's heirs. (2) Alan Crown's Hebrew manuscripts and rare printed books held in the Fisher Library of the University of Sydney rightly points out that Nicholson was the source of much of the material described. (3) On the other hand, H. G. Kaplan's A first census of incunabula in Australia and New Zealand does not identify the Nicholson gifts because it does not record provenances. (4) More recently, Pamela Bell dealt with a parallel area, Nicholson's 1865 gift of art works. She claimed that what the University received was 'the only surviving collection assembled by an expatriate Englishman in the Colony of New South Wales in the first half of the 19th century'. (5) In all this there is a clear invitation to look systematically at Nicholson as a major donor, but he is obstinately absent from an admittedly Melbourne-centred collection of studies published last year....

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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