Literary Clippings

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 525, 30 November 1928, Page 14

Literary Clippings

Amazing, Collection In a warehouse in Little Bourke ■ Street, Melbourne there is stacked ; H * Huge pile o£ fiat cardboard boxes, !

each box being about eighteen inches long, a foot wide, and an inch deep. These boxes are piled symmetrically along the wall, and the huge stack extends for more than thirty feet lengthwise, and is about twelve feet high. In all there are 1831 boxes, and they contain the most amazing collection of newspaper cuttings and other literary clippings that have ever been accumulated by the painstaking, ant-like industry of one man. They represent the life’s hobby of the late E. W. Cole, the founder of Cole’s Book Arcade, says the Melbourne "Herald.” The pile represents the literary pickings of a lifetime. Each box is labelled in classified order, and on opening any one box you will find its contents arranged under subjects and sub-heads. The whole collection is a monument of method and neatness. On one sheet of paper will be pinned a dozen clippings arranged with precision, and references to every phase of human thought, endeavour, enterprise and accomplishments are quoted and indexed. It is the achievement of a human bower-bird with a tidy mind. From Beer to Burials Take any letter of the alphabet“B,” for instance. Each “B” box is neatly labelled, Bliss, Bigotry, Barbarism, Baptism, Bread, Begging, Beards, Britons, Bible, Beer, and so on from Bachelors to Burials. You open the “Bliss” box. Here are cuttings telling everything everyone ever said on the subject. Poets and philosophers, savants and scavengers, all have their blissful moments, and all have recorded them, forgetting, perhaps, that "The bliss that can be told is but half-bliss.” Open the “Bible” box, which contains hundreds of cuttings, and you learn things like this: “The circulation of Bibles since the beginning of the present century amout to 200,000,000.” And so, ad infinitum, apparently. The “C” box runs from “Cabs” to “Czechs.” One complete pile of “C” boxes is devoted to “Chinese.” Mr. Cole seems to have liked the Chinese. Open the “Chance” box and you learn that Voltaire said, “There’s no such thing as chance,” while Napoleon believed that “Chance is the Providence of adventurers.” Running along the alphabetically arranged stack one comes to “Y.” Yesterday, Years, Young, Yoke, Yearning, and nearly every other substantive in the language beginning with “Y.” The “Years” box yields cuttings on the New Year, on all that Pope, Sherlock, Rogers, Goethe, H. W. Beecher, Dr. Davies and other big chiefs said about it. One does not examine the “Yesterday” box. Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday, Why fret about them if To-day be sweet? Labels on Education The “Woman” boxes are many, naturally enough. Says David Wylie in Barrie’s “What Every Woman Knows”: “I wonder that no great writer has ever written a book about how queer women are.” Mr. Colo knew better than that. His “Woman” boxes are rubbing shoulders with the “T” pile. Lovely woman is cheek by jowl with Temper, Torture, Temperament, and Temptation. It is an education to read only the labels. Some boxes contain pictures and portraits. One has an extraordinary jumble of photographs and woodcuts — “Interior of a church at Alcobaca in Portugal,” “Picture of Peter Jackson, the Pugilist,” “Picture of a flat-headed woman and child.” One picture is titled, “A Beauty of New York,” and the circumspect Mr. Cole has altered “beauty” to “woman,” a conscientious correction, no doubt. Trials, Thieving, Terror, Theism, Theatres—it is an intriguing, fascinating list. “Supersitions” is a fat, likelylooking box that one would like to delve into. The “Newspapers” box contains some queer items. Who would have dreaified that there are newspapers with names like these, even in America?: Kansas Prairie Dog, County Rustler, Astonisher aud Paralyser, Scorcher, Border Ruffian, The Broad Axe, The Brick, and The Fanatic. Mr. Cole certainly made his literary pile complete, and left a monument for the curious to marvel over.