In 1907, a lucky person received this now battered small volume for Christmas, one of a series of Nugget Booklets , reprints from the world's literature , put out by the renowned E.W.Cole Book Arcade, Melbourne , with branches in Sydney and Adelaide. A faded inscription in the book indicated that in 1939 it was owned by a different person .
The Supreme Literary Gift, written by T.G. Tucker, Professor of Classical Literature , Melbourne University , over 40 pages extolled the joy of reading the best of literature .
There were 11 Nugget Booklets listed , which included another by Tucker dealing with Shakespeare , selling for 9d each, leather bound 2 shillings and sixpence , postage one penny.
The above volume carried an advert for Glimpses of Australian Bird Life, 31 original and geniune photographs direct from nature, with notes by Robert Hall, F.L.S.,C.M.Z.S. , author of The Useful Birds of Southern Australia.
Another advert , for The Laboratory and Other Poems, by W.A. Osborne , was described as a dainty book of 48 pages , on antique paper ,printed in two colours.
To quote from the classics, thou couldst have knocked this blogger over with a feather when he discovered in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that William Alexander Osborne (1873-1967), from Ireland , a Professor of Physiology and man of letters, who had a colourful career at Melbourne University, in later years had lived on Magnetic Island, Queensland.
While on the island he took a keen interest in the Townsville University College to which in 1962 he gave over 500 volumes, mostly English and American literature, especially poetry.
The Dictionary said that during World War II he had advised the Australian Army on diet and was an interpreter-assessor for German internees. In addition, he was a rigorous and not always liberal chairman of the advisory board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1944-46 (his knowledge of Australian writing was limited), developing some respect for Prime Minister Ben Chifley, the fund's chairman.
Osborne was described as a great speaker and a formidable polemicist, with a ribald atheism. (He habitually called Christmas 'the Mithraic festivities'.) He could be seen as warm and generous, cold and wounding: often he was both and he was susceptible to the flattery of both sexes. He died in Melbourne.
FOOTNOTE: Expect follow up on dynamic Osborne .
