By Carolyn Webb
Once upon a time, a university student called Chris Browne decided to take up book collecting.
It was 1970, and he bought a first edition of Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy thriller The Man With the Golden Gun for two shillings at a charity shop in Oxford, England.
Never short of a book: Melbourne Rare Book Week convenor Chris Browne has a large personal library from 49 years of collecting.Credit: Joe Armao
Back then, collecting was a fun hobby while Browne studied medical science at Oxford University.
It was to grow into an incurable lifelong obsession.
The Gippsland house where Professor Chris Browne keeps some of his collection.
Today, the now-Professor Browne has 10,000 books at his house in Camberwell.
And he's never short of holiday reading – he keeps 2000 more at his weekender in Gippsland.
Asked why he keeps so many books, he can only offer that ‘‘I’ve always enjoyed reading’’. Each year he buys about 500 books and reads as many as 300.
He no longer goes to libraries, ‘‘because I’ve generally got what I want to read here’’.
Professor Browne, 70, who retired in 2012 having worked as an academic in the Monash University medical facility for 40 years, is rather well qualified to be convenor of this year’s Melbourne Rare Book Week, on from July 5 to 14.
Among the 50 bookcases in his Camberwell home you will find 500 books by and about Jane Austen, and 300 relating to Charles Dickens.
Books by Virginia Woolf, Aubrey Beardsley, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde.Credit: Joe Armao
A third edition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, dating from 1818, is one of 40 surviving copies and is worth $20,000.
In contrast, Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling, is worth about $300, but is ‘‘priceless’’ to Professor Browne because as a child in 1951, his grandmother read it to him in Yorkshire, when his parents were working overseas.
The bookplate (label) certifying this edition of Charles Dickens' American Notes was once owned by wealthy US collector Harry Elkins Widener, who died in the sinking of the Titanic. Credit: Joe Armao
The book has whimsical tales about how leopards got their spots and camels their humps.
Kipling would change the stories while reading to his own children, and his frustrated daughter would tell him to read it ‘‘Just So’’ – as it was in the text.
Professor Browne does not just read 100 year old tomes: he has modern favourites, such as author Philip Kerr's detective thrillers set in Nazi Germany.
But whether the book is old or new, he will tell you a story about it.
A first edition of American Notes, Dickens’ book about his 1842 US tour, was once owned by Philadelphia bibliophile Henry Elkins Widener, who died when the Titanic sank in 1912.
Widener’s mother donated his book collection to Harvard, and his estate funded what is now Harvard’s main library.
The signature of Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell), in the 1933 Alice In Wonderland book.Credit: Joe Armao
But Professor Browne says that curiously, Harvard does not have Widener's first edition of American Notes and has approached him to sell them his.
Another cherished book is an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland, published in 1933, which is signed by Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, nee Liddell, who as a child inspired Lewis Carroll to write the Alice books. It was owned by Alice late in her life.
Melbourne Rare Book Week features 45 events, including the three-day Melbourne Rare Book Fair at the University of Melbourne’s Wilson Hall.
Professor Browne will co-host a historic walk of Melbourne visiting locations mentioned in crime novelist Fergus Hume’s 1886 global bestseller, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
The festival also features the launch of a book about Indigenous involvement in Australian football and a forum on books about the 1930 murder of Melbourne artists’ model Molly Dean.
Professor Browne said Rare Book Week was ‘‘a celebration of books, of things printed, and of reading’’. Sessions are free to the public, although booking is usually required.