Searching my own book on the Internet - A. L. Rowse: A Bibliophile's Extensive Bibliography

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2002 by Sydney Cauveren

'BOOKS are like children. You give them birth, and watch over them in their early years; but there comes a day when they leave home to stand on their own feet and you have no control over their subsequent history'. That quote comes from a letter to me, dated April 1985, by Olaf Ruhen, the Australian author of: Harpoon in my Hand (1966). The book vividly recollects a season spent with Tongans, who through economic necessity, still hunt whales from small boats with hand-held harpoons.

Both Ruhen's quote and the story in his book bore relevance in my own quest to track down the whereabouts of a small edition research book I wrote fifteen years later.

With the migration of whales every winter along our coast, Sydney-siders regularly spot pods passing our beaches. A recent visitor even ventured into Sydney harbour, disrupting all commercial activity, but providing photographers with spectacular displays of frolicking and play. Importantly, it gave time for marine biologists to implant a small electronic device onto the mammal's tail fin before it continued on its mating journey North. Now tracked in its activities, we may learn more about how these greatest of living things survive in our ever changing environment.

In the world of the satellite, and with mammoth whaling fleets still active in open oceans, we live in hope the conservationists won't loose contact with Sydney's whale, neither to a Tongan harpoon fisherman, or in tow to a Japanese trawler, where in slaughter, a very different kind of research is, supposedly, undertaken.

Of course, such surveillance has been widely possible only in recent times. Similarly, it has also turned the age of printing and publishing into a computer-spin. Books can now be printed on demand via the press of a button on the internet. All from the home computer! And, editors expect work on computer disks. Words like scanning, e-mailing and down-loading are second nature to business activity. We have stopped licking down envelopes, relying less on the old-fashioned postal system. The electronic age, with its ever expanding possibilities, now dominates communication. Much of it can be baffling and confusing but correctly used it can be turned into an important research tool.

Slow to adapt to new technology, I was compelled to learn its mysteries in order to keep pace -- to use a personal computer and surf the Internet through search engines and watch intrigued, as the top right box on the screen before me, revealed a rotating globe that signals the search is on along the information superhighway.

But quick results are unlikely. Besides being riddled with inaccuracies (information is only as accurate as the source that puts it there), it is often far too volumous as it bursts forth to literally swallow one up. It can become a David and Goliath experience; a flood of information! Indeed, agitatingly time consuming to separate quality from the masses of quantity. If anything, inviting the Internet to do the thinking for you, getting to the point quickly isn't the method. It can be as infuriating as it is rewarding, but one must persist and cull the meaningless information. Logically that can only be accomplished with confidence in computer skills and learning how to avoid the trappings.

What follows, is unlikely to interest any 'million selling' author. Every author wants a best-seller, but in the case of a small scholarly edition book like mine, I was destined for a different -- a more elitist path. An overwhelming amount of research is involved in compiling an author bibliography. The work inevitably turns into an obsession for the compiler who, if working without an institutional grant or scholarship, will only incur costs instead of making royalties.

In my case, the subject was a friend, the great Cornish man of letters Dr A. L. Rowse, whom I loved as an Uncle figure, but who also happened to be a world renowned authority on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

In 1993, I started the bibliography on my electric typewriter, and by 1996, close to completing some five hundred pages of typescript, the whole thing had to be re-typed on to a newly acquired PC, for presentation to the publisher in America, and down-loaded on floppy disks. Thus the labour was extended double-fold. And the determination to succeed was enforced.

Seven years on from the original idea, and with the subject of the book now deceased, my work to honour the author's achievement was finally published. Thus, A. L. Rowse: A Bibliophile's Extensive Bibliography, the Scarecrow Author Bibliography number 103, was published at Lanham, Maryland in March 2000.

My next move was to check that it would not be dead in the water from the start. Few bibliographies receive much notice from the press. I was luckier than most with reviews in The Times Literary Supplement; Contemporary Review and Choice (USA). Even the Duchy quarterly The Cornish Banner received the book enthusiastically. Naturally, my curiosity became difficult to contain. Where would my book end up? Obviously in those university and college libraries holding Rowse collections, and, with sixty U.S. dollars available to spend!