Ancient texts on show at World of the Book at the State Library of Victoria offer a portal to the past

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

In the presence of a tightly rolled, yellowed scroll in the State Library of Victoria, it is hard not to feel a bit awe-struck.
Inside a glass cabinet in the centre of the library sits the oldest known mass-printed text in the world, the Hyakumantō Darani.
The finger-length item is a Buddhist prayer scroll that circulated more than 700 years before the invention of the Gutenberg press.
Its name translates as "1 million pagodas and Dharani prayers", explains Dr Anna Welch, principal curator at the library.
The Hyakumantō Darani is a surviving example of what are thought to have been 1 million woodblock-printed scrolls and mini wooden pagodas originally commissioned by the Japanese empress Shōtoku in 764 to send to Japan's 10 major temples.
And it is the centrepiece of the library's 20th anniversary World of the Book exhibition.
The flat version of the scroll on display in the cabinet is a facsimile, but Dr Welch was there when the original was unfurled.
"It was extremely moving," she says. "We all held our breath.
"What a privilege to be around something that tells us the beginnings of the story of printed text and has survived 1,300 years.
"There are so many cultures immersed in the production of this Buddhist scroll in medieval Japan, printed using Chinese characters. It's an extraordinary fusion. That's the history of the book. It is a global history."
In the World of the Book, this global history spans 4,000 years of technological development in recorded writing, beginning with the oldest object in the library's collection: a cuneiform tablet.
The matchbook-sized stone piece from Southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), dated at 2050 BC, is a proto-tax receipt.
"It's the script that's used to record the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the oldest surviving work of literature … in the world," Dr Welch says.
New to the library's collection and also on display for the first time is a medieval scribe's knife.
Thought to have been made in Germany or the Netherlands in the 15th century, the knife was used to hold down the vellum, a post-papyrus parchment invented by the Romans and made of animal skin.
"Because it's a skin, it reacts to humidity and it'll curl up in the air," Dr Welch says.
As well as being used to hold down parchment using one hand — while writing with a quill and ink with the other — the knife is also "a correction tool".
"It's kind of a white-out of its day, in that you could use it to scrape off a mistake that you'd written," Dr Welch says.
It is from an era when scribes, artists and skilled craftspeople painstakingly made books by hand.
As is the oldest book in Australia, the De Institutione Musica (Principles of Music), dated at 1100 AD, which is also on display.
Set next to the book, with its ornate leather binding, yellowed pages with precise script and richly illustrated borders, the practical — yet beautiful — scribe's tool seems to bring the world of these books to life.
You can almost smell the vellum, hear the scrape of the ink-dipped quill against the parchment.
This, Dr Welch says, is one of the intentions of the exhibition: to get people to think about the materiality of the book and what it signifies.
"Not just what's in the book, but how is it made? What does its form tell us about its cultural context, its meaning and about our own assumptions of it?"
The Darani was the curatorial inspiration for a section within the exhibition that explores cross-cultural connections and differing perspectives of Japan's influence on the West (and vice versa) — particularly after the 17th century.
The mini exhibition showcases some of the pre-Gutenberg history of mass printing and the artistry of Japanese woodblock prints, from Hokusai to Kawanabe Kyōsai.
Seeing Japanese editions of popular Western books, and Westernised versions of Japanese art, in context with the original is a little like peering through Alice's looking glass: culture reflected, refracted and reframed.
A manga version of Les Misérables sits next to an English translation of Astro Boy. Beneath lies a series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books — heroes in half-shells with nunchaku and ninja stars.
The World of the Book circumnavigates one of the upper galleries of the State Library's striking domed reading room, presenting more than 300 works from its collection across five thematic areas.
Some particular beauties include a 1688 edition of the first science fiction novel written by a woman, The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish; illustrated editions of Oscar Wilde's novels by Aubrey Beardsley and André Derain; the collection of surrealist and Dada art books, with illustrations by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Max Ernst; and the section on colour theory, featuring an essay with hand-painted watercolours by Mary Gartside, a French edition of Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting and print works from Bauhaus artist Josef Albers's Interaction of Color.
The exhibition showcases a diverse range of printing and book manufacturing technologies — most of which must be carefully protected from the fading effects of light by controlling how frequently they are handled and displayed.
With one peculiar exception: a large codex art book by Lebanese Australian artist Deanna Hitti, featuring the figure of a woman hidden in a wash of blue.
"This is a cyanotype," Dr Welch says. "It's a non-camera form of photography that was developed in the 19th century. What's really amazing about cyanotypes is that they're light-sensitive. When you display them like this, they fade quite quickly. But if you close the book, it recharges."
Might this collection of precious, ancient books talk to each other, after dark, Night at the Museum-style?
"Oh, they have lives," Dr Welch says. "They absolutely have lives, these books … They're like magic books to me.
"There's an intangible quality to them that transcends their material form, but comes from it.
"It is a kind of time machine."
The World of the Book is free and running at the State Library of Victoria until May 17, 2026.