In Sidney Webb'S diary account of a conversation in early October 1898 with ‘the intelligent principal shopman in the largest bookstore in Sydney’ (almost certainly Dymock's Book Arcade) he reports that he was given a gloomy assessment of the state of local book-buying. Apart from naming Australia's ‘one great and wealthy collector — Mr. Mitchell of Sydney’, his informant contented himself with the tantalisingly vague statement: ‘There had been a little set of bookbuyers in Melbourne, but this had died out.'1 It is possible to guess that this group included in the 1880s such figures as William Cornell, Edmond Schollick2 and the Rev. John Herbert Gregory.3 However, one private library seems to stand out in Melbourne before the crash of 1892: that of John Macgregor, a leading solicitor and a former Parliamentarian and Minister of Mines.

That this collection is now forgotten is explained by the fact that it contained no more Australiana than one would expect to find for a person active in Victorian public life and therefore requiring a range of utilitarian works.4 For today's bibliophiles, ‘Macgregor’ is simply not a recognised provenance or point of reference. His reputation died in the middle of the twentieth century with trade veterans like Leonard Slade, who was in the first decade of his long career when the Macgregor auction was held in 1884. When Slade was interviewed by Norman McCance for the Argus in 1939, his reminiscences, rather inaccurately recorded and spelt, suggest none the less why the sale impressed him:

As an employee of Samuel Mullen, the 25-year-old Slade was indeed quite close to what was happening, even if distance in time brought a certain amount of exaggeration.

Hyperbole was never absent from auctioneers’ advertisements, and Gemmell, Tuckett, and Co., who had become Melbourne's specialists in books by the 1880s, did not restrain themselves in announcing the first day of the sale on Monday 18 August:

Then comes a list, with suitable puffs and some details, of major sections of the catalogue: illustrated works and éditions de luxe; works on art; fiction; Shakespeare and other dramatists; poetry; foreign literature; bibles, theology, etc.; medical; physiognomy and phrenology; Greek and Latin classics; philology; mathematics; philosophy; science; spiritualism and animal magnetism; bibliography and literary history; history and biography; political economy, etc.; antiquities; encyclopedias; law and jurisprudence. Because a copy of the printed catalogue has survived7 — 133 pages and 1787 lots, many of them multiple — it is easy to study the composition of each division and to note, as a first interesting phenomenon, the particular strength of philosophy, mathematics and science. Macgregor's curiosity, as manifested in a library that is more scholarly than bibliophilic in character, is so catholic that it needs to be explained as far as is possible given the absence of personal as opposed to public documents.

Before turning to the dispersal itself, which was of considerable interest to the then Public Library of Victoria insofar as Macgregor had become a Trustee and a member of the Library Committee replacing Sir Archibald Michie in June 1874, it is important to say something about a career that has had less attention than it deserves from biographers. As Geoff Serle wrote on 14 December 1965: ‘We have not included him in the Dictionary — he was a near miss.'8 This being so, there is a case for correcting and amplifying the entry in Kathleen Thomson and Geoffrey Serle, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1851-1900,9 which cites Men of the Time in Australia. Victorian Series. 187810 and the obituary in the Argus11 as its major sources.

John Macgregor (not James, as he is wrongly called on the title-page of the Gemmell, Tuckett catalogue) arrived in Melbourne from Greenock on the ill-fated Glen Huntley in 1840.12 The 12-year-old is described as a ‘Labourer’ and ‘not engaged’ on the list of passengers, whereas his father, also John, is a ‘schoolmaster'.13 The mother, née Abigail Martin, had died the previous year, and three younger siblings were left behind on the Isle of Skye, the birthplace normally given for the future Parliamentarian, who was accurate, but a little pedantic, in indicating ‘Invernesshire’ in the appropriate column of his marriage certificate. The father was unable to pursue land-surveying, as he had hoped, so turned again to teaching, first in association with Robert Campbell and then on his own.14 Bourke Street and later St Kilda are mentioned as locations for schools that educated not only John Macgregor junior, but also the latter's future law partner and Parliamentary colleague Robert Ramsay.15 There is no evidence that the son ever left Victoria again. After finishing his schooling, he trained for the law in various Melbourne practices and was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court in 1855. At the end of his life he was senior partner in the firm then known as Macgregor, Ramsay and Brahe, The La Trobe Journal having served as President of the Law Institute of Victoria in 1872. His political ambitions began early, since he stood for the Legislative Assembly seat of East Bourke in 1856 and 1861 before being elected at a by-election in Rodney in November 1862. He remained in Parliament till March 1874 and was Minister of Mines under McCulloch from July 1866 to May 1868, declining all later offers of cabinet posts. After his retirement, apparently for health reasons, his public commitments were restricted to membership of the 1881 Royal Commission into Public Instruction, a body that reported in 1884 after Macgregor's death and with open dissension on the question of State Aid, and of the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria.

There has been no detailed study of Macgregor's political and administrative activities in the rather Byzantine complexity of Victorian public life in the 1860s and 1870s. Soundings in Hansard for the relevant years suggest that the Argus obituary was not wrong when it noted:

What has escaped the collective biographies of Victorian politicians is the extent of Macgregor's family connections with what one is almost tempted to call a Scottish and Presbyterian mafia. Neither the Australian Dictionary of Biography16 nor Geoff Browne's Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1900-8417 records the fact that Martin Robert McGregor, MLC for Gippsland from 1922 to 1936, was John Macgregor's nephew, the son of a younger brother, Duncan Robert McGregor, who emigrated from the Isle of Skye to Tasmania in the 1850s. The spelling of the family name is, no doubt, a cause of confusion. The family monument in the Boroondara Cemetery shows that John Macgregor junior is the odd man out, since even his father's name is spelt McGregor. More significant is the link forged by Macgregor's marriage on 21 January 1865 — when he was 36 and his bride 17 — to Caroline Kerr, born on 11 April 1847, in the Argus office of her father, the notorious William, Provincial Master of the Orange Lodge. Consent was given by the mother, Caroline, née McCandlish, and the stepfather, John Fisher, MLA for Mandurang from May 1880 to February 1883. This schoolteacher son of the manse later turned barrister was another Scottish immigrant. His marriage is not recorded by Serle and Thomson, who also claim — against the evidence of the death certificates of 1884 and 1921 respectively — that John and Caroline had children. In reality, the union had run into difficulties and the couple parted some years before John's death.18 That Robert Ramsay, also the son of a Presbyterian minister and born in Scotland, was a stickler for the separation of Church and State when he was Minister of Public Instruction in the late 1870s reinforces one's sense of a strong ideological commitment in the Macgregor camp.

Can this stance be read into Macgregor's collection of books? We have at present few enough documents about his networks: membership of the Australian Club;19 a solitary letter to Robert Russell.20 Consequently, his performance as a benefactor and trustee of libraries and as a bibliophile is worth some scrutiny. Despite the weight of the culture of the Enlightenment in what the Melbourne solicitor brought together, often from overseas sources of supply, a good deal of caution is needed in interpreting the record.

Surviving copies of books sold in 1884 do not seem to bear any marks of Macgregor's ownership or use. It is therefore difficult to state when he began collecting. The reported dealings with Quaritch are borne out circumstantially by the presence in the catalogue of lot 1112 ‘QUARITCH, B….Catalogues of Books, 1868 and 1874, 3 volumes, half-morocco’ and quite conclusively by the payment of £13/3/0 to the London firm from the estate.21 The Quaritch archive now in the British Library covers the period after Macgregor's death, so it does not help. Other debts settled by the executors were to the local shops of George Robertson and Samuel Mullen, neither of whose business records survive. Catalogues held from Dulau and Barthe and Lowell (lot 1113) suggest recourse to other European suppliers, a quite normal procedure despite the relative strength of the Melbourne trade and auction market in the 1860s.

That Macgregor did not come to the book world in his retirement years only is indicated by the gifts he made to the Public Library of Victoria in August 1871. He presented sets of Moréri's Le Grand Dictionnaire historique (Paris, 1759, 10 vols, folio) and of the Diderot-d'Alembert Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751-1780, 35 vols, folio), major reference works of the kind that was strongly represented in his own library. Subsequently there were other donations: a substantial collection of the Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris, 1782-1832, 198 vols, quarto) to the Public Library on 5 January 1875; Moigno's scientific journal Cosmos (Paris, 1852-1879, 71 vols, octavo) to the same institution in 1880; and Zedler's Universal Lexicon (Halle & Leipzig, 1732-1750, 63 out of 64 vols, folio)22 to the University of Melbourne on 12 August 1881. Beyond the monetary value of these public-spirited gestures is what they hint at about the overall aim of Macgregor's collecting.

It is not surprising in the light of all this that he was judged a suitable person to replace the bookish Michie as a Trustee of the Public Library. His attendance at general meetings of the Trustees was spasmodic, as was that of many of his colleagues. According to the minutes23 he last appeared on 30 April and 6 July 1883, the only occasions he was seen during that year. Since his presence at Library Committee meetings ceased after 8 November 1882,24 it has to be assumed that he was increasingly affected in the last 18 months of his life by the illness described in the death certificate as ‘Deep seated Intestinal disease. Marasmus. Exhaustion'. However, it can be said that for eight years from 29 September 1874, Macgregor was a diligent member of the specialist committee and possibly a quite influential one given the catholicity of his collecting interests. The period in question crosses the divide from Redmond Barry's presidency to the new spirit evident in the early 1880s. The complex and fascinating history of the library's acquisition policy has still to be written, but one sees in the Macgregor years and later an overt move towards greater professionalism in providing for scholars conscious of the university and research reforms of the later nineteenth century. Already during Barry's overseas trip in 1876 there is a visible — and in some ways regrettable — reaction against the veteran's enthusiasms. On 2 October 1876, Macgregor was present with D.C. McArthur and Edward Langton when:

On 18 December of the same year Macgregor and Langton refused Barry's request for £1500 ‘to be placed at his Disposal for the purchase of Shakespeareana and County Histories’ and gave the ‘Same reply as to the Spanish Works on Mexican Antiquities'.26 As the owner of a set of Lord Kingsborough's sumptuous nine-volume imperial folio Antiquities of Mexico (lot 1631 of the 1884 sale), the solicitor was hardly hostile to the apparently arcane subject, but he was aware of other priorities, namely to build up the library's resources in science and technology. Here one approaches the core of Macgregor's own project as an accumulator of books.

Faced with a collection that looks like the imposing nucleus of a serious academic library, the reader of the Gemmell, Tuckett catalogue can be surprised that no attempt was made to favour any one institution's desire to acquire the material. Macgregor's will of 25 March 1884 — drawn up in extremis — makes provision essentially for the testator's family: a £100 annuity for his widow provided she does not remarry; legacies and annuities for his sisters; and the residue for the children of his brother Duncan Robert McGregor.27 The estate was valued for probate at £16,248 (real £7290 and personal £8950).28 Of this the private library represented £1050, whereas at the sale it realised £2118/5/10. If one applies to these figures the multiples suggested by the Bank of England for obtaining approximations of the value of the pound sterling in November 2000,29 it will be seen that Macgregor's estate was by no means extraordinary for someone in his position. However, the Bank excludes the cost of real property — Macgregor owned two large houses in East Melbourne. A similar caveat should apply to the books, many of which were in fields that have shown spectacular advances in prices in the last century. Bearing this in mind, it is not fanciful to claim that a seven-figure sum would be needed now to reconstitute the library removed from the house in Gipps Street.

The auctioneers were not alone in asserting the importance of what they were offering the public. In the 1860s substantial sales were held in Melbourne without comment in the editorial pages of newspapers. Two decades later notable auctions like Macgregor's could expect some attention from journalists. On 12 August 1884 the Argus published a quite shrewd account of the catalogue of the ‘largest private library which has yet been brought to the hammer in this colony’ by a writer who had some familiarity with the literature on collecting and with the history of scholarship.30 Apart from remarking that Macgregor apparently shared Charles Lamb's taste for folios, having ‘accumulated quite a regiment of these stately grenadiers’, the critic asserted:

The miscellaneous nature of the library, despite its strengths in areas like the classics, science and philosophy, explains and perhaps justifies this sort of impression. It is also obvious that, like many accumulators on a generous scale, Macgregor acquired inadvertently a certain number of duplicates, for example C.R. Weld's History of the Royal Society of 1848 (lots 209 and 210), Schaufelberger's Nova Clavis Homerica of 1761-1768 in eight octavo volumes (lots 372 and 373), Eustathius’ commentaries on Homer's Iliad, the 1730-1735 Florence edition in three folio volumes (lots 376 and 377), Apuleius’ Opera omnia, three volumes quarto, Leiden, 1786-1823 (lots 517 and 518), Suidas’ Lexicon in three folio volumes, Cambridge, 1705 (lots 548 and 549), Facciolati's Totius Latinitatis Lexicon, two volumes quarto, London, 1828 (lots 578, 579 and 580), Leibnitz's œuvres philosophiques latines et françoises, Amsterdam, 1765 (lots 780 and 781) and Robert Boyle's Works, five folio volumes, London, 1744 (lots 819, 820 and 821).

The Public Library of Victoria took an early interest in the preparations for the auction. At a special meeting of the Library Committee on 31 March 1884 it was resolved:

After receiving the librarian's report on ‘the character of the library’ on 28 April, the Committee decided to look at possible purchases at a special meeting on 12 May. At that time it was agreed to circulate copies of the catalogue when printed to members of the Committee. Finally, at a further special meeting on 14 August, the catalogue was examined and Samuel Mullen was retained to bid on the Trustees’ behalf for ‘certain works’ at a commission of 33/4 percent.33

Contrary to the announcement on the title-page of the catalogue the sale lasted five days from 18-22 August. In his relatively new advertising journal Samuel Mullen provided a report on proceedings as well as offering some items he had bought for his own stock. He commented wryly on some of the absurdities:

After quoting some instances of titles realising two and three times their ‘ordinary retail price’ Mullen drew attention to a ‘very graphic description of this sale’ in the Argus of 30 August ‘evidently from the pen of a practised hand'. In truth, the essay ‘At a Book Sale’ is a quite literary piece in fine nineteenth-century style, with just enough specific information to back up Mullen's picture of an occasion at which the astute had the better of naive colonials unused to the traps of the auction mart.35 The interest of various institutions in the outcome had not escaped the writer, who noted:

He could have been speaking of Mullen himself in his role as bidder for the Public Library. Since the surviving copy of the sale catalogue is annotated ‘Order Copy’ and bears marginalia relating to the extent of the Library's commitment, it is clear that discretion was well rehearsed in this case.

At the Library Committee's meeting on 25 August:

The detail of what was bought is contained in the Library's Stockbook for 1884.37 The selection was quite eclectic, in line with the range of Macgregor's own curiosity. However, it was altogether consistent with a preference for the useful over the curious.

At this distance it is easy to regret that the Public Library did not buy more at Macgregor's sale, especially since other local institutions do not seem to have been any more adventurous. This was not a collection of high-spots — although there are such exceptions as Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665 (lot 898) and a 1499 Cicero, Tusculanæ Quæstiones (lot 445) — but an enormously impressive gathering of standard authors and editions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular. It is hard to know how much of all this the solicitor-Parliamentarian had read or studied, but his scholarly instinct was keen — down to the then recent Assézat-Tourneux edition of the works of Diderot (lot 79). Despite the absence of marks of provenance, it is still possible to identify some of the more than 95 percent of items not purchased by the Public Library of Victoria. Through G.W. Rusden, Trinity College at the University of Melbourne eventually acquired the large-paper issue of the Opera omnia of Pierre Gassendi (Lyons, 1658, 6 vols, folio — lot 888B). But where are the eight duodecimo volumes of Bernier's Abrégé of the same philosopher (Lyons, 1678 — lot 889)? Similarly it is disappointing not to have access to the quarto edition of the Diderot-d'Alembert Encyclopédie (Geneva, 1777-1779, 39 vols). On the other hand some titles were, and are, so uncommon in this market that they can be attributed to the Macgregor collection when they surface. This is the case for one of the two volumes of the Çuvres philosophiques of La Mettrie, discovered in a Melbourne bookshop in the 1970s. The original purchaser, H.K. Rusden, conveniently dated his reading stints, starting with 30 September 1884. But where is the other half of this 1753 set included in the multiple lot 890? Gérando's Des signes et de l'art de penser (Paris, An VIII, 4 vols octavo) emerged in the same shop in 1975, but the link to lot 845 has to remain a strong supposition. At any rate, opportunities to repair omissions remain.

Do we care to fill in the historical background of our civilisation in the systematic way attempted by Macgregor? Beatrice Webb expressed snobbish surprise at the breadth of Isaac Isaacs’ interests:

Yet the New Parochialism, which national libraries across the world now seem to be embracing, was foreign to the thinking of many of the founders and shapers of what has become the State Library of Victoria. Ultimately Macgregor's experience teaches us that long physical absence from the Northern hemisphere does not and should not cut us off from the foundations — literary, philosophical, scientific, artistic and legal — of our culture. Even in Melbourne exile one can aspire to a universal view. Libido sciendi vincit omnia.