Mental and Moral Improvement

With today’s digital library resources, it’s easy to forget how libraries once relied entirely on paper catalogues. In Maitland, sometime after 1860, the librarian of the West Maitland School of Arts library (which boasted 417 volumes) cut a length of adhesive tape and stuck it along the spine of this copy of the institution’s catalogue […]

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Still Standing

In 1965 the machines on the factory floor of Mercury Print at Maitland habitually clanged and whirred, as they printed the pages of this booklet, Historical Buildings of Maitland and District. It was just another print job for the busy local printer, who had been tasked with producing it for Maitland City Council, but the […]

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Jobs for the Boys

It was a careful hand, using a fine-tipped paint brush, that expertly filled in the blocks of pastel watercolour paint on these architectural drawings in early 1933. It might have been the young architect Edward Boyd Scobie (1904-1988) who copied and coloured them at his drafting desk, in the offices of his father’s architectural firm at […]

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