The History of St Kilda: From its First Settlement to a City and After, 1840–1930 (First Edition)

A$200 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

The official, council-commissioned civic history of one of Melbourne's most storied bay side suburbs, still actively cited today as a primary reference source in contemporary heritage and urban history scholarship, nearly a century after its publication. Commissioned directly by the St Kilda City Council, John Butler Cooper's two-volume history traces the suburb's transformation from a patrician Victorian-era village of genteel seaside villas into what one contemporary historian has described as a full-blown "carnival". A location that hosted vice-regal and royal visitors including the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901, Lord Jellicoe in 1919, and the Prince of Wales in 1920, even as it simultaneously developed some of Melbourne's earliest blocks of flats, along with the boarding houses, dance halls, and the vibrant entertainment district that gave St Kilda its distinctive, raffish twentieth-century character. Cooper's work draws extensively on original council and municipal sources unavailable to most subsequent local historians, and remains, alongside its later sequel volume covering the years to 1983, one of the two principal published histories of the suburb. First edition. 2 vols., large octavo. Vol.I: xvi, 405, [i]pp.; vol.II: xv, 338, [i]pp. Uniformly bound in vertically-grained blue buckram. City of St. Kilda seal to front covers in gilt. Spines titled in gilt. Numerous photographic illustrations throughout. Spine of Volume 2 a bit shelf darkened. Some creasing to spine

• Binding: Hardcover

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