Publishing for Children explores how Angus and Robertson, a leading Australian bookseller and publishing house, successfully pioneered a tradition of local children’s publishing in the early twentieth-century.

The project adopts a mixed-methods approach, incorporating historical bibliometric data alongside close qualitative and distant quantitative analysis of archival documents. In particular, it draws on underutilised materials in the remarkable Angus & Robertson Archive, housed in the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales.

The website (https://dhrg.uws.edu.au/publishing-for-children) provides access to three datasets that were created from the original archival and bibliometric research undertaken for this project. These datasets, totalling over 74,000 cells of data, directly supplement the written thesis but also contain significantly more information that could be used to answer innumerable future research questions.

Historical Bibliometrics
This dataset contains historical bibliometric data for the 71 Australian children’s books published by Angus & Robertson from 1897 to 1933.

Correspondence
This dataset contains details of 1351 correspondence files between Angus & Robertson and the authors of their early children’s books.

Book Reviews
This dataset contains details of almost 4000 domestic and international reviews of Angus & Robertson’s children’s books. This dataset has also been geocoded and mapped. The map is available at https://rebekahward.github.io/leaflet-maps-with-google-sheets/