Polynesian

classics reprinted

Photographic reprints of long

out of date Pacific books are

issuing from publishing houses

with increasing frequency. The

Libraries Board of South Aus tralia is one Australian organisa tion which is supplying first-rate material by this method; and in America the Charles E. Tuttle Company has lately also been doing an excellent job.

It is important that this kind of reprint should be clearly printed, well bound and sell at the right price, and the two most recent Tuttle reprints meet these requirements. They are Abraham Fornander’s An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migrations . and William Ellis’, Polynesian Researches.

The Fornander work has been re printed as a massive three-volumes

in-one, plus the index, and sells for 5A15.00. The volume is handsomely bound and labelled and is supplied with a slip case.

Volumes one and two were first published in London in 1878 and 1880 and volume three, which is a comparative study of the Polynesian and Indo-European languages, was published in 1885. The index, which is here included, was first prepared and published separately by the Bishop Museum Press in 1909.

Fornander, a great writer of Hawaiian history and legends, pre pared his work in the 1870’s while a circuit judge in the old Kingdom of Hawaii. He died in Honolulu in 1887.

Ellis’ Polynesian Researches is a better-known work. Missionary Ellis lived in Polynesia from 1817 to 1825 and this work was first published in two volumes in 1829/30. In 1853 a revised and enlarged edition was published in four volumes, and this is the edition which has been re printed by Tuttle.

The volumes are: (1) Polynesia/ Society Islands; (2) Hawaii; and (3) one combining the Society Islands, Tubuai Islands and New Zealand.

Each volume is available separately at 5A4.25. Again, they are hand somely and strongly bound, although the rather gaudy dust-jackets are apparently designed to attract the bookshop browsers.

Polynesian Researches, of course, is of special value to those interested in Tahiti, as the work places greatest stress on this area. Although original copies of Ellis’ work are not rare— it was a popular book of the day— these reprints give the Pacific reader cheap access to the literature.

Our copies are from the Aus tralian distributors, Paul Flesch Pty.

Ltd.

A reprint of a slightly different order, but which is just as welcome, is the new Oxford Paperback edition of Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850, which sells for only $A4.40. The original was published only in 1960, but in a far more expensive and a more luxurious edition. Nevertheless, the same material, including the fine plates, are in this paperback in a handier form.

The volume shows how the work of the Pacific explorers of the day was interpreted back home, and shows the context in which they worked.

In brief, the Pacific as part of the world of that day, with particular reference to effects on the arts.

Naturally, an important part of the book deals with Cook’s voyages.—

SI.