BEAN, Charles Edwin Woodrow (and others)

Official History of Australia in the War, 1914-1918 [the complete twelve-volume set]

Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1938 (ten volumes), 1940 (one volume), and 1942 (one volume). The sixth volume is the first and only edition of 1942, and the others are mixed editions ranging from the fourth (Volumes 5 and 11) to the tenth (Volume 12).

Octavo, twelve volumes, each one approximately 700 pages with numerous maps plus plates.

Maroon cloth; trifling blemishes as described below, but this set presents as near-fine on the shelf, and it would be very hard to find better.

Volume 1 is slightly bumped at the rear top corner, with leading edge slightly marked and lightly bumped; Volume 4 is bumped at the rear top corner with associated creasing to the last 30 or so leaves; Volume 12 is lightly marked on the spine; minimal foxing to some edges; some endpapers tanned; personal bookplate on the front pastedown of all volumes.

The Australian Government accepted Charles Bean's 1919 recommendations for 'the official history and for a national war memorial which "for all time" would "hold the sacred memories of the AIF".... Bean himself wrote six volumes about the infantry divisions: the two on Gallipoli, and four on France. He edited eight [sic] more, and he and a colleague annotated the volume of photographs.... The series contained nearly four million words.

In Australian historical writing nothing had ever been done on such a scale; and there had been no military history anywhere quite like Bean's.... [He] brought a democratic and colonial scepticism to bear on the assumption that the dispatches of high commanders were the best source of information about what actually happened when men went into battle. His own diaries (226 note-books) were full of the evidence about "what actual experiences, at the point where men lay out behind hedges or on the fringe of woods, caused those on one side to creep, walk, or run forward, and the others to go back".

Bean's approach differed from that of the British war historians, whose work was official not only in sponsorship but in texture: history written by generals, not by an honorary captain. The British volumes had no biographical footnotes of the sort that were essential to Bean's method because he wanted to show that the participants were "a fair cross-section of our people ... that the company commander was a young lawyer and his second in command and most trusted mate a young engine driver and so on"' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').

Dornbusch 209 (the complete set), 353 (Volumes 1 and 2), 294-297 (Volumes 3-6), 374 (Volume 10), 219 (Volume 11) and 223 (Volume 12); Fielding and O'Neill, page 208 (the complete set); Trigellis-Smith 725-36 (the complete set). Dornbusch provides useful information about dates of reprints and revised editions. For the record, the edition and publication date of the volumes in this set are (in order of volume number) 8/38; 7/38; 7/38; 7/38; 4/38; 1/42; 6/38; 7/38; 6/38; 9/40; 4/38; and 10/38. [12 items].