OBITUARY: RODERICK CAVE
Professor Rod Cave, who died in June at the age of 83, will be remembered in New Zealand as the foundation professor of librarianship at Victoria University of Wellington. He came to New Zealand in 1979 and headed the department for the next sixteen years. He was a well-travelled library educator, having earlier taught librarianship at the University of the West Indies and at Loughborough, and briefly at Ibadan, and having later gone on to head the Division of Information Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
His many publications include a textbook on rare book librarianship and various articles in library journals, but he is best known in the scholarly world as an expert on fine printing and private presses. His work, The Private Press: Five Hundred Years of the Amateur Printer (1971; second edition, 1983), is described by one commentator as ‘very informative,’ ‘a good grounding in the subject’ and ‘opinionated and intelligent’—which can be taken as high praise. He has also written Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies (1987) and a trenchant essay, ‘Printing in Colonial New Zealand: An Insular History?,’ in A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand (2000). After his retirement he continued to write, and an illustrated book published by the British Library in 2014, A History of the Book in 100 Books, had the text written by him and the picture research done by his daughter Sara Ayad.
His prolific writing was matched by an equal fluency of speech. His lectures are said to have been entertaining as well as informative.
Rod was an old boy of the same English public (i.e. private) school as I am, Epsom College. We were there at the same time but he was a day boy and I was a boarder. The school was an experience ‘we shared without knowing’ (to borrow Larkin’s phrase). We both loathed the place. Simon Cauchi
RODERICK CAVE – A PERSONAL MEMORY
My first encounter with Rod Cave was when he phoned me offering a job in the Department of Librarianship at VUW. I was delighted, naturally, and a few months later met him in person when he came to meet me at Wellington Airport, greeting me warmly and genuinely offering any help he could give. He had established a reputation for scholarly work on the history of books and fine printing so naturally I was in awe of him, both as a leading academic and my new boss, but I needn’t have worried.
The Department was small. Staff included Alastair Smith and Rowena Cullen, as well as Alan Richardson – who, along with Rod, was the only other founding member still left. We worked well together and set about tackling some of the problems we faced. We needed to broaden the curriculum, which was done by adding new courses, in recognition of that we changed our name to the Department of Library and Information Studies. The biggest change of all was the introduction of distance education in 1992.
Rod was well-known to the students for his diligence in supervising bibliographic projects; he could often be seen in the National Library checking references to make sure they were all in order. He was forever researching and writing, and from that time came A History of the Golden Cockerel Press 1920-1960. He was fascinated by paper of all kinds and was particularly delighted when I gave him several pieces of Fijian tapa – naturally this ended up as a journal article.
Perhaps feeling that he had done as much as he could in New Zealand, in 1993 he moved on to be the founding Professor of the Division of Information Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It was a challenge for him because the school taught information systems as well as library and information studies, but it prospered under his guidance. I had the pleasure to work with him in Singapore for one year, having taken a year’s leave of absence from VUW. One of my fondest memories of Rod’s company was having a good curry in Little India (of course) then wandering the streets in the humid tropical air while we looked for a cafe that he told me served the best gula melaka you would find anywhere – and he was right. While in Singapore he wrote a marvellous little book on Chinese paper offerings.
After he left Singapore in 1999 he did not work full-time again, but instead began teaching at UCLA Berkeley doing three months on and three months off. It was, in many ways, one of the high points of his career because he could teach in his specialisation and supervise doctoral students who shared his enthusiasm for the history of the book. He settled in Somerby just outside Oakham (which some of us still argue is in the county of Rutland) in 2010. He continued to write, including one of his most popular works The History of the Book in 100 Books: The Complete Story, from Egypt to E-book.
A little story that came towards the end of his life says much about him. Not surprisingly he took an interest in anything involving books, paper, printing or even writing, and this led him to study the tombstones in the local churches. He researched the stone carvers and their styles, keeping detailed accounts of what he discovered of their lives. Later he handed all this research to one of the local museums. It was entirely typical of him. Before coming to New Zealand he had worked in Nigeria (where he worked with celebrated New Zealand librarians such as John Harris), and some of his last pieces were memories of his time there. He shared some of this writing with me as I knew some of the people he had worked with. It was a different time, and he knew it, so while he looked back on the past with a certain nostalgia he didn’t think it was any better than the present. He was a happy, optimistic man, and that is the way I will remember him.
He is survived by Dawn, his wife of 62 years, and four children.