The last time he counted, Prof Wallace Kirsop and his wife, Joan, had about 20,000 books. The floor-to-ceiling shelves lining all possible walls of their 125-year-old Melbourne house are packed full, and those volumes that don’t fit in them sit in stacks on every other available surface. Over the road, in a two-bedroom apartment the couple also owns, there are even more.
Some of these books are hundreds of years old. But Kirsop, 92, is not a collector for collection’s sake. This is a working reference library.
