A mid-April hailstorm in Australia has damaged up to a third of the 35,000 books in the College of Fine Arts Library at the University of New South Wales in Paddington. An April 21 report in the Sydney Herald said damage is estimated at $200,000, and portions of the library were expected to remain closed for more than a month.
The top floor, which contains the stacks and periodicals, was most badly affected. College of Fine Arts Dean Ian Howard said more than 4,000 books were ruined and estimated that about half of those were out-of-print titles from the 1940s and 1950s.
“We had an extensive historical resource that is irreplaceable,” Howard told the newspaper. Books destroyed included an early work on Aboriginal art, Art of Vandjina, published in 1968.
Posted April 26, 1999.