World of the Book

Jane Austen. Octavia Butler. Agatha Christie. Toni Morrison. Virginia Woolf.

World of the Book returns in 2026 with State Library Victoria's largest ever tribute to women writers, alongside hundreds of extraordinary Australian and international works from the State Collection.

Now in its 21st year, Australia's longest running and most-loved book exhibition brings together more than 400 rare, remarkable and historically significant items from c. 2000 BCE to today, many on public display for the first time.

Travel through the history of the book and marvel at literary treasures including a first edition of Jane Austen's Emma (1816) originally owned by the Austen family, the Melbourne international blockbuster that outsold Sherlock Holmes, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published in 1886, 17th- and 18th-century printed and manuscript amulets and talismans from Europe and Mongolia, incredible examples of moveable books, 'blow' books and miniature books, including the smallest book in the Library's collection, the Hyakumantō Darani of Japan, one of the oldest printed texts in the world, Melbourne's Sugar and Snails Press, one of the earliest publishers of non-sexist children's books, which inspired other authors to make girls the main character in the 1970s, and the identification and naming of dinosaurs in the Victorian era by Charles Darwin's rival Richard Owen.