The Social Sciences and Humanities Library at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has donated a copy of the rare book "Stone men of Malekula" to the National Library of Vanuatu. The monograph is one of the first ethnographies published about a cultural group in Vanuatu and was written by University of Cambridge anthropologist John Layard, who undertook fieldwork in northeast Malakula in the early 1900s. There was only ever one print run of the book, which was published in 1942 in London, and the only surviving copy in Vanuatu is the one held by the National Library. Due to heavy usage in the Library, particularly by descendants of John Layard's informants from the islands of Atchin and Vao, the book is now literally falling apart.
When Kathy Creely, Curator of the Melanesian Archive and Melanesian Studies Resource Center at the UCSD (part of the Mandeville Special Collections Library of the University), visited Vanuatu in July 2005, she noticed the state of the book and subsequently arranged for a second copy held by the UCSD Library to be donated to Vanuatu. When Ralph Regenvanu, Director of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, visited San Diego in February 2006 (to attend the General Conference of the Association for Social Anthroplogy in Oceania), he was able to recieve the book and bring it back to Vanuatu.
The new copy of "Stone men of Malekula" now enjoys pride of place in the Rare Books section of the National Library of Vanuatu.
