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.

“The rare books are something of an extension of that. They’re mostly things I’ve worked on,” Kirsop says.

Kirsop speaks to Guardian Australia from a comfortable wicker chair in his study dotted with stand-alone rotating bookcases, as Monty, their honey-coloured longhair cat, saunters past.

Kirsop’s work concerns not only the contents of books but books as physical objects: who they belonged to, where they were bought and sold, the paper, watermarks, bindings, bookplates, inscriptions and annotations – all of which can illuminate history and help us understand people and the world.

In English, this speciality is called bibliography – “an unfortunate term”, Kirsop says, “because people understand that just as a list of books”. His French-speaking colleagues have come up with a more apt description, he says, “archaeology of the printed book”.

Vastly more Australians have benefited from Kirsop’s work than likely know his name. A lifelong scholar, Kirsop undertook doctoral research on 17th-century alchemical literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and became heavily involved in the study of bibliography in Australia on his return, co-founding the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand in 1969.

According to those close to him, he was instrumental in establishing the study of rare books, and the concept of special collections, in Australian institutions. He taught French at the Sydney and Monash universities from 1955 until 1998 and continues to publish frequently on the history of the book in Australia and France. He is the only Australian to have ever given the prestigious annual Sandars lectures at Cambridge University.

At the same time, he has made a career of what he once described as “serial agitation” on behalf of libraries and library users, from voluntarily cataloguing French holdings at the State Library of Victoria in the early 1960s to his former presidency and current membership of the State Library User Organisations’ Council, established to promote the development and conservation of the state library’s collection.

But with the proliferation and ubiquity of digital media, the skills and knowledge of Kirsop and other rare book experts are becoming as scarce as the works they study.

“It used to be fairly standard in library schools but it ceased to be there,” he says. “Then it used to be taught in some English departments in universities and they’re not doing it any more.”

Public and university libraries have also been shedding printed works and embracing what, in an essay, Kirsop has called “the new parochialism”: collecting local publications but “begrudg[ing] the outlay” for other works “even when these are indispensable for understanding the context of our interacting and multicultural societies”.

“Of course, the argument is always, ‘well, if anybody ever wants to look at these things, we can get it online’ … But anybody studying seriously the production of any book before 1801 needs to look at as many copies as possible,” he says.

Nowhere has the importance of access to original printed works been demonstrated more compellingly than in the case of the University of Sydney Library’s 1497 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The book itself was “a fairly late edition even in the 15th century” and “wasn’t a great copy”, Kirsop says, until 2017, when a university librarian noticed a red chalk sketch of a mother and baby and an inscription in the endpapers.

The discovery was globally significant: a rare sketch by the Venetian Renaissance artist Giorgione, with the inscription confirming for the first time the artist’s date of birth and death.

“Initially people in Europe couldn’t believe that such a thing could turn up in Australia. Well, that’s nonsense,” says Kirsop, who has written about Australian collectors of Dante for a new book about the Giorgione drawing. Now the Dante is “the most expensive, most valuable book in Australia”.

It is also a neat example of the fusion of modern technology with printed work. To precisely date the ink and chalk, the book was put through the Australian Synchrotron, a machine that produces extremely bright light allowing examination of materials on a molecular and atomic level. The sketch is also now accessible online.

Owners of rare books are wary of publicising what they have. Kirsop is not a vendor, though he is an honorary member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (“I sometimes say it’s because I’ve spent a lot of money with them,” he says, “but no, it goes back a long way”).

He is, instead, a donor: he has given so many rare books to the State Library Victoria that there is an entire collection named after him. The rest are left to the library in his will. He has been described by SLV staff as “one of this library’s greatest supporters”.

He is less supportive of the recent abandoned library restructure proposal – involving job cuts to reference librarians and a refocus on “digital experiences” – which he describes as “a mistake”. (Library management scrapped the plan after public outcry, saying it had “created unintended concerns”.)

He also decries the progressive whittling back of library hours: from 10pm daily to the final slashing of the last remaining late-night openings during Covid lockdowns.

“By shutting at 6pm they cut off everybody who might want to … do an hour or two’s work in the evening,” Kirsop says. “This now seems to be accepted and it’s really not good enough.”

He agrees with the State Library User Organisations’ Council’s position that better representation of library users on the library’s board is a key step towards positive change, and says he was heartened to see the new appointments to the board announced recently.

Kirsop doesn’t own a computer or a mobile phone. He handwrites all his manuscripts and checks his email once a week at the office he still has at Monash University. It seems less a rejection of modern technology, though, than continuing to work with what he knows will endure.

“Media coexist,” Kirsop says. “These modern forms only continue to be in existence and usable if the hardware continues … Whereas the printed book is still here. The manuscript is still here. All you need is a weatherproof room to put it in and natural light to read it.”