This catalogue of the additions to the collection of the Australian Subscription Library is the first Addenda to the major catalogue published in 1843, A Catalogue of the Books in the Australian Subscription Library and Reading Rooms, Systematically Arranged. Printed in Sydney by Kent and Fairfax, printers of the Sydney Morning Herald, the preliminaries include a list of new members (with 27 proprietors and 48 annual subscribers added ‘since publication of the last list’), a financial statement (for the year 1844), and an ‘estimate of the assets of the library’, which valued the 13,000 volumes in the library’s collection at £5,200.
The catalogue follows the same classification system as the 1843 catalogue, and employs the same arrangement of entries, that is, alphabetically by author under subject heading, with number of volumes, bibliographical format, and year of publication given in each case. The Addenda shows robust growth in the library’s collection since the publication of the 1843 catalogue. The greatest growth is in the Fiction section, with 130 new titles added; these are almost entirely composed of recently-published novels, with popular authors including G. P. R. James, Frances Milton Trollope, and James Fenimore Cooper. In the other major generic categories in the Australian Subscription Library, Biography and History, and Geography, Voyages, Travels, etc, 87 and 88 titles were added respectively. The remaining additions are in the categories of Agriculture, Horticulture (3 titles), Antiquities (10 titles), Classics (1), Jurisprudence (19 titles), Mechanical Arts, etc (10), Medicine, Anatomy and Surgery (5), Miscellaneous (54), Moral Philosophy (1), Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, etc (11), Natural History (10), Periodicals (20), Philosophy (5), Poetry and the Drama (18), Political Economy and Commerce (3), and Theology (11). The Jurisprudence section includes 10 volumes of the Parliamentary Documents series, the contents of which are given in detail in the catalogue.
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