This catalogue advertises an auction sale of books, conducted by George Paul in Sydney, on March 23, 1836. Paul was very active in selling books by auction around this period; a fortnight before this sale he had conducted a large auction of ‘a splendid collection of books, elegantly bound, the property of a Gentleman proceeding to India’.
This sale, of about 171 titles and 280 volumes, listed in 127 lots, appears to be of a more heterogeneous origin. Almost three-quarters of the works advertised in this catalogue were works of fiction. The earlier lots consisted of recently published novels, ranging from fashionable ‘Silver Fork’ society novels of the 1820s-30s, from the publishing houses of Henry Colburn, Richard Bentley, Smith, Elder and Co., to gothic fiction published by the Minerva Press. Of particular interest was the number of novels associated with American Romanticism, including Charles Brockden Brown’s novels Wieland, and Ormond; James Fennimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch, and The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines; W. Gilmore Simms’s Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia; Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot, and Joseph Hart’s Miriam Coffin, or the Whale Fisherman. Among the non-fiction works were Robert Dawson’s Present State of Australia (1830), William Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1828-1830) and a six-volume set of the Edinburgh Gazetteer. The catalogue drew attention to the sale of works belonging to a couple of notable recent publishers’ series. Ten titles from John Murray’s Family Library, and eight titles from Smith, Elder and Co.’s Library of Romance, a series of single-volume novels, modestly priced at six shillings each; five full sets of the latter series (comprising 12 novels) were also advertised later in the catalogue (lot 120).
NG
