This catalogue of the Australian Subscription Library, published in 1843, was compiled by the librarian P. J. Elliott and printed in Sydney by James Reading. It was ‘systematically arranged’ using the same classifications as the Arranged Catalogue published three years earlier. The preliminaries include a list of the library’s office holders, proprietors, and subscribers, a financial report (for the year 1842), a list of donations to the library, and lists of the library’s rules and regulations, and orders of the committee. This catalogue incorporates the acquisitions listed in the supplementary catalogues of 1840, 1841, and 1842.
This catalogue lists some 2,862 titles, comprising 7,337 volumes, in the collection of the Australian Subscription Library in 1843. The late 1830s and early 1840s were the period of the library’s strongest growth, and this is reflected in the fact that collection overall had grown by 43% (by number of titles) in the three years since the publication of the 1839 catalogue. The largest categories remained Works of Fiction (representing 25% of the overall number of titles), Biography and History (20%), and Geography, Voyages and Travels (11%). The seventeen other categories formed smaller proportions of the library’s collection: Miscellaneous (8%), Theology (5%), Poetry and the Drama (4%), Jurisprudence (3%), Periodicals (3%), Agriculture (2%), Natural Philosophy (2%), Natural History (2%), Moral Philosophy (2%), Philology (2%), Mathematics, Astronomy, etc (1%), Antiquities (1%), Architecture (<1%), and Classics (<1%).
