This catalogue of the Australian Subscription Library, published in 1853, was compiled by the librarian P. J. Elliott and printed at the office of the Atlas newspaper in Sydney. The preliminaries include a list of the library’s proprietors, subscribers, and life members (who had bought out their annual subscriptions for a £12 sum to fund the library building in the 1840s). There was also a list of donations to the library (arranged by the name of the donor), a financial report for the year 1851, and an ‘Estimate of the Assets of the Library.’ Described on the title page as ‘Vol. II’, this catalogue was only a partial list of the library’s collection, and was apparently designed as a continuation of the 1843 Arranged Catalogue; in the sections which include ongoing tract collections (such as in the ‘Jurisprudence’ and ‘Miscellaneous’ categories) this catalogue refers to page numbers in that earlier catalogue. This catalogue incorporates the acquisitions listed in the supplementary catalogues of 1845, 1847, and 1850.
The catalogue lists some 1,440 titles and about 2,611 volumes acquired between 1843 and 1852. The increasingly strained financial circumstances of the Australian Subscription Library were evident in the fact that this was less than half what had been acquired between 1826 and 1843. The major categories of the collection remained the same as the earlier catalogue – with 312 new works in the ‘Biography and History’ category, 315 in ‘Geography Voyages and Travels’, 295 ‘Works of Fiction’, and 223 ‘Miscellaneous’ works constituting the bulk of the acquisitions.
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