This is the third full catalogue of the South African Public Library The 1834 catalogue was compiled by Alexander Johnstone Jardine and is divided according to J.C. Brunet’s classification scheme. Theology and divinity (151 titles); jurisprudence, government and politics (277 titles); sciences and the arts (274 titles); surgery, medicine and chemistry (150 titles); mathematics (130 titles); belles lettres (541 titles including 78 periodicals and journals); history (716 titles), languages (280 titles) and late additions (50 titles). The catalogue ends with an index and publications marked with an asterisk are not included in the library of circulation. History is the largest class and the 716 titles listed include 157 titles of general biography, 130 works of ancient and modern history and 339 voyages and travels, including thirty-one about the Cape, three of which were written by British or Dutch settlers (Thomas Pringle, Donald Moodie and J.S. De Lima).
Imaginative work is divided into lyric and dramatic poetry (87 titles) and works of imagination (248 titles). The best represented authors in the former are Alexander Pope (18 volumes), William Shakespeare (18 volumes), John Dryden (18 volumes), Walter Scott (10 volumes) and Henry Fielding (10 volumes). Walter Scott dominates the fiction section, with two different editions of his collected works present as well as individual copies of The Antiquary , Tales of a grandfather and an unspecified series of Tales of my landlord . 14 volumes of Maria Edgeworth’s collected works and a separate edition of Moral tales for young people are also listed, making her the second best represented author after Scott. Other popular novelists include John Galt (13 titles), James Fennimore Cooper (8 titles), Horace Smith (7 titles), G.P.R. James (6 titles) and Catherine Gore (6 titles). A significant proportion of the belles lettres section (200 volumes) consists of prestigious publishers’ series, which are listed under a separate section of the belles lettres division.
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