This is the first printed catalogue of the Tasmanian Public Library, established in Hobart in 1849. Despite the name it was in fact a subscription library, catering to the elite of the colony. The preliminaries of the catalogue lists 13 ‘Life Members’ (including many of the colony’s civic and religious leaders) who had paid a £10 donation, and 107 subscribers paying a £2 subscription fee. The catalogue preliminaries also include a list of books donated to the institution, a list of the rules and regulations of the library, and a list of the bye-laws of the committee.
The catalogue lists a modest total of 152 titles, with a separate section at the end further recording 10 periodicals received by the library. The entries list the number of volumes or parts, bibliographical format, and also the nominal price for each title. The collection is largely dominated by works in the areas of history, biography, and travel narratives, and there are also a number of somewhat dated standard works such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The imaginative literature listed in the catalogue is similarly traditional, with the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope all present, along with Robert Southey’s edition of the poems of William Cowper, and some European classic fiction like Don Quixote, Paul and Virginia, and the works of Rabelais. The copy reproduced here has been annotated by an unknown member of the library, with dots placed next to a number of titles, and a marginal note at the head of the catalogue: ‘books dotted are perused by me’.
NG
