This catalogue is the second printed catalogue of the collection of the Tasmanian Public Library, following the earlier catalogue issued in the institution’s inaugural year, 1849. In the intervening time, the library’s collection had greatly increased, thanks particularly to the acquisition of the bequest of James Bicheno, former colonial secretary and life member of the institution, who had died in 1851. The terms of Bicheno’s will offered his collection of books to the library (or to the Van Diemen’s Land Mechanics’ Institute), on the condition that the sum of £300 be paid to his estate. The library advertised for public subscriptions to raise the funds, noting that the ‘Books should be so stamped or set apart as to become a memorial of their late lamented owner’. The preliminaries to the catalogue include a preface giving a brief history of the institution, lists of the rules and regulations of the library, and of the bye-laws of the library committee, and lists of the office bearers, life members, and annual subscribers. Following the catalogue, there is a statement of the financial accounts of the library for the years 1850 and 1851.
This classified catalogue divides the ‘Bicheno collection’ from ‘The Public Library’ within each of the 16 generic categories used. For each title, the catalogue also records bibliographic format, year of publication, and a monetary ‘value as fixed by the committee’. There were now some 1,312 titles (and roughly 3,164 volumes) in the library, and the acquisition of the Bicheno collection greatly expanded its holdings of scientific and scholarly works in general. The catalogue lists 259 titles in Miscellaneous English Literature, with the other categories by most number of titles being History (202), Natural History and Philosophy (165), Geography, Voyages and Travels (158), Biography (152), Poetry (68), Fiction (59), Theology (56), Classics (38), Philology (35), Periodicals (30), Dramatic Works (23), Antiquities (23), Architecture (15), Commerce and Political Economy (15), and Law, Criminal Jurisprudence etc (14). The fiction section shows that canonical works were still generally favoured over recent novels, and the poetry selection was dominated by eighteenth century and earlier poets, though there were collected editions of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Southey, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
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