The 1839 supplement to the catalogue of the South African Public Library is compiled by the librarian Alexander Johnstone Jardine and has the library’s rules for subscribers appended to it. There are 488 titles listed by title and number of volumes, 112 of which are novels and tales. The four most popular contemporary novelists whose works the library seems to be collecting avidly are given by name : Fredrick Marryat (11 titles), G.P.R. James (10 titles), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (10 titles) and Benjamin D’Israeli (6 titles). The rest of the novels listed are popular romances and historical novels published between 1837-39, including Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839). Other notable literary acquisitions include 12 volumes of Daniel Defoe’s works, including Robinson Crusoe and Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837). The library’s commitment to collecting serious scientific works for its reference library (particularly natural history) is reflected in the acquisition on Charles Darwin’s Zoology of the HMS Beagle (1838) and the first six numbers of army surgeon and former Cape Town resident Dr. Andrew Smith’s Zoological Illustrations of South Africa . The catalogue also includes a large quantity of voyages and travels, literary biographies, memoirs and histories.
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