This 1855 catalogue of the Tasmanian Public Library is the institution’s third printed catalogue, issued three years after the 1852 catalogue. In the copy reproduced here, the preliminaries have been annotated with information pertaining to the Launceston Library Society or Launceston Public Library. Established in 1845, the Launceston Library Society was also a private subscription library, with no connection to the Hobart-based Tasmanian Public Library. After struggling financially, the library was rebranded the Launceston Public Library in 1856, and, attracting modest government support, survived until 1881. It is possible that the annotations in the preliminaries here indicate that the rules of the Tasmanian Public Library were modified for the establishment of the Launceston Public Library, which took place shortly after the publication of this catalogue.
The catalogue, compiled by Murray Burgess, is idiosyncratic. It combines an alphabetical author-title or title only list with classified subject-based lists within a single arrangement; according to the preface, this method was chosen ‘so that that unity which is of such unquestionable convenience in a work of this kind is preserved throughout’. In practise, the arrangement is somewhat difficult to follow, though it helps to note that the entries in the author/title list are numbered (presumably a catalogue or accession number), and the works-by-subject lists are printed in double-column format, with the title first and author following in italics, below the subject heading printed in gothic type. The works acquired through the Bicheno bequest are distinguished with an asterisk (in the author-title list). The reorganisation of the catalogue from the one issued in 1852—34 subject/genre categories are employed here compared to 16 in the earlier catalogue—makes it difficult to chart the growth of the collection in particular areas, but the 2,139 titles listed here represent a substantial increase from the 1,312 a few years earlier. The major genre categories here are Geography, Voyages and Travels (470 titles), History (269), Fiction (194), Biography (161), and Drama and Poetry (146). The remainder, alphabetically, are Agriculture (17 titles), Antiquities (29), Architecture (18), Arts and Sciences (11), Astronomy (9), Botany (52), Chemistry (7), Divinity (93), Fine Arts (23), French (31), Games and Sports (17), Genealogy and Heraldry (11), Geology and Mineralogy (25), German (2), Greek (19), Latin (20), Law and Jurisprudence (18), Literature and Language (50), Magazines and Periodicals (27), Mathematics (18), Mechanics, Engineering (11), Medical Sciences (20), Miscellaneous English Literature (122), Moral and Mental Philosophy (41), Natural History (66), Natural Philosophy (38), Naval and Military (17), Political Economy (77), and Trade and Commerce (10).
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