This 1819/1820 catalogue of the book seller and stationer James Howell pertains to a circulating library operating out of his bookshop on Hout Street, Cape Town. The library’s various subscription fees and regulations are set out in the front of the catalogue. Replacement fees for lost or damaged books are recorded for each title on the right-hand side of the catalogue. All of the 200 titles in the collection are novels or romances.
Attempting to ‘mix the useful with the agreeable’ and intended for those employed in ‘Government Situations’, the library contains what we would now consider to be a relatively high-brow collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels. Despite a number of popular Minerva Press romances such as John Holroyd Fielding’s Beauchamp; or the Wheel of Fortune (1817), of note are novels by Samuel Richardson (2 titles); Walter Scott (10 titles), Maria Edgeworth (4 titles); Anna Maria Porter (5 titles); Sydney Owenson (4 titles); Elizabeth Inchbald (4 titles); Tobias Smollett (4 titles); Holstein (3 titles); Sophia Lee (2 titles), Elizabeth Opie (3 titles); and Charlotte Smith (2 titles), as well as works by Clara Reeve, Henry Mackenzie, Oliver Goldsmith, Daniel Defoe, William Godwin, Mary Brunton, Caroline Lamb, Ann Radcliffe, Augustus von Kotzebue, and Jane Austen.
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