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This is the earliest printed catalogue of the of the Australian Subscription Library, listing the books in the collection of the library as at 22 January 1828, two years after its founding. The catalogue formed part of a small pamphlet printed by Robert Howe, who was also one of the founding members of the Library.
The catalogue lists some 150 titles and some 474 volumes, somewhat erratically arranged alphabetically by either title or author-title, with the same books sometimes appearing twice. Most of the books listed here had been part of the library’s original order, despatched to a Colonial Office agent in London in April 1826. The initial order for the Library included a request for ‘Walter Scott’s novels’, and the printed 1828 catalogue features a separate section for Scott’s works (pp.12-13); the subsections ‘Historical Romances’, ‘Novels and Tales’, ‘Novels and Romances’ and ‘Tales of the Crusades [sic]’ replicate the titles of the publishers’ series in which Scott’s fiction was issued in the early 1820s. This catalogue also lists books the library had acquired from Saxe Bannister in August 1826, including a 45-volume set of Alexander Chalmers’ British Essayists (1817), George Burnett’s edition of the Prose works of John Milton (2 vols, 1809) and Walter Scott’s Poetical Works (10 vols, 1823).
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