This catalogue advertises an auction sale of some 679 volumes, in 209 lots, conducted by the auctioneer and land agent Samuel Lyons—a former convict who by the 1830s had become a prosperous trader in Sydney. Although the sole surviving copy of this catalogue is undated and designated ‘c.1832’ in the catalogue of the State Library of New South Wales, the actual dates of the sale were 25-26 November, 1834.
It is unclear whether the volumes sold here had formerly constituted the library of a particular colonist. There was no indication about prior ownership in the advertising, and multiple copies of a relatively small number of recently-published novels suggest that at least this section of the books under sale were imported directly from Britain, rather than being ‘pre-owned’. Lyons’ catalogue offers only rudimentary information, giving short titles and (sometimes) authors, but consideration had been given to how the sale would be conducted; the majority of the religious works under sale were offered in the earlier lots, and there were other recognisable groupings of genres, including novels (lots 47-68, 158-66), classical texts (lots 125-33), and law books (lots 148-53).
Of the books advertised here, there was a notably high proportion of religious works: some 33 titles being published sermons and lectures on theological topics, along with a significant number of volumes of periodicals of notably devout character—including 26 volumes of the Evangelical Magazine, 6 volumes of the Home Missionary Magazine, and 5 volumes of the Baptist Register. Works of fiction similar number constituted a similar number of titles (37), though there were significantly more volumes, since many of the novels were multi-volume works. While there were a couple of notable novels of the 1790s—William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (3 copies), and M. G. Lewis’s The Monk were advertised here—the majority of the fiction was recently published novels, from fashionable London publishing houses like that of Henry Colburn, and Richard Bentley. There was also a 50-volume set of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s British Novelists, as well as four full sets of the 26 volumes of John Murray’s Family Library.
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