This auction catalogue by John Blackman consists of over 600 volumes separated into 291 lots and took place over two days in August 1835. The majority of the titles are imaginative works with numerous gothic and romance titles from John Lane’s Minerva Press and his successor Anthony King Newman. Selina Davenport, Henrietta Rouviere Moss, Francis Lathom and George Robert Gleig all have a number of their works included in this auction catalogue. The catalogue also has the novels, The Abbess: A Romance (1799) and Rimualdo: Or, The Castle of Badajos (1800) by the notorious Shakespeare forger, William Henry Ireland. Although the imaginative works dominate the entire catalogue, Blackman chose to include a separate section in the catalogue titled ‘New Novels’ suggesting the popularity of these, mostly triple-decker, novels and the necessity of advertising the contemporaneity of the works on offer.
The catalogue also consists of medical, travel and religious works, including sermons by the American Unitarian minister, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, the nonconformist educator Philip Doddridge and works by the English cleric, Jeremy Taylor. Philosophical works by John Locke and David Hume also appear in the catalogue, as does a 12-volume edition bound in calf of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Other notable inclusions are Countess Blessington’s Conversations with Byron (1834), 9 volumes of Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon (1827) and 7 volumes of Byron’s works ‘elegantly bound’.
The final page of this copy of the catalogue held at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, reveals the signature of ‘McGarvie Esq, George Street’ suggesting that William McGarvie was perhaps in attendance at this particular auction collecting books for his own circulating library in Lower George Street, Sydney.
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