Taking place over three days, this auction catalogue by John Blackman consists of close to 700 volumes, divided into 221 lots. In addition to the well-represented travel and voyages genre and the ‘much esteemed medical and theological works’ advertised by the title page, the catalogue comprises a number of works in Latin and Greek, including a 1674 edition of Antoine Arnauld’s Logica; sive, Ars cogitandi. A further example of a rare edition is The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (1676) by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, which is advertised in the catalogue as a ‘very rare and curious old book’.
The catalogue lives up to its boast regarding ‘romance’ works as it contains numerous titles including a translation of Madame Cottin’s crusade romance The Saracen, or Matilda and Malek Adhel (1805), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Catherine Mason’s (Catherine George Ward) Alice Gray (1833), and Ulrica of Saxony: A Romantic Tale of the Fifteenth Century (1828) by Rosalie St. Clair. Unlike many of the other romance authors who remain unnamed in the catalogue, Anna Maria Porter is identified alongside her novels suggesting she was a known and popular author. The extensive representation of women writers in this catalogue is continued with the inclusion of 50 volumes of The British Novelists (1810) edited, and with an introductory essay and preface, by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Marie Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Countess Blessington’s Grace Cassidy, or The Repealers (1833). Other notable inclusions of imaginative writing are 42 volumes of Scott’s Waverley novels, ‘from Waverley to Woodstock’, Deloraine (1833) by William Godwin, 11 volumes of Byron’s works, including Don Juan (1824), and works by Smollett, Fielding, and the American writers Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
This copy of the catalogue held at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, includes marginalia of crosses and ticks next to particular titles and the occasional record of numbers that could perhaps be the final bidding price.
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