This is the third known printed catalogue of the library of the parliament of New South Wales, after the catalogues issued in 1851 and 1857. This catalogue is the first to include a (very brief) list of the rules of the library. It was printed by the government printer, William Hanson, in 1866.
Like the previous two printed catalogues of the New South Wales parliamentary library, this employs an alphabetic arrangement proceeding variously by author, title or subject. Parliamentary and state papers, and works on law, jurisprudence, commerce, and education, feature strongly in the collection, as does general history and geography. Large publisher series, such as the Edinburgh Cabinet, and the numerous series produced by London publisher H. G. Bohn, are distinguished in the catalogue by their own subsections. It is notable that in this catalogue, there is a significant amount of newly-added imaginative literature, particularly that of Romantic poets and writers. Besides the Works of S. T. Coleridge, there are now a number of recent poetry publications by Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as collected editions of the poems of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Hood, Thomas Campbell, Hartley Coleridge, H. H. Milman, Peter Pindar, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and the poems of Ossian. There are also copies of the Works of Charles Lamb, a dozen titles by Thomas de Quincey, and biographies of Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott. Colonial literature is represented too, notably by Richard Rowe’s collection of stories and verse, Peter Possum’s Portfolio (1858).
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