This catalogue advertises the auction sale of books formerly belonging to William Piper, Esq., held in Benalla, northern Victoria, on 6 July 1869, by the local firm of Boger and Watts. William Piper had been commissioner of Crown Lands for the Ovens District from 1853, and was a Police Magistrate in Benalla, where he also held significant pastoral interests. In 1869, he signalled his intention to retire from the public service and return to England, ‘thereby bidding farewell for ever to the country which he had adopted for over thirty years’ as the Ovens and Murray Advertiser put it. The same newspaper noted that the auction sale of Piper’s ‘books and furniture’ in early July had continued over three days and was ‘largely attended all through’.
The sole surviving copy of this catalogue, from the State Library of Victoria, is incomplete, but suggests that Piper had collected a well-rounded library, suited both for utility and entertainment. The section categorised as ‘History’ includes a number of important, multi-volume works on European history, while the ‘Miscellaneous’ section includes both practical works on agriculture and viniculture, and large multi-volume sets of the modish London periodicals Punch, and the Illustrated London News. There was a small but up-to-date selection of law books, and a similar number of religious texts, and reference books, including dictionaries and atlases, and a collection of poetry books dominated by the most popular eighteenth-century and Romantic poets. Novels made up a significant part of the collection Piper advertised for sale, including a complete 48-volume set of Scott’s Waverley novels, multi-volume sets of the works of Jonathan Swift, and of Maria Edgeworth, a few standard eighteenth-century novels, and a judicious selection of late Georgian and early Victorian novels, by Jane Austen, Frederick Marryat, Theodore Edward Hook, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, among others. Piper had seemingly also had some interest in collecting rare books: advertised for sale were copies of a 1702 folio edition of the works of Flavius Josephus (described in the catalogue as ‘very fine’), copies of the Bernard Lintot publications of the Illiad and Odyssey translated by Alexander Pope; a copy of John Baskerville’s 1760 printing of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and an early edition of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas.
NG
