This catalogue of the Australian Subscription Library is the fifth known printed catalogue of the institution, and the third produced by Sydney printer William Jones. This is a vastly superior catalogue, in every respect, to the ones Jones had printed in 1834 and 1836. The preliminaries include lists of the office-holders, proprietors and subscribers of the library, the rules and regulations of the institution and a separate section of ‘orders of the committee’, and a financial statement for the year 1837. There is a list of donations or ‘presents to the library’, the first time such a list is included in an Australian Subscription Library catalogue.
This is also the first classified catalogue issued by the Australian Subscription Library. Some 1358 works are listed within 24 subject or generic categories, arranged within these alphabetically by author or title. The number of volumes is given for each title, and, in some but not all cases, also bibliographical format. The number of titles in each subject category reveal, broadly, the strengths of the library’s collection. By far the biggest categories were Novels and Romances, with 366 titles, and History and Biography, with 313, followed by Miscellaneous Works (171), and Voyages and Travels (151). The remaining categories have relatively few titles each, though it is worth noting that there are some large publishers’ series incorporated in these, such as the 10-volume Antiquarian and Topographical Cabinet in the Antiquities section, and the Classical Library in the Classics section. These categories are Agriculture and Horticulture (32 titles), Antiquities (3), Architecture (4), Chemistry (12), Classics (6), Commerce (6), Dramatic Works (9), Essays (19), Geography (7), Jurisprudence (31), Mathematics, Astronomy, etc (19), Medicine, Anatomy and Surgery (5), Mechanical Arts (11), Natural History (43), Philology (11), Philosophy (21), Poetry (27), Political Economy (17), Reviews, Magazines and other Periodicals (38), and Sermons and Theological Works (36). The extensive holdings in the Novels and Romances section reveal the extent to which the library had prioritised the acquisition of fiction during the 1830s, particularly of novels from the modish publishing houses of Richard Bentley, Henry Colburn, and Smith, Elder and Co. As in the previous catalogues, the ever-popular works of Sir Walter Scott are given special prominence in their own sub-section, and, like the previous (1836) catalogue, there are also subsections for Anna Laetitita Barbauld’s British Novelists series, and Leith Ritchie’s Library of Romance.
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