Dated March 1829, this catalogue lists the books in the Australian Subscription Library, three years after its establishment. It was printed by Ralph Mansfield, who had gone into partnership with Robert Howe in the editorship of the Sydney Gazette in January 1829, shortly before the latter’s death. Listing some 264 titles and 887 volumes (and a further 15 periodical publications in unbound numbers), this catalogue shows that the Library’s collection had nearly doubled in size since the publication of its printed catalogue of 1828. Like the earlier catalogue, the 1829 catalogue lists the works in the library in an author-title alphabetical arrangement (except in the case of fiction, which gives title first), also noting the bibliographical format and the number of volumes for each title. There are inset sections for the works of Walter Scott, and for the 20 volumes of Thomas Byerley’s Percy Anecdotes (1821-3).
The archives of the Australian Subscription Library show that the growth in the collection at this time was mainly due to purchases made at colonial auction sales. In April 1828, the Library committee authorised one of its members to spend £50 at the auction sale of the books of Henry Grattan Douglass. In August that year, the committee resolved to spend a further £100 at the auction sale of the late John Oxley . The purchases from the Oxley sale, recorded in the archives, suggest the library’s ambitions to create a serious reference collection; large historical runs of the Quarterly Review (35 vols.) and the Edinburgh Review (45 vols.) were prominent among the acquisitions here. There were also indications of an interest in current imaginative literature—from the Oxley sale the Library acquired James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (3rd ed., 1810).
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