Printed in Sydney by William Jones, the 1834 catalogue of the Australian Subscription Library is the third known printed catalogue of the institution. Its preliminaries include lists of the office holders and membership, and the rules and bye-laws of the library. Like the earlier catalogues of the Australian Subscription Library, the catalogue is arranged as an alphabetical author-title or title-only listing of the books in the library, as at January 1834, noting also the number of volumes and bibliographical format of the titles. Some 644 titles are listed, a significant increase from the 264 titles listed in the 1829 catalogue. The major growth in the five year interval had been in the library’s fiction holdings; the archives of the library reveal that a policy to order more recent fiction had been enacted in the early 1830s.
Annotations on the sole extant copy, reproduced here, indicate that this catalogue had once belonged to J. G. Collins, an army officer and subscriber to the Australian Subscription Library. On the title page, Collins annotated the copy with the note: ‘Marked thus I have seen’, and titles of books are checked off throughout the catalogue. According to the titles checked, Collins seems to have been mainly interested in the fiction collection of the library.
