This List of Books was compiled for the launch of the Sydney Free Public Library in September 1869. The initial collection of the Free Public Library, forerunner of the current State Library of New South Wales, was established largely through the purchase of the books of the Australian Subscription Library, whose premises it also occupied. In his speech inaugurating the institution, the governor of New South Wales, Lord Belmore, noted that
a written list of the books of the Australian Library was only finished a short time before the completion of the purchase by the Government, and could only lately be placed in the printer’s hands. It is not possibly consequently at once to issue a perfect catalogue, as it is the intention of the Government to remove from the institution such books as it may be undesirable to retain in a Free Library, and to purchase at once in the colony additional works of a suitable kind, provided they can be obtained at a reasonable cost, and also to transfer numerous valuable works and records from the public departments.
The list, which has no preliminaries or additional matter, was printed by the government printer, Thomas Richards.
Only one copy of this document survives (reproduced here), and it has been extensively annotated, with many listed books scored out. It seems clear that this copy has been used to identify works of fiction, which had been one of the largest sections in the Australian Subscription Library collection. Contemporary debates about public libraries frequently expressed anxieties about the proportion of fiction versus that of ‘improving’ or scholarly works in the collections, and it appears that the extensive fiction collection was the one deemed ‘undesirable to retain in a Free Library’. While the non-fiction works have been scored out, most of the works of fiction (left blank) have been annotated with a tick, while others have been marked with an ‘o’ (some of which are also scored out). An examination of this list alongside later catalogues of the Sydney Free Public Library suggests that those marked with an ‘o’ were the works of fiction deemed worthy to retain in the library, while those marked with a tick were earmarked for relegation.
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