This 1852 supplementary catalogue of new acquisitions to the South African Public Library was compiled by the librarian Fredrick Maskew and printed by Saul Solomon, Cape Town. It is appended to a transcription of speeches given at the annual meeting of subscribers. The library purchased 679 volumes in the 12 months proceeding May 1852 and the classification breakdown of the acquisitions is as follows. Theology (22); politics, law and economics (10); medicine (4); natural history (9); belles lettres and criticism (72); arts and sciences (43); biography (62); history (48); voyages and travels (99); dictionaries and lexicons (16); works of imagination and poetry (274);miscellaneous (20).
The catalogue is arranged alphabetically by title and author, and the number of volumes of a work is listed. Notable acquisitions include Henry Mayhew’s anthropological study London Labour and the London Poor and Charles Babbage’s The exposition of 1851 or views of the industry, the science and the government of England . This catalogue is notable for its collection of early Canadian fiction. Two of the ‘Sam Slick’ novels of Nova Scotia novelist Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) are listed as is Susanna Moodie’s (1803-1885) Roughing it in the Bush . Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is the most notable work of British fiction listed.
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