Library Catalogs
Library
catalogs are a vital resource for the study of
reading patterns and the evolution of reading tastes and collecting
interests in American intellectual and cultural history. The
Society's collection of institutional public library catalogs
(the classification PBL) and private library catalogs (PL)
affords access to a rich body of material for literary scholars,
historians, librarians, and bibliographers. Such catalogs
provide a barometric view of the intellectual life of an
institution or an individual as well as highlighting the
distribution of particular books at any given time.
Public library catalogs printed through 1840 are accessible
via the card and online catalogs. Those issued after 1840 are
uncataloged, and are shelved alphabetically by state, with state
institutions preceding those of individual city or town. The
acquisitions department maintains a checklist of all
post-1830 public library catalogs. The checklist currently
consists of five loose-leaf binders of photocopies of library
catalog title-pages, arranged by state or foreign country.
Included in the PBL collection is a representative
selection of nineteenth-century institutional library catalogs.
There are catalogs for the Boston Athenaeum, the New York Society
Library, the public libraries of Cincinnati and Worcester, Sunday
school libraries, lyceum libraries as well as mercantile libraries
in San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, to
mention but a few examples. There are also foreign library
catalogs for institutions in Canada, France, England, and
Barbados, among others.
In addition to library catalogs, the PBL collection consists
of institutional annual reports to the present day, such as those
of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Library Company of
Philadelphia, as well as modern monographs, such as the histories
of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the
Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. There are also assorted
institutional
publications, including newsletters, readers' guides to special
collections, exhibition catalogs, and occasional miscellanies.
Journals issued by institutional
libraries are shelved with the periodicals collection.
The catalogs of private libraries (PL) provide critical
insights for both biographers and intellectual historians and offer
an amazing range for the study of individual collecting interests
and tastes. Most of the private library catalogs printed through
1840 are cataloged online. Those issued after 1840 are shelved
alphabetically in
the PL classification by name of library owner. A primary access
point for these works is found in the card or online catalogs
under the subject heading "Libraries, private."
The Society's post-1830 private
library catalogs range from the eighty-volume set of loose-leaf
notebooks of Thomas Winthrop Streeter and the twenty-one-volume set
of binders of Henry F. DePuy to the smaller catalogs of the
important libraries of Jared Sparks and Amor L. Hollingsworth. The
PL collection also consists of modern catalogs of reconstructed
private libraries that existed in the eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries, including, for example, Intellectual Life on the
Michigan Frontier: The Libraries of Gabriel Richard and John
Monteith (Ann Arbor, 1985). There are also many valuable auction
catalogs of the sale of great private libraries, such as the 1948
Parke-Bernet catalog of Herbert S. Auerbach's Western
Americana collection, Christie's catalog of the Estelle Doheny
collection sold between 1987 and 1989 in New York and London,
Sotheby's catalogue of the 1989-90 sale of the library of H.
Bradley Martin, and the 1999 catalog of Frank T. Siebert's library of the
North American Indian and the American frontier.
Material related to public and private library catalogs may
be found in many other collections such as
Biography, Book Trades (including Booksellers and Auction
Catalogs), Broadsides, General Institutions, and Manuscripts.
Researchers who
are interested in studying public and institutional library
catalogs should be aware of Robert B. Winans's A
Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in
America 1693-1800 (Worcester, 1981) and Robert Singerman's American
Library Book Catalogues, 1801-1875: A National Bibliography
(Champaign, Ill., 1996).
- Joanne Chaison, Research Librarian
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For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
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