The Library of William Congreve

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In the printed book, line breaks in the Congreve catalogue were shown as virgules or slashes / (the “shilling marks” described in the editor’s Introduction). The breaks have been restored in this e-text, retaining the slashes and all hyphens.
Variations and inconsistencies match the original, including:
Variation between œ and oe, æ and ae. Dashes and hyphens. Spacing within entries in the Editio column. Dots and ellipses.
Errors in the modern (1955) material have been corrected and marked with mouse-hover popups . Other irregularities are noted but were left unchanged. It is assumed that errors in the Catalogue itself, and inconsistencies in quotations from original printed works, were reproduced from their originals.
First page of Congreve’s “Bibliotheca,” showing the partially obliterated entries by the first hand. Reproduced from the original in the library of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society by permission of His Grace the Duke of Leeds.
Reprinted, with additional illustrations, from the Bulletin of The New York Public Library of 1954–1955. Printed at The New York Public Library.
When William Congreve died in 1729 he left a collection of books which his old friend and publisher, Jacob Tonson, described (in a letter preserved at the Bodleian) as “genteel & well chosen.” Tonson thought so well of the collection that he urged his nephew, then his agent in London, to purchase Congreve’s books. But Congreve had willed them to Henrietta, the young Duchess of Marlborough, who was much concerned with keeping intact (as she wrote in her will) “all Mr. Congreaves Personal Estate that he left me” in order to pass it along to her youngest daughter Mary. This daughter, said by gossip to have been Congreve’s daughter also, married the fourth Duke of Leeds in 1740, and thus Congreve’s books eventually found their way to Hornby Castle, chief seat of the Leeds family in Yorkshire.