In 1875 vol. i. was reprinted with fuller titles, covering the years 1482[76]-1601, with 600 entries, doubling the extent of that portion.[77] Numerous facsimiles of titles and maps add much to its value. A second and similarly extended edition of vol. ii. (1600-1700) was printed in 1882, showing 1,642 entries. The Carter-Brown Catalogue, as it is ordinarily cited, is the most extensive printed list of all Americana previous to 1800, more especially anterior to 1700, which now exists.[78]
Of the other important American catalogues, the first place is to be assigned to that of the collection formed at Hartford by Mr. George Brinley, the sale of which since his death[79] has been undertaken under the direction of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull,[80] who has prepared the catalogue, and who claims—not without warrant—that it embraces “a greater number of volumes remarkable for their rarity, value, and interest to special collectors and to book-lovers in general, than were ever before brought together in an American sale-room.”[81]
The library of William Menzies, of New York, was sold in 1875, from a catalogue made by Joseph Sabin.[82] The library of Edward A. Crowninshield, of Boston, was catalogued in Boston in 1859, but withdrawn from public sale, and sold to Henry Stevens, who took a portion of it to London. It was not large,—the catalogue shows less than 1,200 titles,—and was not exclusively American; but it was rich in some of the rarest of such books, particularly in regard to the English Colonies.[83]
The sale of John Allan’s collection in New York, in 1864, was a noteworthy one. Americana, however, were but a portion of the collection.[84] An English-American flavor of far less fineness, but represented in a catalogue showing a very large collection of books and pamphlets,[85] was sold in New York in May, 1870, as the property of Mr. E. P. Boon.
Mr. Thomas W. Field issued in 1873 An Essay towards an Indian Bibliography, being a Catalogue of books relating to the American Indians, in his own library, with a few others which he did not possess, distinguished by an asterisk. Mr. Field added many bibliographical and historical notes, and gave synopses, so that the catalogue is generally useful to the student of Americana, as he did not confine his survey to works dealing exclusively with the aborigines. The library upon which this bibliography was based was sold at public auction in New York, in two parts, in May, 1875 (3,324 titles), according to a catalogue which is a distinct publication from the Essay.[86]
The collection of Mr. Almon W. Griswold was dispersed by printed catalogues in 1876 and 1880, the former containing the American portion, rich in many of the rarer books.
Of the various private collections elsewhere than in the United States, more or less rich in Americana, mention may be made of the Bibliotheca Mejicana[87] of Augustin Fischer, London, 1869; of the Spanish-American libraries of Gregorio Beéche, whose catalogue was printed at Valparaiso in 1879; and that of Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, printed at the same place in 1861.[88]
In Leipsic, the catalogue of Serge Sobolewski (1873)[89] was particularly helpful in the bibliography of Ptolemy, and in the voyages of De Bry and others. Some of the rarest of Americana were sold in the Sunderland sale[90] in London in 1881-1883; and remarkably rich collections were those of Pinart and Bourbourg,[91] sold in Paris in 1883, and that of Dr. J. Court,[92] the first part of which was sold in Paris in May, 1884. The second part had little of interest.
Still another distinctive kind of bibliographies is found in the catalogues of the better class of dealers; and among the best of such is to be placed the various lists printed by Henry Stevens, a native of Vermont, who has spent most of his manhood in London. In the dedication to John Carter Brown of his Schedule of Nuggets (1870), he gives some account of his early bibliographical quests.[93] Two years after graduating at Yale, he says, he had passed “at Cambridge, reading passively with legal Story, and actively with historical Sparks, all the while sifting and digesting the treasures of the Harvard Library. For five years previously he had scouted through several States during his vacations, prospecting in out-of-the-way places for historical nuggets, mousing through town libraries and country garrets in search of anything old that was historically new for Peter Force and his American Archives.... From Vermont to Delaware many an antiquated churn, sequestered hen-coop, and dilapidated flour-barrel had yielded to him rich harvests of old papers, musty books, and golden pamphlets. Finally, in 1845, an irrefragable desire impelled him to visit the Old World, its libraries and book-stalls. Mr. Brown’s enlightened liberality in those primitive years of his bibliographical pupilage contributed largely towards the boiling of his kettle.... In acquiring con amore these American Historiadores Primitivos, he ... travelled far and near. In this labor of love, this journey of life, his tracks often become your tracks, his labors your works, his libri your liberi,” he adds, in addressing Mr. Brown.
In 1848 Mr. Stevens proposed the publication, through the Smithsonian Institution, of a general Bibliographia Americana, illustrating the sources of early American history;[94] but the project failed, and one or more attempts later made to begin the work also stopped short of a beginning. While working as a literary agent of the Smithsonian Institution and other libraries, in these years, and beginning that systematic selection of American books, for the British Museum and Bodleian, which has made these libraries so nearly, if not quite, the equal of any collection of Americana in the United States, he also made the transcriptions and indexes of the documents in the State Paper Office which respectively concern the States of New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Virginia. These labors are now preserved in the archives of those States.[95] Perhaps the earliest of his sale catalogues was that of a pseudo “Count Mondidier,” embracing Americana, which were sold in London in December, 1851.[96] His English Library in 1853 was without any distinctive American flavor; but in 1854 he began, but suspended after two numbers, the American Bibliographer (100 copies).[97] In 1856 he prepared a Catalogue of American Books and Maps in the British Museum (20,000 titles), which, however, was never regularly published, but copies bear date 1859, 1862, and 1866.[98] In 1858—though most copies are dated 1862[99]—appeared his Historical Nuggets; Bibliotheca Americana, or a descriptive Account of my Collection of rare books relating to America. The two little volumes show about three thousand titles, and Harrisse says they are printed “with remarkable accuracy.” There was begun in 1885, in connection with his son Mr. Henry Newton Stevens, a continuation of these Nuggets. In 1861 a sale catalogue of his Bibliotheca Americana (2,415 lots), issued by Puttick and Simpson, and in part an abridgment of the Nuggets with similarly careful collations, was accepted by Maisonneuve as the model of his Bibliothèque Américaine later to be mentioned.[100]