In the Sparks collection at Cornell are two other manuscript bibliographies worthy of notice. One is a Biblioteca Americana, by Antonio de Alcedo, dated in 1807. Sparks says his copy was made in 1843 from an original which Obadiah Rich had found in Madrid.[14]
Harrisse says that another copy is in the Carter-Brown Library; and he asserts that, excepting some additions of modern American authors, it is not much improved over Barcia’s edition of Pinelo. H. H. Bancroft[15] mentions having a third copy, which had formerly belonged to Prescott.
The other manuscript at Cornell is a Bibliotheca Americana, prepared in twelve volumes by Arthur Homer, who had intended, but never accomplished, the publication of it. Sparks found it in Sir Thomas Phillipps’s library at Middlehill, and caused the copy of it to be made, which is now at Ithaca.[16]
In 1808 Boucher de la Richarderie published at Paris his Bibliothèque universelle des voyages,[17] which has in the fifth part a critical list of all voyages to American waters. Harrisse disagrees with Peignot in his favorable estimate of Richarderie, and traces to him the errors of Faribault and later bibliographers.
The Bibliotheca Hispano-Americana of Dr. José Mariano Beristain de Souza was published in Mexico in 1816-1821, in three volumes. Quaritch, pricing it at £96 in 1880, calls it the rarest and most valuable of all American bibliographical works. It is a notice of writers who were born, educated, or flourished in Spanish America, and naturally covers much of interest to the historical student. The author did not live to complete it, and his nephew finished it.
In 1818 Colonel Israel Thorndike, of Boston, bought for $6,500 the American library of Professor Ebeling, of Germany, estimated to contain over thirty-two hundred volumes, besides an extraordinary collection of ten thousand maps.[18] The library was given by the purchaser to Harvard College, and its possession at once put the library of that institution at the head of all libraries in the United States for the illustration of American history. No catalogue of it was ever printed, except as a part of the General Catalogue of the College Library issued in 1830-1834, in five volumes.
Another useful collection of Americana added to the same library was that formed by David B. Warden, for forty years United States Consul at Paris, who printed a catalogue of its twelve hundred volumes at Paris, in 1820, called Bibliotheca Americo-Septentrionalis. The collection in 1823 found a purchaser at $5,000, in Mr. Samuel A. Eliot, who gave it to the College.[19]
EBELING.[20]