The Harvard library, however, as well as several of the best collections of Americana in the United States, owes more, perhaps, to Obadiah Rich than to any other. This gentleman, a native of Boston, was born in 1783. He went as consul of the United States to Valencia in 1815, and there began his study of early Spanish-American history, and undertook the gathering of a remarkable collection of books,[21] which he threw open generously, with his own kindly assistance, to every investigator who visited Spain for purposes of study. Here he won the respect of Alexander H. Everett, then American minister to the court of Spain. He captivated Irving by his helpful nature, who says of him: “Rich was one of the most indefatigable, intelligent, and successful bibliographers in Europe. His house at Madrid was a literary wilderness, abounding with curious works and rare editions. ... He was withal a man of great truthfulness and simplicity of character, of an amiable and obliging disposition and strict integrity.” Similar was the estimation in which he was held by Ticknor, Prescott, George Bancroft, and many others, as Allibone has recorded.[22] In 1828 he removed to London, where he established himself as a bookseller. From this period, as Harrisse[23] fitly says, it was under his influence, acting upon the lovers of books among his compatriots, that the passion for forming collections of books exclusively American grew up.[24] In those days the cost of books now esteemed rare was trifling compared with the prices demanded at present. Rich had a prescience in his calling, and the beginnings of the great libraries of Colonel Aspinwall, Peter Force, James Lenox, and John Carter Brown were made under his fostering eye; which was just as kindly vigilant for Grenville, who was then forming out of the income of his sinecure office the great collection which he gave to the British nation in recompense for his support.[25] In London, watching the book-markets and making his catalogue, Rich continued to live for the rest of his life (he died in February, 1850), except for a period when he was the United States consul at Port Mahon in the Balearic Islands. His bibliographies are still valuable, his annotations in them are trustworthy, and their records are the starting-points of the growth of prices. His issues and reissues of them are somewhat complicated by supplements and combinations, but collectors and bibliographers place them on their shelves in the following order:
1. A Catalogue of books relating principally to America, arranged under the years in which they were printed (1500-1700), London, 1832. This included four hundred and eighty-six numbers, those designated by a star without price being understood to be in Colonel Aspinwall’s collection. Two small supplements were added to this.
2. Bibliotheca Americana Nova, printed since 1700 (to 1800), London, 1835. Two hundred and fifty copies were printed. A supplement appeared in 1841, and this became again a part of his.
3. Bibliotheca Americana Nova, vol. i. (1701-1800); vol. ii. (1801-1844), which was printed (250 copies) in London in 1846.[26]
It was in 1833 that Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, of Boston, who was for thirty-eight years the American consul at London, printed at Paris a catalogue of his collection of Americana, where seven hundred and seventy-one lots included, beside much that was ordinarily useful, a great number of the rarest of books on American history. Harrisse has called Colonel Aspinwall, not without justice, “a bibliophile of great tact and activity.” All but the rarest part of his collection was subsequently burned in 1863, when it had passed into the hands of Mr. Samuel L. M. Barlow,[27] of New York.
M. Ternaux-Compans, who had collected—as Mr. Brevoort thinks[28]—the most extensive library of books on America ever brought together, printed his Bibliothèque Américaine[29] in 1837 at Paris. It embraced 1,154 works, arranged chronologically, and all of them of a date before 1700. The titles were abridged, and accompanied by French translations. His annotations were scant; and other students besides Rich have regretted that so learned a man had not more benefited his fellow-students by ampler notes.[30]
Also in 1837 appeared the Catalogue d’ouvrages sur l’histoire de l’Amérique, of G. B. Faribault, which was published at Quebec, and was more specially devoted to books on New France.[31]
With the works of Rich and Ternaux the bibliography of Americana may be considered to have acquired a distinct recognition; and the succeeding survey of this field may be more conveniently made if we group the contributors by some broad discriminations of the motives influencing them, though such distinctions sometimes become confluent.
First, as regards what may be termed professional bibliography. One of the earliest workers in the new spirit was a Dresden jurist, Hermann E. Ludewig, who came to the United States in 1844, and prepared an account of the Literature of American local history, which was published in 1846. This was followed by a supplement, pertaining wholly to New York State, which appeared in The Literary World, February 19, 1848. He had previously published in the Serapeum at Leipsic (1845, pp. 209) accounts of American libraries and bibliography, which were the first contributions to this subject.[32] Some years later, in 1858, there was published in London a monograph on The Literature of the American Aboriginal Linguistics,[33] which had been undertaken by Mr. Ludewig but had not been carried through the press, when he died, Dec. 12, 1856.[34]
We owe to a Franco-American citizen the most important bibliography which we have respecting the first half century of American history; for the Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima only comes down to 1551 in its chronological arrangement. Mr. Brevoort[35] very properly characterizes it as “a work which lightens the labors of such as have to investigate early American history.”[36]