[59] Cf. account of Maximilian’s library in the Bookworm (1869), p. 14.
[60] These biographical data are derived from a tract given out by himself which he calls A brief account of the literary undertakings of Hubert Howe Bancroft (San Francisco, A. L. Bancroft & Co. [his own business house], 1882, 8vo, pp. 12). Other accounts of his library will be found in the American Bibliopolist, vii. 44; and in Apponyi’s Libraries of California, 1878. Descriptions of the library and of the brick building (built in 1881) which holds it, and of his organized methods, have occasionally appeared in the Overland Monthly and in other serial issues of California, as well as in those of the Atlantic cities. He has been free to make public the most which is known regarding his work. He says that the grouping and separating of his material has been done mostly by others, who have also written fully one half of the text of what he does not hesitate to call The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft; and he leaves the reader to derive a correct understanding of the case from his prefaces and illustrative tracts. Cf. J. C. Derby’s Fifty Years among authors, books, and publishers (New York, 1884), p. 31.
[61] Averaging twelve from that time to this; a hundred persons were tried for every one ultimately retained as a valuable assistant,—is his own statement.
[62] At a cost, as he says, of $80,000 to 1882.
[63] They appeared in The Nation and in the New York Independent early in 1883. The first aimed to show that there were substantial grounds for dissent from Mr. Bancroft’s views regarding the Aztec civilization. The second ignored that point in controversy, and merely proposed, as was stated, to test the “bibliographic value” which Mr. Bancroft had claimed for his book, and to point out the failures of the index plan and the vicarious system as employed by him.
[64] Seemingly intended to make part of one of the later volumes of his series, to be called Essays and Miscellanies.
[65] With a general title (as following his Native Races) of The History of the Pacific States, we are to have in twenty-eight volumes the history of Central America, Mexico, North Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Northwest Coast, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, and Alaska,—to be followed by six volumes of allied subjects, not easily interwoven in the general narrative, making thirty-nine volumes for the entire work. The volumes are now appearing at the rate of three or four a year.
[66] The list which is prefixed to the first volume of the History of California, forming vol. xiii. of his Pacific States series, is particularly indicative of the rich stores of his library, and greatly eclipses the previous lists of Mr. A. S. Taylor, which appeared in the Sacramento Daily Union, June 25, 1863 and March 13, 1866. Cf. Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., p. xxxix. A copy of Taylor’s pioneer work, with his own corrections, is in Harvard College Library. Mr. Bancroft speaks very ungraciously of it.
[67] See Vol. IV., chap. i. p. 19.
[68] Jackson, Bibl. Géog., no. 639; Menzies Catalogue, nos. 1,459, 1,460; Wynne’s Private Libraries of New York, p. 335. Mr. Murphy died Dec. 1, 1882, aged seventy-two; and his collection, then very much enlarged, was sold in March, 1884. Its Catalogue, edited by Mr. John Russell Bartlett, shows one of the richest libraries of Americana which has been given to public sale in America. It is accompanied by a biographical sketch of its collector. Cf. Vol. IV. p. 22.