The Library of William Congreve

require UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding, primarily the “oe” ligature œ and Œ . If these characters do not display properly, or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. 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. Bracketed periods [ ] are in the orginal. They occur whenever a catalog entry ends with an abbreviation (“Tom.”, “Vol.”, “papr.”); the final period was supplied by the editor in most of these entries. 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. THE LIBRARY OF WILLIAM CONGREVE 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. The Library of WILLIAM CONGREVE By JOHN C. HODGES University of Tennessee, Knoxville New York The New York Public Library 1955 Reprinted, with additional illustrations, from the Bulletin of The New York Public Library of 1954–1955. Printed at The New York Public Library. The Library of William Congreve INTRODUCTION W hen 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…