Winans (Robert B.)

(24.5 cm), xxxi, 207 pp. Publisher’s cloth (no dust jacket issued). - “This checklist describes printed catalogues of books separately issued in America prior to 1801 by booksellers, publishers, book auctioneers, circulating libraries, social libraries, college libraries, and private libraries” (Introduction). Winans includes 278 extant catalogues that he was able to locate in libraries, 8 others not extant but for which he found substantial evidence that they had been printed, 138 entries for unlocated catalogues, and references to another 265. The auctioneers, printers, and owners of books sold are listed for book auction catalogues, which makes Winans’s index a more useful guide to the eighteenth-century entries in George L. McKay’s American Book Auction Catalogues, 1713-1934: A Union List (New York 1937) than McKay’s own index. It “should be made mandatory reading for historians of American 18th-century culture” (from a review by Edwin Wolf 2nd, in The Book Collector, Spring 1984, pp.103-105). ¶ Fine copy.