In 1848 Mr. Stevens proposed the publication, through the Smithsonian Institution, of a general _Bibliographia Americana_, illustrating the sources of early American history;[94] but the project failed, and one or more attempts later made to begin the work also stopped short of a beginning. While working as a literary agent of the Smithsonian Institution and other libraries, in these years, and beginning that systematic selection of American books, for the British Museum and Bodleian, which has made these libraries so nearly, if not quite, the equal of any collection of Americana in the United States, he also made the transcriptions and indexes of the documents in the State Paper Office which respectively concern the States of New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Virginia. These labors are now preserved in the archives of those States.[95] Perhaps the earliest of his sale catalogues was that of a pseudo “Count Mondidier,” embracing Americana, which were sold in London in December, 1851.[96] His _English Library_ in 1853 was without any distinctive American flavor; but in 1854 he began, but suspended after two numbers, the _American Bibliographer_ (100 copies).[97] In 1856 he prepared a _Catalogue of American Books and Maps in the British Museum_ (20,000 titles), which, however, was never regularly published, but copies bear date 1859, 1862, and 1866.[98] In 1858—though most copies are dated 1862[99]—appeared his _Historical Nuggets; Bibliotheca Americana, or a descriptive Account of my Collection of rare books relating to America_. The two little volumes show about three thousand titles, and Harrisse says they are printed “with remarkable accuracy.” There was begun in 1885, in connection with his son Mr. Henry Newton Stevens, a continuation of these _Nuggets_. In 1861 a sale catalogue of his _Bibliotheca Americana_ (2,415 lots), issued by Puttick and Simpson, and in part an abridgment of the _Nuggets_ with similarly careful collations, was accepted by Maisonneuve as the model of his _Bibliothèque Américaine_ later to be mentioned.[100] In 1869-1870 Mr. Stevens visited America, and printed at New Haven his _Historical and Geographical Notes on the earliest discoveries in America_, 1453-1530, with photo-lithographic facsimiles of some of the earliest maps. It is a valuable essay, much referred to, in which the author endeavored to indicate the entanglement of the Asiatic and American coast lines in the early cartography.[101]