Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner, Dave Morgan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that 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, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the 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, omitting the / but retaining any hyphens. Book sizes printed with superscript “o” have been rendered as 4to, 8vo, 12mo. Other superscripts, including a few books written as 8^vo, are shown in braces: 8{vo}, 2{3} edn. Bracketed periods [.] were printed with small subscript brackets. 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. Under the headings of _Forma_, _Editio_, _Theca_ (size, edition, case number), sets of four unspaced dots .... were added by the transcriber to indicate an empty column. Variations and inconsistencies match the original, including: --Variation between œ and oe, æ and ae. --Dashes and hyphens. In general, four dashes ---- represent a single long line; other combinations are groups of distinct hyphens. --Spacing within entries in the _Editio_ column. --Dots and ellipses other than the .... sets noted above. It was assumed that errors in the Catalogue itself, and inconsistencies in quotations from original printed works, were reproduced from their originals. Typographical errors, whether corrected or unchanged, are listed at the end of the e-text.] THE LIBRARY OF WILLIAM CONGREVE [Illustration: 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_ [Illustration] 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