View of John Winthrop's Career As a Scientist, to Mention the Copy of Euclid, Cambridge, 1655, Which Had Been Used in College Successively by Penn Townsend (A.B
Some Books of Early New England Provenance in the 1823 Library of Alleghany College BY EDWIN WOLF, 2ND N 1823, appealing to the Germans of Pennsylvania for I funds to establish a Professorship in German Literature, Timothy Alden, the president of Alleghany College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, stated: "The Library, a most useful and indispensable appendage to any such institution, through the munificence of Winthrop, Bentley, Thomas, and many other benefactors, comprising books in thirty different languages, is the first, except one, as to the excel- lence of the selection and in point of value, belonging to any collegiate institution in the United States."' The Catalogus Bibliothecae Collegii Alleghaniensis, compiled by Alden and printed at Meadville in 1823, confirms the amazing state- ment that at the end of the first quarter of the 19th century a library existed not far from Lake Erie in quality surpassed only by that of Harvard College as an "appendage" to a teaching institution. It is probably also correct to say that among non-teaching institutions only the Library Company of Philadelphia and Jefferson's collection at the Library of Congress were better. It is surprising that for well over a century so important an aggregation of books has been so little known. Searching for books from Franklin's library, I stumbled upon it. To my amazement it produced, not books from Franklin's ' Timothy Alden, A Letter addressed to the Germans of Pennsylvania [Meadville, 1823], 8. I have used the original spelling of Alleghany throughout; after 1833 it was changed to Allegheny. 14 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [April, library, but a wealth of New England provenance.
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