Excerpt from Catalogue of the American Library of the Late Mr. George Brinley, of Hartford, Conn, Vol. 1: America in General, New France Canada Etc., The British Colonies to 1776, New England Some critical readers may object to the frequent recurrence of the terms scarce, rare, superlatively rare, and so on; and if such terms have been misapplied the objection is certainly a valid one. But it is believed that a thorough examination of the catalogue will show that reference to the rarity of a book or tract has been omitted when it might fairly have been made, ten times as often as it has been made without warrant of critical bibliography. Turn, for example, to the collection of Books printed in New England, 1640 - 1709 (pages 87 and to that of the Works of the Mathers (pp. 127 and of the six hundred and fifty consecutive titles there are scarcely twenty that any American bibliographer could hesitate to mark rare, or very rare. The general plan of the Catalogue is indicated, as regards the First Part, by the table of Contents, prefixed. The arrangement it can hardly be called a classification is substantially that which was adopted by Mr. Brinley himself, for his book-shelves. A strictly alphabetical arrangement, by authors' names or titles, would perhaps have been more acceptable to bibliographers, but the extent of the library rendered such an arrangement impracticable, and it seemed inappropriate to the sale-catalogue of a library which is not less remarkable for the completeness of its collections in special depart ments, than by the number of its titles. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.