William Byrd's Library

The Byrd library, established by William Byrd I in the seventeenth century and brought to greatness in the eighteenth by William Byrd II, was sold piecemeal during the 1780s after William Byrd III's death. All that remains to suggest its magnificence is a manuscript catalogue made in the 1750s and about four hundred surviving titles. The library has never been adequately catalogued. When the library was still intact, a list was made by the Virginia bookbinder John Stretch in the 1750s, but he simply recorded the titles from the spines of the volumes without regard for author, date, or place of publication. As the Stretch catalogue shows, William Byrd II subdivided the collection into history and travel books, law, medicine, entertainment (which included books on art and gardening as well as belletristic works), French, Greek and Latin, and a large miscellaneous group which included geometry, architecture, astronomy as well as many other books.

This catalogue provides full bibliographic citations based on the Stretch catalogue. Though the purpose of this catalogue is to show what books Byrd owned, the nature of the surviving evidence makes it impossible to precisely describe the library's contents. The only titles that can be known definitely are those which survive with evidence of Byrd's ownership, those which were published in only one edition, or those which, based on Byrd's letters, diaries, and the surviving catalogue, can be narrowed down to one possible edition. Consequently, the individual catalogue entries here have been organized to present information concerning all possible editions Byrd may have owned.