Note 110 — PART I. AMERICANA IN LIBRARIES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES.

His catalogues are spiced with annotations signed “Western Memorabilia.” Sabin (Dictionary, vii. 369) quotes the saying of a rival regarding Gowans’s catalogues, that their notes “were distinguished by much originality, some personality, and not a little bad grammar.” His shop and its master are drawn in F. B. Perkins’s Scrope, or the Lost Library. A Novel. Mr. Gowans died in November, 1870, at sixty-seven, leaving a stock, it is said, of 250,000 bound volumes, besides a pamphlet collection of enormous extent. Mr. W. C. Prime told the story of his life, genially, in Harper’s Magazine (1872), in an article on “Old Books in New York.” Speaking of his stock, Mr. Prime says: “There were many more valuable collections in the hands of booksellers, but none so large, and probably none so wholly without arrangement.” Mr. Gowans was a Scotchman by birth, and came to America in 1821. After a varied experience on a Mississippi flat-boat, he came to New York, and in 1827 began life afresh as a bookseller’s clerk. Cf. American Bibliopolist, January, 1871, p. 5.