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Municipal Council, 718 volumes and pamphlets were purchased from Wylie for Tls 1,767.50 to form the nucleus of the society's library. The Shanghai Municipal Council stipulated that the society would be responsible for providing “suitable rooms and a librarian”, and should they fail to do so, the books would be given to another organization.
O. R. Crockett was appointed the "honorary librarian" in 1864, the first of at least twenty-eight people to hold this office. Over the years they represented at least four nations, England, the United States, Germany, and France. The third librarian, the American-born Frenchman Henri Cordier who compiled the monumental Bibliotheca Sinica, was the real founding father of the library.
Unlike many members of the society, Cordier was a young man newly arrived in China, and full of both curiosity and energy. He immediately struck up a friendship with Wylie and was instrumental in the transfer of his books to the library. His first task for the society was to compile a catalogue of its recently assembled collection. As he recalled later:
On the first of April, 1871, Mr. Ney Ellis, then a merchant, took me to the library, which was indeed in a most dilapidated state in a large room of the Commercial Bank Building... I began at once the Catalogue of the books, which was published the next year (1872) at the Ching-Foong General Printing Office.
This catalogue showed 1,300 titles in Western languages, arranged according to Klaproth's classification, "at least in its principal divisions", with Wylie's books noted with asterisks. Not catalogued were an additional 1,023 volumes in Chinese, mostly from Wylie, and the **Transactions of Learned Societies and Periodical Publications, which form one of the most important classes of the Library**. Cordier noted in the preface:
However valuable this collection may be, its deficiency is very great; and many a volume which an Orientalist ought to find is sought in vain through the pages of the Catalogue. Now that the paucity of our resources is known, no doubt people will come forward and help us fill the blanks.