The collection is a manual card index to the books, pamphlets, and manuscript volumes in the Williamscote Library which have been cataloged individually. In 1968 the Pennsylvania State University Libraries purchased a relatively intact 18th-century library, numbering nearly 2,500 bound volumes, five or six hundred pamphlets, and about thirty manuscript volumes. It had been assembled principally by John Loveday (1711-1789), philologist and antiquary, who lived at Caversham in Oxfordshire. John Loveday, Jr. (1742-1809), Doctor of Laws, removed the library to Williamscote House near Banbury and added much to it. The library, rich in theology, was strengthened in the classics by the inheritance of the library of James Merrick (1720-1769), the poet and scholar. Not included in the microfilmed card index are all of the books sold to James Stevens-Cox in 1966, as well as the small group of books still remaining in stock at Maggs Bros. from their 1966 and 1980 purchases which were purchased from Maggs Bros. and added to Penn State's Williamscote Library inventory in 1998.
