A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies
Date: 2014-07-26T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Bibliography of bibliographies -- History

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Title: A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

Author: Archer Taylor

Release date: July 26, 2014 [eBook #46414]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES ***

A
History
of
Bibliographies of
Bibliographies
by
Archer Taylor

The Scarecrow Press
New Brunswick, N.J. 1955

Copyright 1955, by Archer Taylor.

For
Stanley Pargellis

Preface

In the following essay I use the term "bibliography of bibliographies" only for works of universal scope. Accordingly I discuss neither such national bibliographies as Giuseppe Ottino and Giuseppe Fumagalli's Bibliotheca bibliographica italiana (Rome, 1889) nor such special lists as Gabriel Peignot's Répertoire des bibliographies spéciales (Paris, 1808) and A List of Bibliographies of Special Subjects (Chicago, 1902) issued by the John Crerar Library. I exclude also lists of reference works.

Other groups of books have demanded less arbitrary handling. In general, I have ruled out chapters on the bibliography of bibliographies in handbooks of library science. By the same token, I have included neither classified library catalogues, public or private, nor catalogues of private libraries owned by scholars or bibliographers in special fields. Finally I discuss only those subject indexes that were published before the bibliography of bibliographies was recognized as an independent scholarly undertaking, such as Conrad Gesner's Pandectae (1548) and Israel Spach's Nomenclator (1598). All later subject indexes in which the bibliography of bibliographies is subsidiary to other purposes, have been excluded.

The bibliographies cited by short titles or the author's names are listed in full in the Bibliography. I have given locations for rare books only, and then only for the copies that I have used. I have not tried to identify the works cited in quotations illustrating bibliographical method or to correct errors in such quoted titles, except when the book is difficult to identify or when a correction is pertinent to the discussion of the writer's bibliographical technique.

Various friends have generously read this essay in manuscript and have offered suggestions for its improvement. I am greatly indebted to them for this assistance. Dr. Arnold Weinberger of Harvard University Library has given me general advice and many comments on details. Taylor Starck of Harvard University, Lawrence S. Thompson, Director of the University of Kentucky Library, and Hugh G. Dick of the University of California at Los Angeles have given me good counsel. Anne E. Markley of the University of California, School of Librarianship read the manuscript with painstaking care and helped me to avoid many errors.

Table of Contents

| Preface | vii
I. | The Beginnings of the Bibliography of Bibliographies | 1
II. | The Bibliography of Bibliographies Comes of Age | 21
III. | Lists of Books Entitled "Bibliotheca" | 47
IV. | The Bibliography of Bibliographies Begins Anew | 61
V. | Bibliographies of Bibliographies as Periodical and Cooperative Enterprises | 105
VI. | Conclusion | 131
| Bibliography | 137
| Index | 147

Chapter I
Beginnings of the Bibliography of Bibliographies

The introduction to St. Jerome's De viris illustribus written in A.D. 392 may contain the first bibliography of bibliographies. Here we find a list of nine men who had written bibliographies of various kinds. St. Jerome writes as follows:

You urge me, Dexter, to arrange ecclesiastical writers in imitation of Suetonius[1] and to do for men of our faith what he has done in listing men famous in heathen letters. Among the Greeks some have done the same thing: Hermippus Peripateticus,[2] Antigonus Carystius,[3] the learned Satyrus,[4] and Aristoxenus, the musician,[5] who was by far the most learned, [and] furthermore, among the Romans, Varro,[6] Santra,[7] Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius, whom you cite as a model.[8]

After a brief digression St. Jerome refers to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, which he has found very useful, and then concludes with an allusion to Cicero, whom few would now think of as a bibliographer. In this passage he makes it clear that bibliography was not highly esteemed even in A.D. 392:

And so I pray to the Lord Jesus Christ that, since your master Cicero, who stood at the pinnacle of Roman eloquence, has not disdained to compile a list of orators in the Latin language in his Brutus, I may execute such a task worthily, pursuant to your request, by listing the writers of His church.

St. Jerome's list is an altogether acceptable bibliography of bibliographies. It includes Antigonus Carystius and Satyrus who wrote general biobibliographies, and Aristoxenus who listed the pupils of Isocrates or the writers of tragedy. We can infer that St. Jerome saw a common element in the works of all these men. This common element is the idea of a list or bibliography. Had he cited only writers of general biobibliographies, we might imagine that he thought of them as historians or chroniclers. In the context of an introduction to his own bibliography of Christian writers he must have thought of them as bibliographers. He neglected to mention many other early bibliographers with whom he was probably familiar.

Almost thirteen centuries later Philip Labbé, whom we shall learn to know as the first author of a bibliography of bibliographies to be published as a separate work, found St. Jerome's list and after making some additions, put it in alphabetical order. He could not find a proper place for it in his own bibliography of bibliographies, the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1664, and buried it without any apparent reason immediately after a reference to a book by Constantinus Felicius that dealt with Cicero's exile and glorious return. I suspect that the slip containing this information had been misplaced in his manuscript. Labbé wrote as follows:

Besides Damastes Sigiaeus,[9] many have written on the lives of scholars, for example, Agatharcides of Cnidus,[10] Amphicrates,[11] Antigonus Carystius, Aristoxenus, Artemon of Magnesia,[12] the Carthaginian Charon,[13] Clearchus of Soli,[14] Hermippus of Smyrna, Satyrus, Timagenes of Miletus,[15] and others, and among Latin writers, Varro, Santra, Nepos, [and] Hyginus, whom St. Jerome cites along with Suetonius on p. 62.[16]

Labbé's careless treatment of this information suggests that he had not finished preparing it for publication. The text itself is not entirely intelligible. He did not put it, as St. Jerome had done, in the introduction and failed to find any other logical place for it. St. Jerome's list obviously interested Labbé, for he quoted it again in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus." When Antoine Teissier revised and enlarged the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum in 1686, he came upon this duplication and retained only the passage in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus."

Except the long-forgotten Labbé, subsequent bibliographers know nothing of St. Jerome's brief list. It did not set anyone to writing bibliographies of bibliographies, and no example has been reported in the almost uncharted area of bibliographical history that lies between St. Jerome and the Renaissance.

Modern bibliographies of bibliographies begin as sections in general subject indexes. In any such index bibliography is, as a matter of course, represented. Conrad Gesner's Pandectae, 1548,[16a] which is the first subject index to be printed, begins with bibliography. The first book (liber) of the Pandectae is entitled "De grammatica" and deals with the classification and organization of knowledge.[17] Chapter (titulus) XIII, with which we are especially concerned, is a treatise on general bibliography.[18] Its eight sections (partes) deal with books of general usefulness and some related matters. Pars i, "Greek and Latin Writers of Miscellanies and of Books Containing Critical Comments on More than One Author," is well described by its title. Gesner divides it into two parts: "Greek Miscellanies," including such works as Aelian, Varia historia;[19] Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae;[20] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata;[21] and Johannes Tzetzes, Historia varia.[22] Books of this sort were reference works consulted for information on almost any subject. To this alphabetical list Gesner adds three titles: the accounts of marvels found in various works by Aristotle; Julius Pollux, Onomasticon; and Plutarch, Symposium.[23] For a bibliography of books of table talk similar to Plutarch's work Gesner refers the reader to Liber Politica, Titulus Convivia.[24] He adds a concluding remark that Caelius Rhodiginus and Nicolaus Leonicenus—men who had written widely used contemporary miscellanies—as well as other makers of compilations have drawn freely on the authorities that he has listed. Gesner is a good bibliographer. He has arranged these titles carefully and has clearly indicated how much he knows about them and the translations of them.

The second part of Titulus XIII, Pars i, is devoted to Latin miscellanies. It begins with Alexander ab Alexandro (Alessandro Alessandri, d. 1523), Geniales dies, "which contains grammatical and legal collectanea and comments on various authors." Gesner remarks that he has preferred to cite miscellanies and collections of loci communes because a separately printed treatise can be easily found but the information in a miscellany is likely to be overlooked.[25] He then names some fifteen Latin miscellanies of various dates according to the first names of the authors. Among them are the writings of Angelo Poliziano, Aulus Gellius, the Adagia of Erasmus, the Varia of Cassiodorus, the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the De honesta disciplina by Petrus Crinitus, and the De inventoribus rerum by Polydore Vergil. This mingling of classical and contemporary authorities is characteristic of Renaissance scholarship. Gesner concludes with a citation of a quarto Miscellanea printed in Paris by Gormont and written by an unidentified author (nescio quo authore).[26]

Gesner's free use of cross-references shows how carefully he planned his book. For example, he reminds the reader that miscellanies dealing with such natural objects as metals, stones, animals, and plants will be found in the book entitled Physica,[27] those concerned with the words and deeds of famous men will be found in Caelius Rhodiginus,[28] and epistolographers, who may be thought of as authors of books of a miscellaneous character, will be found in a later section.[29] In a subdivision indicated by a paragraph sign but without a centerhead Gesner says that dictionaries contain miscellaneous information, cites examples, and adds a cross-reference to his discussion of dictionaries. As is evident, he has covered the sources of miscellaneous information rather fully.

In a second division of this part Gesner names writers who have written comments on several authors and have printed them in a single volume. He cites eleven examples, beginning with Bassianus Landus (Bassiano Landi, d. 1562), Epiphyllides[30] and including the manuscript notes of his contemporary, the Neapolitan grammarian, L. J. Scoppa. Since the Epiphyllides does not seem to have been printed and a contemporary scholar's manuscript notes are obviously difficult to find, Gesner can be said to have taken great pains with the list. He excludes those who have written one or more volumes of commentary on a single author.

In Pars ii, De indicibus librorum, an extremely interesting discussion of indexes with rather little bibliographical baggage, Gesner differentiates and discusses several varieties and brings his discussion of methods to a close with some remarks about page numbers and chapter numbers.[31] A paragraph sign sets off a list of indexes to various books, chiefly editions of the classics and Biblical or patristic writings. This list would have been very useful to H. B. Wheatley in writing What is an Index? (London, 1879). On the next page (fols. 21a-21b) Gesner names a few publishers' catalogues and, after a paragraph sign, a few library catalogues.[32] Pars ii ends with a long discussion of the ways of cataloguing books (fols. 21b-22b).

Pars iii, Problemata, Quaestiones & Disputationes, is a strictly bibliographical account of special varieties of miscellanies.[33] The next two Partes contain a discussion of the methodology of note-taking and are not directly bibliographical in nature. Pars vi lists some forty collections of commonplaces (fols. 27b-28a). Among them are Antonius Corvinus's arrangement of Erasmus's Apophthegmata in commonplaces,[34] Stobaeus, Thomas Hibernicus,[35] Maximus Planudes (who expurgated and arranged the Greek Anthology in loci communes), Otto Brunfels (whose Pandectae sacrae[36] Gesner has used freely), and Valerius Maximus. Such books were more or less like general reference works. Here, as elsewhere, Gesner names classical and contemporary writers in a single list.

We have been examining thus far Gesner's account of general reference works and come finally to the seventh pars, which is the most interesting division of the titulus for a student of bibliographical history. It is entitled Bibliographies, i.e. alphabetical list of catalogues of books, the classification of books, the care of them, mottoes, and the buildings.[37] This title is virtually the table of contents of a handbook of library science.[38] We shall consider only the first sections of this pars and in particular Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies.

Gesner begins the seventh pars with miscellaneous notes on pertinent books and on libraries. He carefully separates these notes from the following bibliography of bibliographies. This is an alphabetical list of thirty-one names, beginning with

Alberti Magni de antiquis authorib. astronomiae liber[39] Amphicrates de viris illustrib. scripsit, Athenaeo teste Apollodorus Athenien. Bibliothecae pars etiamnun extat.

In this list Gesner includes both general and special bibliographies. He cites St. Jerome's De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (a variant title of the De viris illustribus) and the continuations by Bede, Gennadius of Marseilles, Honorius Augustodunensis, Isidore of Seville, and Sigebert of Gembloux; Johannes Tritheim, who compiled the original work of St. Jerome and the continuations into a single volume; and Sophronius, who translated it into Greek. He cites contemporary legal bibliographies, one by Bernardinus Rutilius (Bernardino Rutilio, 1504-1538), who dealt with men of his own time, and another by Johannes Fichardus (Johann Fichard, 1512-1581), the often published Juris consultorum vitae veterum quidem, which surveyed older authorities.[40] He has seen or heard of Jacob Rueff's survey of astrologers, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi's literary history, Otto Brunfels's bibliography of medicine in classical times, and Philip Ribot's biobibliographical dictionary of the Carmelite order. The last he has not seen but believes to have been utilized by Johannes Tritheim.

These names illustrate the variety of bibliographies known to Gesner and his clear conception of what a bibliography of bibliographies should be. He has admitted only pertinent books and has arranged their titles carefully in alphabetical order according to first names. He has given sources for citations that he has not verified and for books that he knows to be in manuscript or probably lost. He has commented occasionally on the quality of a book or has told how it was arranged. For example, he says that Rueff's astrological bibliography contains pictures of men and instruments and comments in German verse. He does not give the dates and places of publication, but bibliographers have been slow to learn the importance of citing these details. No doubt he expected his readers to consult his biobibliographical dictionary, the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, for that information. A sixteenth-century scholar, who was accustomed to find books arranged according to format, might have complained that Gesner did not indicate the size of the books. In his procedure he goes beyond St. Jerome, who was content to cite only names. Gesner cites titles.

In Pars viii, "De mirabilibus," the last subdivision of Titulus XIII, Gesner gives a hasty account of books about marvels and noteworthy things. Although he cites several lost classical works on the subject and Alessandro Alessandri, Geniales dies, which had appeared in print a generation before the Pandectae, he makes no great effort to deal bibliographically with the subject. He obviously regards such works as collections of odds and ends and therefore akin to miscellanies. He says, for example, that geographers tell strange tales about the shapes and manners of men and the nature of countries, skies, and seas. He could, he says, have given here references to ancient statues and inscriptions, but has preferred to classify them under history. Poetry and invented tales might also be mentioned and riddles, he thinks, are not to be neglected. The remaining tituli of the first book deal with matters akin to grammar in its usual modern sense but include several specialized bibliographies that we need not examine closely.[41] Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies represents an auspicious beginning of a very difficult variety of bibliography.

The foregoing details about the first book in Gesner's Pandectae make clear Gesner's skill in organization and classification as well as the place that the bibliography of bibliographies had in his scheme. They give some notion of sixteenth-century scholarship and explain why Gesner's Pandectae failed to be continued or revised and, more especially, why his bibliography of bibliographies has not been noticed. Even A. G. S. Josephson, who had a very sharp eye for bibliographies of bibliographies concealed as chapters in subject indexes, did not come upon Gesner's work. Josephson's study will be mentioned in its proper place at the end of this essay. Gesner's subject bibliography was not appreciated fully because it contained many references to classical sources and did not give a comprehensive account of contemporary writings. Although Gesner's classification was logical and although he adhered with remarkable care to the categories that he set up, no one but Gesner himself could make additions to the book or revise it.

It remains to say a word about the relation of the Pandectae to the book of which it forms a part. Gesner published four volumes—the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, the Pandectae of 1548, the Partitiones of 1549, and the Appendix of 1555—that are ordinarily regarded as a single work. The Bibliotheca and the Appendix constitute a biobibliographical dictionary. The Pandectae and the Partitiones are a subject index that lacks a promised section on medicine. The dictionary and the index have no close relations to each other, except to the degree that the dictionary gives additional information about books cited by authors' names in the index. In Gesner's situation a modern scholar would have distributed according to subjects the slips that he had made for his biobibliographical dictionary and would thus have obtained a subject index almost immediately. Gesner did not proceed in this way, but undertook and completed the subject index as a virtually independent work.

The next man to write a bibliography of bibliographies gives no evidence of having read Gesner's work or, more specifically, of having come upon Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies. He is Israel Spach (1560-1610), who wrote a general subject index at the end of the sixteenth century. In the bibliographical section, "Writers of Bibliographies (Bibliothecarum scriptores)," of his Nomenclator philosophorum et philologicorum, (1598), Spach names twenty-nine books. Of these only two medical and two legal bibliographies were known to Gesner, and one of these legal bibliographies is cited in a better edition that appeared long after the publication of the Pandectae. Spach's emphasis lies on contemporary works. Although he mentions the medieval continuators of St. Jerome, he does not mention St. Jerome himself. Inasmuch as these continuators were brought together in Johannes Tritheim, De viris illustribus, which he cites,[42] he could have dispensed with them. He begins with Antoine du Verdier's supplement (1585) to Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis and then mentions Apollodorus, whose Bibliotheca was still unpublished. Apollodorus and Claudius Ptolemy, Sententiae (also unpublished) are the only two bibliographers of classical times that he names. Spach knows general works like Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca, Robert Constantin's compilation (1555) that purported to be a supplement to it, and Nicolaus Basse's cumulation (1592) of the semi-annual catalogues of the German booktrade; national bibliographies like Anton Francesco Doni's La libraria (1556)[43] and John Bale's list of English authors; and, finally, bibliographies of special disciplines like ecclesiastical history, medicine (Otto Brunfels and Symphorien Champier), and law. In these categories he has chosen appropriate books. Although he includes Hierimias Paduanus, who wrote a very popular collection of loci communes that circulated also under the name of Thomas Hibernicus (Thomas Palmer),[44] he agrees with Gesner in preferring to list such works separately.

In the fifty years between the publication of Gesner's Pandectae and Spach's Nomenclator bibliographers had come to recognize the value of several kinds of compilations that Gesner had not chosen to include. For example, Spach cites the catalogues issued by publishers,[45] a category that Gesner knew but separated from his bibliography of bibliographies. He includes some titles that most bibliographers would not now include in a bibliography of bibliographies, for example, a book dealing with the book trade,[46] a book dealing with a particular library,[47] a famous catalogue of Greek manuscripts at Augsburg.[48] Titles such as Wolfgang Lazius, Catalogus partim suorum, partim aliorum scriptorum[49] do not indicate clearly the contents of the book. Spach has thrown his net wide and has caught some fish that we can not call bibliographies. Nevertheless, all the works that he cites deal with books, and we shall not quarrel with him for including treatises on the Frankfurt book fair or the Vatican library. Two titles show how widely he ranged in the search for materials. John Boston's fourteenth-century union catalogue of manuscripts owned in England has come to his knowledge,[50] and he has picked up Claudius Ptolemy, Sententiae sive de utilitate librorum,[51] which was, in one form or another, a popular book about books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spach's omission of regional or national bibliographies and biobibliographical dictionaries, except for Bale and Doni, and of biobibliographical dictionaries of the religious orders is obvious. Perhaps he regarded them as historical rather than bibliographical reference works.

As we have seen, Spach offers a good account of sixteenth-century bibliographies and especially of those published in the latter half of the century. When taken in conjunction with Gesner's earlier bibliography, which reviewed classical writers and his own contemporaries, Spach's list provides us with a good account of sixteenth-century bibliography.

The bibliographical section, "Writers of Bibliographies (Bibliothecarum Scriptores)," in a general subject index entitled Bibliotheca philosophica (1616) by Paulus Bolduanus continues the tradition represented by Gesner and Spach. I have not been able to learn much about the life and works of this obscure Pomeranian minister of the gospel, who apparently lived and died in or near the village of Stolp.[52] He wrote bibliographies of theology, history, and philosophy between 1614 and 1622, publishing in the latter year a supplement to his theological bibliography. Petzholdt rightly commends (pp. 458-459) the Bibliotheca philosophica as superior to Spach's Nomenclator but curiously fails to see that Bolduan's notion of philosophy was in general use in the first half of the seventeenth century. A bibliotheca philosophica of that time would include as a matter of course everything but theology, law, and medicine. Petzholdt praises (pp. 771-772) Bolduan's Bibliotheca historica (1620) as a respectable work that shows bibliographical skill and accuracy. These are kinder words than Petzholdt can ordinarily find for a seventeenth-century bibliography and are a corrective to Burkhard Gotthelf Struve's harsh judgment: "In our day, when other works of this sort are available, we can easily dispense with these efforts."[53]

Bolduan's bibliography of bibliographies[54] is both longer and more carefully made than Spach's. He has arranged nearly seventy titles alphabetically according to the first names of the authors. He cites catalogues of university libraries (only the Leyden catalogue of 1595 could have been within Spach's reach and he did not know it), the compilations made for the book trade by Nicolaus Basse, Johannes Clessius, and Henning Grosse, the ubiquitous publisher's lists issued by Goltzius and Oporinus, and bibliographical dictionaries of various subjects and the religious orders. Like Spach, whose list he seems to have taken over completely, he has heard of John Boston's catalogue and, like Spach, is ignorant of the author's first name and is compelled to cite it under "Bostonus." He corrects Spach's misspelling of Muzio Pansa's name. He does not, however, include any classical Greek or Latin bibliographers. We can therefore infer that he did not find Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies, where they were mentioned. He might have omitted them on principle, but he also fails to mention some early sixteenth-century bibliographies known to Gesner which he would surely have included, had he known them. An example of such a bibliography is Jacob Rueff's book on astrology. Bolduan names no title that cannot be called a bibliography in some sense. In both extent and accuracy he surpasses Spach. As comparison with Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography,[55] shows, this competent workman gives a good account of the bibliographies available in 1616.

A dozen years later, in 1628, Franciscus Sweertius (Francis Sweerts, 1567-1629) printed a bibliography of bibliographies about as large as that by Bolduan. He does not cite his predecessors and probably did not know them. This learned Antwerp merchant and author of several scholarly works printed his bibliography of bibliographies in his Athenae Belgicae.[56] It has no organic relation to Sweerts's purpose of writing a Belgian biobibliographical dictionary. In this compilation, which has a slightly stronger theological tinge than its predecessors, Sweerts lists seventy-eight bibliographies in twenty paragraphs according to subjects. This is, therefore, the first classified bibliography of bibliographies. Except in five instances with such headings as "De Bibliothecis" and "De Vitis & Scriptoribus Ord. S. Dominici," the subjects are to be inferred from the typographical arrangement. Although he has not completely worked out a scheme of organization, he progresses from general works on libraries and books to special bibliographies of theology, law, and medicine. He is less careful than Spach and Bolduan about the bibliographical details of place and date of publication, but the need for this information was just beginning to be recognized at the time when he wrote. He adheres closely to the idea of listing bibliographies and admits only one perhaps pardonable interloper, a compilation of the Church Fathers. It is curious that he cites the Bibliotheca theologica by Johannes Molanus (Jean van der Meulen), which was published in 1618, as being still in manuscript. Later bibliographers have picked up all the titles cited by Sweerts and his selection does not differ sufficiently from that made by Spach and Bolduan to need characterization by quoting titles. Sweerts wrote the first independent or almost independent bibliography of bibliographies and at the same time the first classified bibliography of bibliographies.

The four bibliographies of bibliographies published in the eighty years between Gesner's Pandectae (1548) and Sweert's Athenae Belgicae (1628) are, as their authors intended them to be, relatively complete. In The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, Theodore Besterman adds only a few rather unimportant titles and these may indeed not have seemed to be bibliographies or to have deserved mention in the eyes of Gesner and his successors. Instructive technical developments are evident in these first four compilations. Gesner cites both classical Greek and Latin works and contemporary bibliographies. Spach, Bolduan, and Sweerts adopt the modern practice of preferring to list bibliographies of contemporary usefulness. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan do not separate their work from the larger task of writing a general subject index. Sweerts sees that the bibliography of bibliographies can be an independent enterprise. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan offer alphabetical lists. Sweerts adopts the modern plan of a classified list. Although the bibliography of bibliographies has continued to be a necessary part of a general subject index, I shall limit myself in the following discussion to bibliographies of bibliographies that have been published as separate works.

Chapter II
The Bibliography of Bibliographies Comes of Age

In the seventeenth century several bibliographies of bibliographies were undertaken as independent enterprises. One of them was actually completed and published and after several editions had the good fortune to be revised and to receive a supplement. A century after Gesner had published his bibliographies of authors and subjects, in the decade between 1643 and 1653, Jodocus a Dudinck, who did not fulfill his promise, and Philip Labbé, sought to survey all scholarship and hit upon the idea of a bibliography of bibliographies as a means to this end. Like Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis of 1545-1555 (which was a list of all writers and their works), Philip Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1653 (which was a bibliography of bibliographies) enjoyed a successful career for a little more than a generation and then disappeared from view. After the first revisions and supplements no one chose to continue either Gesner or Labbé. This analogy between the century that began with the invention of printing and ended with Gesner's survey of 1545-1555 and the following century that ended with Labbé's survey of 1653 is perhaps more curious than important. It does nevertheless emphasize a twice-repeated interruption in the historical development of bibliographies. In the two generations between 1643 and 1705 men in various countries compiled or promised to compile bibliographies of bibliographies and with the beginning of the eighteenth century they ceased to do so.

The first separately published bibliography of bibliographies is, if it actually exists, Jodocus a Dudinck, Bibliothecariographia (Cologne, apud Jodocum Kalcoven, 1643.) No one has ever seen it and many have searched for it during the last three centuries. Back in the seventeenth century the Lutheran theologian Caspar Sagittarius (1643-1694) sought it in vain. A little later Johann Andreas Schmidt or Schmid (1652-1726), who was both a theologian and a writer on library science, was similarly defeated in an effort to find the book. Probably Hieronymus Augustinus Groschufius was right when he said in one of the earliest treatises on rare books (1709-1716) that the Bibliothecariographia was never printed.[57] The first reference to the book is found, as far as I know, in a Belgian biobibliographical dictionary of 1643 and all our information about the book and its author goes back to this source.[58] The announcement is not particularly suspicious because the publisher Jodocus Kalcoven of Cologne seems to have been an agent or a limited partner of the famous firm of Willem Blaeu (later Jan Blaeu) of Amsterdam.[59] This firm used Kalcoven's name on various scholarly books.[59] Little as we know about Dudinck's book, its title indicates that he clearly understood the nature of a bibliography of bibliographies. He called it "A Bibliography of Bibliographies. A list of all authors and works that have appeared under the title of bibliography, catalogue, index, list, athenae, and so on."[60] Jodocus a Dudinck had a very good eye for opportunities in the bibliographical field. He announced a general treatise on libraries[61] and both a bibliography of the Virgin Mary and an account of the places associated with her.[62] No one has even seen any of Dudinck's books, but the fact that books on all these subjects were written by other hands within a generation shows his ingenuity and judgment as a bibliographer. Nothing appears to be known about Dudinck beyond what Valerius Andreas has to say. He was a priest in a small village in the Rhineland, "multae vir lectionis."

Ten years after the announcement of Dudinck's book Philip Labbé (1607-1667) printed a bibliography of bibliographies as a supplement to his Novae bibliothecae specimen (1653).[63] He seems to have regarded this later as a separate publication and has caused some confusion by doing so. On its separate title page the date of this supplement is 1652, but the supplement does not appear to have been issued separately and the title page of the book bears the date 1653. This bibliography of bibliographies is entitled: "Supplementum novae bibliothecae, sive speciminis antiquarum lectionum, coronis libraria. Hoc est, Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, & Catalogus Catalogorum, Nomenclatorum, Indicum, Elenchorum, &c. quibus Scriptores in quavis arte & professione praecipui, &c. libri ferme omnes, partim editi, partim inediti repraesentantur." Here Labbé has defined the proper contents of a bibliography of bibliographies. He has included very few inappropriate titles in his list of nearly three hundred separately published bibliographies, bibliographies that were still in manuscript, and bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works. There are very few examples of the last category. He is careful about his work. For example, he cites a manuscript biobibliographical dictionary by Alfonsus Ciaconius (Alfonso Chacón, 1540-1599) and gives his authority in Antonio Possevino, Apparatus sacer (Cologne, 1608). Chacón's dictionary was not printed until 1731, and then only as a fragment. Labbé knows Alfonso Barvoet's catalogue of manuscripts in the Escorial; Alfonso García's list of famous Spaniards; Ambrosio Gozzi's biobibliographical dictionary of Dominicans; Andreas Quercetanus's (André Duchesne, 1584-1640) bibliography of French history (three editions are cited); autobibliographies like "Index librorum F. Angeli Rochensis. Romae 1611"; national bibliographies like that for France by Antoine du Verdier; and a classical miscellany like Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, which scholars then regarded as a bibliography. In other words, Labbé has named examples of varieties of bibliographies that we now recognize. Although he mentions a publisher's catalogue (which he has not seen), he seems doubtful about its pertinence to the task. He comments, for example, on a collective volume in the De Thou library that contained catalogues issued by Plantin, Froschauer, Wechel, and other publishers and says that he is not including it. Labbé's comments are abundant and informative. This first independent bibliography of bibliographies is a commendable piece of work.

Labbé realized that he had hit upon a new and important idea and worked diligently to improve and enlarge his collections. In 1662 he published a sample of his plans for several bibliographies under the title of Sexdecim librorum initia. This consisted of the first eight pages of each of ten bibliographies on which he was working and discussions of six more that he expected to write. The first eight pages of the bibliography of bibliographies extend to Antonius Possevinus (inclusive). A comparison of the complete list of 1653, the sample of 1662, and the book that was finally printed in 1664 is necessarily limited to a portion of the alphabet. In 1653 he cited fourteen names (some of these authors were responsible for several bibliographies), in 1662 he cited thirty-three names, and in 1664 he cited sixty-eight names (including the additions made in a supplementary alphabet). In 1653 he regretted his inability to find a publisher's catalogue issued by Aldus Manutius. In 1662 he reported that he had not found it. In 1664 he cited publishers' catalogues issued by both Aldus Manutius and Aldus Manutius, Junior. In both 1662 and 1664 he made additions to the titles listed under various names, introduced new cross-references, and made improvements in details. As an example of an improvement, note his correction of the name Antonius Bumaldus to Joannes Antonius Bumaldus. This apparently minor change is important because Labbé's arrangement of authors according to their Christian names required him to transfer the name from the letter "A" to the letter "J."

Although Labbé greatly improved his book between 1653 and 1664, he nevertheless published it without incorporating all the additions into the main alphabet and without making full and accurate indexes. Subsequent editions did not completely remedy these serious defects. In 1672, when Labbé had been dead for five years, an anonymous editor combined the additions with the main alphabet, but did not correct errors in the text or improve the indexes. In 1678, the unsold sheets of the 1672 edition were issued with a new title page and a brief appendix containing John Selden's numismatic bibliography. The last edition of the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum was printed at Leipzig in 1682. It is called "enlarged (auctior)," but in a rather extensive comparison I have found only one new title. The German editor removed some of Labbé's comments on Protestant writers but did little more.

Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum is an alphabetical list according to first names of some eight hundred authors of bibliographies. According to Besterman, it includes about fifteen hundred titles. Labbé's arrangement according to first names causes no difficulty to a modern user because he provides an index of family names. Unfortunately, however, this index of family names is incomplete, and the lack of care in its preparation is evidence that Labbé hurried to get his book to the printer.

Eight subject indexes—only the fourth is not alphabetical—make the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum fully usable. When the reader has familiarized himself with them (and apparently very few have done so), he can understand the book and its value to a scholar. In working with the indexes he will discover that Labbé did not make them complete and reliable. Part of the difficulty in understanding and using the indexes arises from Labbé's old and unfamiliar classification according to men instead of subjects. This classification was firmly established when Labbé wrote and he probably never thought of any other. St. Jerome had called his book by the alternative title "De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis," that is to say, "Ecclesiastical Writers," but it was a bibliography of ecclesiastical literature. A bibliography of astrology was, in Labbé's conception, a list of men who wrote on astrology. He soon ran into difficulties and adopted devices to get around them that show bibliographical method in a transitional state. In "Index I. Practitioners of Various Arts and Sciences (Index Primus. Professores variarum scientiarum atque artium representans)" we find such entries as "Advocatorum Consistorialium, Advocatorum Parisiensis Curiae, Aristotelis Graecorum Interpretum, Arithmeticorum," which we can translate (changing to the nominative case) as "Consistorial Lawyers, Lawyers of the Parisian Court, Greek Interpreters of Aristotle, Arithmeticians." These designations are to be understood as references to as many subjects. "Index II. [Bibliographies of] Nations and Countries" and "Index III. [Bibliographies of] Religions and Religious Orders," which does not include non-Christian religions or heretical sects, give him no trouble. In the fourth index Labbé meets his Waterloo. This "Index IV. Authors Writing on Various Subjects" is awkwardly conceived in terms of the authors but is arranged according to the theological merit of the subjects on which they wrote. It descends from the Virgin Mary to inventions in the following order: (1) writers about the Virgin Mary, (2) [writers about] the Immaculate Conception, (3) writers who were popes, (4) writers who were cardinals, (5) writers who were French cardinals, (6) women writers, (7) writers about heretics, (8) writers on the prohibition of heretical books, (9) compilers of catalogues of manuscripts, (10) compilers of catalogues of ancient and modern libraries and writers on library science, (11) writers on academies, universities, and Jesuit colleges, (12) writers of catalogues and eulogies of individual academies and their faculties, (13) writers on the inventors of things, arts, and sciences. In order to fit his material into this pattern Labbé changes his procedure and writes in an individual entry in No. 10 above: "Manuscriptorum catalogus varias exhibent Antonius Sanderus, Aubertus Miraeus,..." In other words, the subject heading takes the place of a heading in terms of the author. The fifth index lists bibliographers of men who have borne the same name. Anton Sander's book on Antonies is an example. Such works were very popular in Labbé's day and deserved this special attention. The sixth index is a list of bibliographies, which are often autobibliographies, of individual writers and of indexes to their works. The seventh index includes publishers' and booksellers' catalogues. In the somewhat confused eighth index, which again illustrates the difficulty already discussed, Labbé intended to list bibliographies having a proper name in their titles. Here are found books on the Ambrosian and Amsterdam libraries, Labbé's own anti-Jansenist bibliography, and an anonymous catalogue of anti-Jesuitica. He preferred to put the last two bibliographies here and not in the third index, which contained religious bibliographies. He had already set up a category for writers about the Virgin Mary in the fourth index, but he named others in the eighth. I cannot see why he placed writers of dictionaries in the eighth and not in the fourth index, and certainly he should have put writers on chemistry and politics in the first and not the eighth index. These irregularities are difficult to explain. In a search for a subject bibliography a modern reader must turn to the first, fourth, and eighth indexes. He will find a national or local biobibliography in Index II, a biobibliography of a religious order in Index III, a list of works on homonyms in Index V, a bibliography of an individual author in Index VI, and a catalogue issued by a publisher or bookseller in Index VII. The classification is complicated but not altogether unusable.

In the eleven years that passed between the first publication of the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and its final appearance in 1664, Labbé might have worked out the details more carefully than he did. We can of course pardon some faults because modern bibliographers are more demanding than those of 1664. We may, however, say fine words about these demands and be forced to eat our words when we look later in this essay at the modern bibliographies of Léon Vallée, Henri Stein and the very recent work of Hanns Bohatta and Franz Hodes. While we are mindful of the old saying about those who live in glass houses, we can nevertheless point out inconsistencies, irregularities in procedure, awkward arrangements of materials, and outright errors. The faults to be found in Labbé's book are relatively slight and do not seriously impair its value.

Labbé is inconsistent and irregular in method. He seems to have learned to cite titles in the original languages when he was nearly through collecting them. It was too late to change and furthermore his sources probably often gave him Latin and not the original French or Italian titles. For example, he cites a book by Augustinus Superbus by its Latin title and adds the note "Italicè."[64] In the seventeenth century this was an altogether regular way of citing an Italian title. He also cites the same book with an Italian title. In reading the proof he could have removed the duplication. The article on Augustinus Marloratus seems to have been written before he realized the necessity of bringing the author's name into the first place for the purpose of alphabetizing the entries. He is irregular in regard to critical comment, which the plan of his book did not require. He usually adds none, but see, as exceptions, the remarks on Angelus Roccha, Conradus Gesnerus, Conradus Lycosthenes, and Joannes Neander. It will be noticed at once that all but one of these men are Protestants. In a few instances Labbé gives additional information about the subject of the book that he is citing. For example, he adds a paragraph to the citation of a catalogue of heretical writers compiled by Bernardus Luxemburgensis:

Regarding these men [i.e., heretical authors] ancient writers ought also to be consulted: Philastrius, Augustine, the author of Praedestinati (edited by Sirmondus), St. Epiphanius, St. John Damascene, and others.

This paragraph may indicate that Labbé considered including subjects but did not find a way to do so. Critics of the Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum and among them Adrien Baillet, who should have known better, have called for interpretative and critical comments. They ought to have perceived that such comments, although useful, would have greatly exceeded Labbé's purpose. In all the later history of bibliographies of bibliographies only two men—Gabriel Peignot and Julius Petzholdt—have made a systematic effort to add comments. Labbé does, to be sure, often express his opinion about heretical books, and his warnings have awakened Protestant wrath and have caused Protestant bibliographers to speak harshly of him. He has rarely expressed himself so vigorously as he does in the article "Robertus Cocus" (Robert Cooke, 1550-1615), where he writes:

He wrote Censura Patrum (London, 1623. 4o; 1614. 8o), but it ought to be utterly rejected, along with Rivet's Criticus, Scultetus's Medulla, the outburst of Hottinger, and similar commentaries of the most virulent heretics, by all holding the Catholic faith or it ought to be put far away in the castle of Hell, whence it is forbidden to depart, along with the Magdeburg Centuriators, Mathias Flaccius Illyricus, and the works of others that have been assembled in several volumes. I hear also that a criticism of ancient writers by the same Cooke was published at Helmstadt in octavo in 1655.

Labbé makes mistakes in details and perhaps more mistakes than a modern bibliographer. We can easily pardon minor troublesome mistakes in alphabetization. In an index according to Christian names it is not fatal to have the last name of Christophorus Ferg misspelled Freg.[65] Labbé should have eliminated many duplications like those of Christophorus Giarda and Christophorus a Giarda or Philibertus Fezaius and Philibertus Fresalius (the latter is an error).

A comparison of Labbé's text with the indexes discloses serious discrepancies that reduce the value of his book. One can usually go from the indexes to the text without much trouble, although a few references lack the name needed as a guide.[66] A reverse comparison of the text with the indexes is much less satisfactory and shows that Labbé added names to the text after he had made the indexes.[67]

We can justly object to Labbé's inclusion of subject entries in an alphabet of authors.[68] Had he given more thought to them, he would no doubt have hit upon the idea of a dictionary catalogue of authors and subjects and might have simplified the complicated indexes. His plan required him to put subjects into the indexes, but he had no good place to put an article "Bibliothecae." This contains a classified list of catalogues and libraries that I shall discuss in the next chapter. He put it in its alphabetical place, in a list of names. A curious bibliography of fictitious bibliographies is entered under "Fictae Bibliothecae." When Labbé put a bibliography of guides to university studies at the end of his alphabet of authors, he showed his realization of the fact that he had no place for it.

As all bibliographers have at one time or another, Labbé included some titles that had little to do with his task. The differentiation of biography and bibliography was perhaps less clear then than now, and general treatises on scholarly matters probably seemed more closely akin to bibliographies than we find them to be. Honoratus Montecalvus, Speculum tragicum Regum, Principum & Magnatum superioris seculi celebriorum ruinas exitusque calamitosos breviter complectens, which is adequately described by its long title, is not a bibliography but one of many accounts of the mishaps that have befallen great men. Jacobus Gretser, De jure et more prohibendi, expurgandi et abolendi libros haereticos et noxios is obviously a book about books, but it is scarcely a bibliography. Although Jacobus Middendorpius's famous treatise on universities is a general account of its subject, Labbé is probably too generous in admitting it. These examples suggest some laxity in Labbé's definition of bibliography.

In its conception and execution the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum is excellent. Although rarely consulted, it is still valuable for reference purposes. An occasional difficulty will arise, but a modern reader must not object to Labbé's short titles.[69] Theatri, which was then immediately understood as a citation of Theodor Zwinger, the Elder (ed.), Theatrum vitae humanae, a standard sixteenth-century encyclopedia, was then no more difficult to understand than The New International might be today.[70] Labbé is a good bibliographer because he cites pertinent references to non-bibliographical books.[71] He is careful to indicate whether he has seen the book he is citing[72] and occasionally comments on its bibliographical value.[73]

In brief, Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum is well conceived, neatly arranged, and relatively accurate in details. In plan and arrangement it surpasses, for example, such a modern work of similar size and purpose as A Bibliography of Bibliographies that the famous bibliographer Joseph Sabin published in 1877. As I have already said, the references are as accurate as those to be found in three of the bibliographies of bibliographies published in the last seventy years. His choice of an arrangement according to authors' names has been adopted only by Joseph Sabin (1877) and Léon Vallée (1883-1887). Unpopular as it has been, it nevertheless seems to me a good method of dealing with intractable material. A classified bibliography requires both an index of subjects and an index of authors. An alphabetical index of subjects requires cross-references and an index of authors. Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum needs only a new index of subjects to become a reference work useful to a modern scholar.

The time was not ripe for a bibliography of bibliographies and Labbé's contemporaries and immediate successors neither perceived the novelty of his idea nor fully appreciated its value. Contemporary recommendations of the book have a perfunctory flavor. Valentin Heinrich Vogler, who wrote an admirable survey of scholarly books entitled Introductio universalis in notitiam cuiuscunque bonorum scriptorum (Helmstadt, 1670), is representative. He passed a judgment on a book that he had not seen. When Heinrich Meibom made a new edition of Vogler's handbook in 1691, he summarized Vogler's comment and having seen Labbé's book, added some characteristic and interesting remarks of his own:

Vogler did not see it [the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum]. Nevertheless, with only a few excerpts available to him, he did not use bad judgment in saying that it offers only a brief review of authors arranged according to their names[74] and makes no comments on the way in which these men have dealt with their materials. Still, the work is very useful (Utilis tamen valde labor est), although I have found many authors cited, of whom some have no pertinence and others tell the lives of men who are famous for their reputations and deserts rather than in literary endeavors and writing. From not a few entries it would also appear that he has often not seen the books, but, deceived by the title, he has nevertheless cited them. This is, for example, the case when he cites David Frölich, Viatorium.[75] And he does not blush to make venomous remarks in his usual fashion about some excellent men, especially those who differ from him in religious matters.

Meibom speaks harshly, and more harshly than Labbé has deserved, but he does grudgingly acknowledge that the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum is useful. Daniel Georg Morhof, whose Polyhistor, a general treatise on university studies, demanded some mention of indexes, bibliographies, and reference works, expresses much the same judgment on Labbé and leaves one in doubt whether he has actually seen the book. In a chapter entitled "De catalogorum scriptoribus," Morhof begins with general remarks about the kinds of bibliographies that a scholar then had within his reach, but fails to identify clearly the bibliography of bibliographies as a special variety. He does, however, go on to say, "Like Hodegeta and Janus Patulcis, Philip Labbé is vigilant at the very entrance to learning."[76] This means that he recognized Labbé's book to be one of the first books to be consulted in undertaking an investigation. He should have said more. Perhaps Vogler, Meibom, and Morhof, whose acquaintance with the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum seems superficial, knew it only from book reviews, especially Denis de Sallo's review in Le Journal des sçavans. Adrien Baillet, who quotes this review, mentions also a brief notice by Henning Witte, who seems to have an equally superficial knowledge of the book.[77]

A few scholars did understand what Labbé had done. Probably Vincent Placcius (1642-1699), who spent his life in the study of anonyma and pseudonyma, would have continued the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum in Labbé's spirit.[78] Theophilus [or Gottlieb] Spitzel (1639-1691), a very intelligent bibliographer and theological writer of Augsburg, gave more attention to the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum than anyone else of his generation. He obtained it after considerable delay and with some difficulty. After reading the preface, in which Labbé explains his plan, he characterized Labbé's flamboyance as "really gorgeous indeed (satis profecto splendidam Praefationem)."[79] In order to justify his criticism of the book, he reprinted the eighth index—a list of men who had compiled bibliographies (bibliothecae) and similar general works—and added a supplement to show how many titles Labbé had overlooked. Spitzel's additions amount to nearly one hundred titles, which are grouped in sixty categories. They show that Spitzel understood the true nature of a bibliography of bibliographies, but they do not show the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum to be seriously incomplete or unsatisfactory. Some additions—for example, the Oriental bibliographies by Paul Colomies—were published after Labbé had given the last touches to his book or indeed after he had died. Others are bibliographies hidden in non-bibliographical works. For example, one can suspect his pleasure in adding "Joh. Nadasi, in libro cui Tit. Annus dierum memorab. S. l. [sine loco] ed. Antw. 1665"[80] to the bibliographies of the Jesuits. Labbé was a Jesuit and seems to have been caught napping, although he had cited Rivadaneira's bibliography of the Jesuits and had published his own bibliography of French Jesuits. Spitzel did not point out that the first edition of Labbé's book was printed in 1664, a year before the book cited by Spitzel appeared, and that Labbé died in 1667, five years before the second edition was published. Labbé could not have included this title. Such victories are easy. Furthermore, Spitzel did not learn to use Labbé's indexes. His failure brings some comfort to a modern reader who does not find them very convenient. In his additions, for example, Spitzel cites some bibliographies of medicine. Labbé had found them, too, and had cited them in the first index, where they properly belonged according to his plan. Spitzel should have seen that Labbé cited Michele Poccianti's list of Florentine authors and Cornelius Loos's list of German authors in the right places.

A generation after Spitzel, J. F. Reimann (1668-1743), a theologian and the author of several very curious surveys of the history of learning, showed his full appreciation of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. His praise is significant because he was not accustomed to stint himself in condemning books that he did not like. In the Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam Litterariam, so wohl insgemein, als auch in die Historiam Litterariam derer Teutschen (Halle, 1708-1713), he writes: "Let this book of Labbé's be commended to you for diligent study above all others, for (disregarding the obscenities, which are scattered about in it like mouse dirt in pepper) it is one of the very best works in the field [of general bibliography]." He concludes his remarks on this field by recommending it a second time, when he mentions along with it the anonymous Bibliographia Historico-politico-philologica curiosa as a meritorious work.[81] After this, Labbé's book ceases to be mentioned because it was replaced by a new edition, to which we now turn.

In 1686 Antoine Teissier (1632-1715), a Frenchman who became historiographer at the court of Frederick I of Prussia, published a revised and enlarged edition of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and gave it a new title: Catalogus auctorum, qui librorum catalogos, indices, bibliothecas, virorum literatorum elogia, vitas, aut orationes funebres, scriptis consignarunt. This new title, which he signs "By Antoine Teissier (Ab Antonio Teisserio)," obscures the fact that the Catalogus is essentially a new edition of Labbé's bibliography. The title page gives credit to Labbé only for an appendix entitled Bibliotheca nummaria. Teissier could, to be sure, claim that his emphasis on eulogies, biographies, and funeral orations representing a category of biographical writings that Labbé had not included amounted to a sufficiently large alteration to justify a claim to authorship. We can at least say that he did not treat his predecessor generously. In a preface addressed to the reader he says that he has doubled the number of bibliographies cited and has added twelve hundred biographical works.[82] He has made the Catalogus both an index to biographies and a bibliography of bibliographies. He could scarcely have added the biographies if he had fully perceived the nature and usefulness of a bibliography of bibliographies.

Teissier was a diligent collector and a good organizer. Although he has corrected errors and has filled in gaps in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, he was not always as careful as he should have been. He added two new indexes: Index V (Catalogus, pp. 353-355), listing writers of biobibliographies of miscellaneous scope (i.e., works that were not restricted to men of a particular country or profession), and Index X (Catalogus, pp. 364-400), listing the men who were the subjects of biographies. These indexes show that Teissier was chiefly interested in biography. He transferred an index of last names that Labbé had given in the preliminary pages to the end of the Catalogus and made it Index XI. He showed bibliographical sense in perceiving and remedying the serious difficulties that the references to "Anonymus" in Labbé's indexes had caused. In order to run them down in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum one must read the entire book. Teissier assembled all anonymous works in a single place ("Auctores anonymi," pp. 319-332) and thus made it possible to identify a reference rather easily. He removed the brief account of fictitious libraries to a new place (Catalogus, p. 363) and added to it a short but very interesting list of sixteen seventeenth-century catalogues of private libraries.

Teissier did not learn from Labbé's experience that titles should be cited in the original languages. Consequently, the Catalogus offers the same mixture of Latin titles translated from the vernacular and vernacular titles as we found in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. Probably he could not have achieved any substantial improvement in this regard. He could not see many books that he cited and the sources from which he took the titles usually gave them in Latin translation. Like Labbé, he cited bibliographical sections of non-bibliographical works.[83] He made some mistakes and corrected some that Labbé had made.[84] His most serious fault is his failure to verify his references. In the seventeen pages devoted to authors whose first names begin with "H" (Catalogus, pp. 121-138) Teissier cited eight books with the remark "He is said to have written—(scripsisse dicitur)." This number is much larger than it should be. Since he usually neglects to cite his source (Labbé is more careful in this regard), search for the title may be difficult. He is often careless in details.[85]

Teissier did not improve his technique in the Auctuarium, a supplement published in 1705. This book of 388 pages contains many new bibliographies and substantial additions to the indexes.[86] He has turned up some new bibliographers of classical times that had escaped Labbé and were not included in his revision of 1686. For example, he cites Xenocrates as the writer of a list of geometricians and Varro as the writer of a list of poets. He has brought up to date the list of English bibliographers by adding Henry Holland, who is the H. H. of the Herwologia,[87] Richard Smith, whose library was the subject of an early catalogue; and William Winstanley, who wrote on English poets. He knows "Rossus Warwicensus" from John Pits's biobibliographical dictionary of English authors, but of course has not seen Thomas Hearne's edition, which came out a few years later.[88] He is as neglectful as he had been in the Catalogus about giving dates and places of publication and citing authorities for titles that he has not seen and works in manuscript.

Labbé's original plan survived without substantial change in Teissier's revision of 1686 and supplement of 1705. In the Auctuarium, the fourth index, "Writers on Various Subjects (De variis argumentis scriptores)," has grown enormously. If Teissier had given any attention to remaking the structure of the book, it might have suggested to him the idea of an alphabetical subject index. He has no longer adhered strictly to listing bibliographies in terms of men who specialized in various subjects but shifted somewhat in the direction of an emphasis on the subject. He could have introduced many practitioners of various arts and sciences into the first index, but his decision to put them into the fourth index shows a breaking down of the scheme that Labbé had invented. When he says (Auctuarium, p. 398) that the seventh index will supplement the list of library catalogues, which are in the eighth index, he is confessing to uncertainty about the scheme. Wavering of this sort is evidence that he did not fully understand the scheme or did not choose to adhere to it.

Although scholars no longer remember Antoine Teissier and his bibliographies, the Catalogus and the Auctuarium offer a uniquely useful summary of seventeenth-century scholarship. In them we find such bibliographies as a list of twenty-two medical bibliographers (Auctuarium, p. 288), fifteen writers (Catalogus, p. 349) on academies and universities (these authors are scarcely bibliographers, but contemporary practice did not separate them sharply from bibliographers), twenty compilers of catalogues of manuscripts (Catalogus, p. 352), twenty authors of lists of famous women (Catalogus, p. 352), and four bibliographers of dictionaries (Auctuarium, p. 298).[89] There is even a reference to a bibliographer of books of anagrams.[90]

The reception of Labbé's and Teissier's books shows that the world was not ready for a bibliography of bibliographies. We can see additional evidence to this effect in the announcement in 1680 of a bibliography of bibliographies that did not get into print. Cornelius a Beughem (fl. 1678-1710), a Dutch bookseller who compiled and published several bibliographies, borrowed the title Bibliotheca bibliothecarum from Labbé and the title Bibliothecariographia from Dudinck for books that never got into print. Presumably the Bibliothecariographia was a treatise on library science. In his subtitle Beughem makes clear what he intended to include in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. It was to be An Account and Fuller Listing of all Books and Works that Have Appeared up till now under the Titles Bibliotheca (Bibliography), Catalogus, Index, Athenae, etc.[91] We can perhaps infer that he did not include bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works. His bibliographies of incunabula and of medical, juridical, and historical writings as well as his survey of articles in journals (a Poole's Index at the end of the seventeenth century!) show him to have been a most diligent worker.[92] We can only regret his failure to print his two books on bibliography and library science.

With Cornelius a Beughem's unfulfilled promise of a Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, Antoine Teissier's Catalogus and Auctuarium, and Charles Moëtte's lost manuscript bibliography of bibliographies that I shall mention in Chapter IV, the making of bibliographies of bibliographies came to a temporary end shortly after 1700. Scholars do not seem to have esteemed Teissier's books very highly then or later and Teissier himself concealed their nature by including a large number of biographies. The tentative efforts to write lists of books entitled Bibliotheca that might have developed into bibliographies of bibliographies are the subject of the next chapter, but it may be said in advance that they had no important result.

Explanations for the disappearance of bibliographies of bibliographies around 1700 are readily found. Even a casual reading of the subject indexes to Labbé or Teissier reveals few themes to attract eighteenth-century scholars, who were studying theological, political, economic, historical, literary, and scientific problems in new ways. The great encyclopedias, of which Moréri's Le Grand dictionnaire, first published at Lyons in 1674 and revised, enlarged, and supplemented down to 1759, is typical, gave scholars information that they might otherwise have sought in bibliographies. The changes in the intellectual climate around 1700 are too varied and numerous to discuss here. It is enough to note that they included the disappearance of bibliographies of bibliographies from the list of scholarly tools.

Chapter III
Lists of Books Entitled "Bibliotheca"

The listing of books that contain the word Bibliotheca in their titles is a special bibliographical development in the seventeenth century and continues into the eighteenth. It might have led by easy stages to making a bibliography of bibliographies, but it unfortunately attracted little notice and maintained a tenuous existence for only about a century. The word bibliotheca, which often appears in titles, has such more or less bibliographical meanings as bibliography, subject index, catalogue of a public or private library, and collection of materials dealing with a particular subject. Consequently, a list of books entitled bibliotheca has much in common with a list of reference works and, more particularly, a bibliography of bibliographies. Although there was no proper place for such a list in his Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, Philip Labbé included one under the heading Bibliotheca in an alphabet of authors.[93] This is an early example of a list of books chosen according to their titles.

Labbé limited himself strictly to works of a bibliographical nature. He did not, for example, include the collections of the church fathers that were very familiar to him, although they bore the title Bibliotheca. Many books that he cites are hard to identify: some titles seem to have been made up and others refer to books that were never printed. Labbé uses the term bibliotheca so loosely that we do not always know whether he is referring to a library and its catalogue (for example, Bibliotheca Augustana may mean the library or may be a short title for its catalogue) or a book (for example, Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis). In either case, he is thinking as a bibliographer, and we can easily conceive the enlargement of his list into a bibliography of bibliographies.

Labbé's classification of books entitled bibliotheca shows a remarkable understanding of their different kinds and calls attention to their remarkable variety. I cannot easily cite an equally instructive and suggestive review of bibliographies.[94] Labbé's classification is as follows: (1) Bibliothecae named for places (vel a locis dictae): Augustana,[95] Floriacensis,[96] Ingolstadiensis,[97] etc.: (2) bibliothecae named for persons (vel a personis): Borromaea,[98] Bodleiana,[99] Thuana,[100] etc.; (3) bibliothecae named for rulers (vel a principibus): Regia Gallica,[101] Caesarea,[102] Bavarica,[103] etc.; (4) bibliothecae named for religious orders (vel a Ordinibus Sacris): Augustiniana,[104] Carmelitica,[105] etc.; (5) bibliothecae named according to the subjects with which they deal (vel a materia quam tractant): Chymica,[106] Concionatoria,[107] Juridica,[108] etc.; (6) bibliothecae named according to their arrangement or like circumstances (vel a forma similibusve circumstantiis): Classica,[109] Selecta,[110] Universalis.[111]

The anonymous author of The Newly Opened Library (Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec), in which good information about libraries as well as convenient directions for acquiring, maintaining, and using them are put into the hands of students and inquiring friends. To which are added: the chief European libraries and what travelers ought to notice in visits to them (1702) hit upon the same idea of listing bibliothecae.[112] In this book a special section or appendix labelled "A List of Authors Who Have Written Books Entitled 'Bibliotheca' and Books about Libraries (Series Authorum qui Bibliothecas & de Bibliothecis scripserunt)" names books called bibliotheca, catalogues of libraries, and treatises on library science. The selection is obviously even more definitely bibliographical in character than Labbé's list had been. The compiler arranges the titles alphabetically according to the author's last names or, in the case of an anonymous work, according to an important word in the title. This arrangement and the choice of titles show that he had no knowledge of Labbé. Like Labbé, he includes none of the collections of texts that were entitled bibliotheca.

Our author begins with Valerius Andreas, Bibliotheca Belgica (1643), a biobibliographical dictionary of writers in the Low Countries. In the letter "A" he includes the Augustanae Bibliothecae Catalogus (1633), which he also enters under the name of the compiler, Elias Ehinger, librarian at Augsburg. He cites the Bibliothèque universelle, a critical journal edited by Jean Leclerc, because the title contains the word Bibliothèque. Such titles show that he was thinking in bibliographical terms, for Andreas's book and the Augsburg catalogue are bibliographies and Leclerc's journal was a review of current publications.

The titles in this list are interesting because some are rarely mentioned and others are difficult to track down. Examples are "Augusti sereniss. Ducis Brunsvicensis Bibliothecae Sciagraphia, Bibliothecae Catalogus. Wolfenb. 1650. in 4-to;"[113] "Henricii Furenii Bibliotheca Medica." Hafn. 1659. in 4-to;[114] "Hamburgensis Bibliothecae scripta memoria." Hamb. 1651. fol.;[115] and Bartol. "Moseri Thesaurus Bibliatricus seu Bibliotheca gemina Onomastica & Classica." Dilingii. fol.[116] The list includes a few autobibliographies, for example, those written by such librarians and bibliographers as Peter Lambeck (Lambecius) and Philip Labbé. The most surprising title that the compiler names is "Joan. Brunderii [sic] index librorum MS quae in Bibliothecis Belgicis extant."[117] This union catalogue of manuscripts owned in the Low Countries was made by the Belgian Dominican Johannes Bunderius or Bunderus (b. 1481 or 1482, d. 1557). Down to 1666 it is mentioned occasionally by men who had consulted it, but our author probably never saw it and no fragment of it is known to have survived the dispersal of Anton Sander's library. A reference to such a manuscript was by no means an idle display of erudition. Allusions in various seventeenth-century works show that men used this union catalogue. For example, the Spaniard Pedro de Alva y Astorga, the author of several very rare encyclopedic works, which were published at Madrid and Louvain, drew upon it, and the Italian Antonio Possevino quoted it in his Apparatus sacer.

This curious list in Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec shows some signs of carelessness. Its compiler has not seen all the books in it. For example, he assigns Petrus Bertius's catalogue of the university library at Leyden to 1591 instead of 1595 (this error is probably a slip of the pen) and mentions the famous ghosts announced by Jodocus a Dudinck. He credits the Philobiblon to both Richard de Bury and Richard Dunelmensis (De Bury's name as Bishop of Durham). With all its faults, this "Series" is nevertheless a respectable piece of work by a man who saw clearly the nature of a bibliography of bibliographies.

A generation later, in 1734, Johannes Gottfried Unger published a pamphlet entitled De libris bibliothecarum nomine notatis, a classified list of books entitled bibliotheca, and added critical and descriptive comments. Julius Petzholdt, who is often a severe judge, deals with it generously, when he says (p. 79) that it is worth a glance and can then be forgotten. Although he seems to be unaware of any predecessor, Unger's idea was not novel. His execution of the idea leaves much to be desired. Since his list contains few, if any, books that cannot be easily found elsewhere, his list has little value and his comments do not enrich it. His strict adherence to the task of collecting books entitled bibliotheca prevented him from seeing the possible greater usefulness of what he was doing.

After some general remarks on libraries and bibliographies and a definition of the task, Unger cites seven general works: Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum (he mentions here Teissier's Catalogus and Auctuarium, but he has not seen them); G. M. König, Bibliotheca vetus et nova; Latinus Latinius, Bibliotheca sacra et profana; Jean Leclerc, Bibliothèque universelle et historique (this is the Bibliothèque universelle and its continuation, the Bibliothèque historique); Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca universalis; Johannes Groeningius, Bibliotheca s[ive] codex operum variorum; and Louis Ellies DuPin, Bibliothèque universelle des historiens. "And these are the books entitled Universal Library or: Bibliography." His comments contain some information but do not on the whole show much familiarity with the books. For example, the remarks on König's late seventeenth-century biobibliographical dictionary are lifted from D. G. Morhof, Polyhistor. He points out that the subtitle of Latinius's Bibliotheca gives a good idea of its contents: "Observationes, correctiones et variae lectiones in sacros et profanos scriptores, ex marginalibus notis codicum ejusdem [Latini Latinii] a Dominco Marco editae." In other words, the book is a miscellany of emendations and critical comments rather than a bibliography. He describes Leclerc's journals by a long quotation from the preface to the first volume. They are, he thinks, a better example of this genre of books than Latinius's collectanea. He dismisses Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis with the remark that it "also deserves mention (praeterea notatu digna est)" and a reference to Morhof, Polyhistor. He does not describe the book by Johannes Groeningius.[118]

Unger's account of forty-one theological bibliographies and collections of texts entitled bibliotheca is not altogether bad. He often quotes the titles of chapters from these books or says that a book is a collection of texts and not a bibliography. Much of this information was even then available in well-organized reference works, and Unger's only contribution is the selecting of the books entitled bibliotheca. His account of legal bibliographies begins with Martin Lipenius, Bibliotheca juridica, "which was published at Frankfurt in 1607 as a folio and was enlarged by F. G. Struve in 1720." This is not a good start, for the first date is wrong (it should be 1679) and he would have found five more legal bibliographies entitled bibliotheca by opening Lipenius. In this category he cites nine more titles, counting three works by Caspar Thurmann as one book. This combination is not particularly objectionable. Thurmann had made a classified legal bibliography and finding no publisher, had printed portions as small bibliographies. Unger then proceeds to historical, medical, and philosophical categories, but we need follow him no further. He finally resigns himself to naming titles in a confused order. His disappointing performance has the merit of naming books called bibliotheca, but it does not suggest, as Labbé and the anonymous author of Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec had done, that they were primarily interesting as bibliographies.

The sixty folio pages (double columns) filled with entries beginning with the word bibliotheca in Michael a San José, Bibliographia critica (1740-1742) have the appearance of a list of books, but on closer examination many titles prove to be made up. In other words, San José offers what amounts to a general survey of bibliography. Since his book is almost unknown and the entries are often curious, a brief description will not be out of place. The articles are arranged alphabetically according to the adjective that follows the word bibliotheca. Thus, the list begins with J. F. Reimann, Bibliotheca acroamatica (Hannover, 1712), a condensation of Peter Lambeck's catalogue of manuscripts in the Imperial Library at Vienna. The next entry consists of two columns headed "Bibliotheca Adriani Baillet" and is a brief discussion of the Jugemens des savans (1685-1686) and a long summary of a prospectus of a philosophical dictionary that Baillet planned but never published. More entries follow in an alphabetical order according to proper names or adjectives derived from proper names or the subject matter. Laurentius de Cremona, Bibliotheca aethiopica is entered under "Aethiopica," and Albert Bartholin, Liber de scriptis Danorum under "Alberti." It is difficult to discover the plan of arrangement, and equally difficult to see the reasons for choosing the books. The presence of more than twenty entries entitled "Bibliotheca Biblica" is not surprising, but eleven botanical bibliographies and twelve pages summarizing the Linnean classification seem an unnecessarily generous allotment to that subject. A few pages later San José cites collective works—not bibliographies—that deal with Byzantine history and canon law, but he ordinarily limits himself to bibliographies and biobibliographies. He shows no sense of proportion in the choice of titles. Out of hundreds of regional biobibliographies he chooses one for Naumburg for mention. It can have meant very little to most readers of his book, and he might have omitted it. A "Bibliotheca occulta concionum P. Paulini a S. Joseph" (Rome, 1720) did not deserve three pages or a revision of Antonio León Pinelo, Epitome (an early bibliography of American subjects) five. San José is careless with names and titles. Martin Hancke, the writer of a Silesian biobibliography (p. 528), acquires an Oriental look, when he is called Han Kii. San José's strange medley may yield a curious bit of information now and again, but it need not detain us longer.

The last list of books entitled bibliotheca is the Dissertation sur les bibliothèques (1758) by J. D. Durey de Noinville (1683-1768).[119] He does not hold to the purpose announced in the heading "Alphabetical list of both works published under the title of bibliothèque and printed catalogues of collections in France and foreign countries."[120] He offers virtually a bibliography of bibliographies. His use of an asterisk to mark works containing an alphabetical index of authors shows some bibliographical sense, but the lack of a clear plan of selection and organization makes the book unusable. In a hodgepodge of seven hundred and fifty titles—I take the figure from Besterman—Durey de Noinville may list a book according to its author or its subject without any apparent reason for his choice of either method. His knowledge of available bibliographies is entirely inadequate. The accounts of reference books dealing with Belgium, church history and France are scanty,[121] the list of learned journals is almost worthless,[122] and the remarks about journals entitled Mercure exceed somewhat the scope of his enterprise.[123] In addition to these faults Durey de Noinville makes bad mistakes in details.[124] His virtually worthless compilation yields an occasional nugget, but such discoveries are rare.[125] His book is only interesting or important for showing how a bibliography of bibliographies might have grown out of a list of books entitled bibliotheca.

The efforts that we have surveyed in this chapter produced nothing of lasting value. The list written by the author of Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec did not lead to either a bibliography of bibliographies or a guide to reference works. Durey de Noinville's disorderly book was not good enough to suggest making anything better. All these writers worked independently and made little or no use of their predecessors. We might see in this fact an omen of the course of bibliographies of bibliographies in the next century.

Chapter IV
The Bibliography of Bibliographies Begins Anew

Comprehensive authoritative bibliographies of the most popular fields of scholarship are characteristic products of the eighteenth century.[126] They began to appear in the last years of the seventeenth century, when Giulio Bartolocci (1613-1687) published the Bibliotheca magna rabbinica (3 v.; 1675-1693) which Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati (d. after 1696) completed and provided with the supplementary Bibliotheca latino-hebraica (1694). There are many standard bibliographies to set beside it. Barthélemy d'Herbelot [de Molainville] compiled the Bibliothèque orientale in 1697, Johann Albert Fabricius published the first edition of the Bibliotheca latina in the same year and continued with such larger and more important works as the Bibliotheca mediae et infimae latinitatis (6 v.; 1734-1746) and his masterpiece, the Bibliotheca graeca (14 v.; 1705-1728). In 1693 Ellies Du Pin published the first volume of the long theological bibliography that only his death was to interrupt. Many of these works were revised and enlarged during the next century and a half. The Bibliothèque orientale was republished for the last time in 1781-1783. An edition of the even more successful Bibliotheca latina was begun in 1773 and remained incomplete. The new edition of the Bibliotheca graeca begun in 1790 was brought to an end, although the work was still incomplete, with an index published in 1838. Excellent bibliographies which are still worth consulting were written for every subject of particular interest to eighteenth-century scholars. J. C. Wolf published four thick volumes of a Bibliotheca hebraea in 1715-1733. William Cave, who had begun his bibliographical activities in the seventeenth century, Jacques LeLong, and (after the middle of the century) J. G. Walch satisfied the demands of theologians. Langlet du Fresnoy, Johann Burkhard Mencken, and B. G. Struve compiled exhaustive lists of historical materials and investigations. The many bibliographies by Johann Albert Fabricius reviewed such subjects as church history, missions, and classical, Christian, Jewish, and heathen antiquities. In brief, the eighteenth-century scholar had on his shelves excellent bibliographies of the subjects that he found most interesting. However, he did not have any good guide to them in the form of a bibliography of bibliographies.[127]

The only bibliography of bibliographies that can be dated in the eighteenth century has, as far as I know, disappeared entirely. It is a manuscript dated 1707 that was sold at Amsterdam in 1743. From the brief auctioneer's description we can infer that it resembled Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and was a continuation of that bibliographical tradition. I have been unable to learn anything about its author. The description is as follows:

Bibliotheca Alphabetica à Carolo Moëtte collecta cum Indice Auctorum, Parisiis 1707. NB. Opus hoc propriè est Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, MSS. ineditum.[128]

Each epoch in the history of bibliographies of bibliographies has an individuality of its own. In the hands of Conrad Gesner and his successors this variety of bibliography slowly established itself. In the next epoch the work of Philip Labbé attracted contemporary scholars to continue and improve it. Although Antoine Teissier was the only one to publish the revision of a predecessor's work, his procedure is characteristic of seventeenth-century scholarship. The eighteenth century neglected the bibliography of bibliographies and let the writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in this field sink into obscurity. In the nineteenth century, as we shall see, men undertook to compile bibliographies of bibliographies with an astonishing disregard of the difficulties of the task and a surprising neglect of previous efforts. Without an exception these men were librarians and should therefore have been fully aware of what they were doing and of what had been done. Their behavior is nothing less than amazing. I may anticipate the theme of the next chapter by saying that the characteristic aspect of the making of bibliographies of bibliographies in the twentieth century is cooperation.

When the great French bibliographer Gabriel Peignot (1767-1849) published his Répertoire bibliographique générale in 1812, he declared that he had hit upon an entirely new idea. Although he knew and cited such predecessors as Labbé and Teissier, he did not clearly see that he was undertaking the task that they had already completed. He did not use their books systematically, and he did not exhaust the information that they had collected.

Peignot shows his competence as a bibliographer in various ways. Like his predecessors (although he seems not to have intentionally imitated them), he includes bibliographies printed as parts of non-bibliographical works. For example, he quotes at the very beginning a bibliography of books about bees from a local agricultural journal. Within the various articles he arranges the titles chronologically and thus suggests the historical growth of knowledge and bibliography in a particular field. Although bibliographers before him had often added comments, Peignot is more systematic and generous than his predecessors. For example, his account of bibliographies of ana—a subject to which he had himself made an important contribution a few years before the publication of the Répertoire—even includes useful references to book reviews. Particularly interesting as a technical improvement in bibliographical method are his frequent references to the number of titles in the book that he is citing. Bibliographies published before the Répertoire rarely give this information. During the course of the history that we have surveyed, the standards of accuracy and completeness rose and Peignot attains a very high level in this regard. The index of authors in his Répertoire is both complete and accurate and so, also, are his citations of titles.

Peignot's Répertoire contains perhaps a thousand articles extending from "Abeilles (bees)" to "Zoologie." According to Theodore Besterman, it names two thousand bibliographies. Since Peignot is primarily interested in surveying eighteenth-century scholarship, he does not exhaust Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and its continuations.

Peignot's decision to arrange his bibliography of bibliographies in an alphabet of many small subject headings has necessarily reduced the permanent value of his labors or, more correctly, has made it more difficult for us to benefit from them. The Répertoire suffers from the unavoidable difficulties that arise from the choice of headings.[129] A reader can never know whether a particular subject will appear as a separate entry or as a subdivision of a larger field. Will heresy stand alone or under theology? What will the term philosophy include? Peignot gives no cross-references to aid his reader. Nor is there an alphabetical subject index that would guide the reader to the bibliographies included in the larger headings. Such an alphabetical subject index would have been useful, but I grant at once that an alphabetical subject index to an alphabetical list of subjects seems a strange duplication. There is, to be sure, a brief classified subject index (pp. xv-xix).

A serious and inescapable handicap to the permanent usefulness of Peignot's alphabetical list of many small headings is the rapid obsolescence of technical terms. In some cases we can no longer know exactly what Peignot meant by a particular term and therefore cannot immediately turn to a desired entry. For example, "histoire littéraire" does not mean the history of literature or at least of literature in the sense of belles lettres. In Peignot's use "métaphysique" includes demonology or, as a modern bookseller would say, "occult" books. A specialist in the history of theological studies will know that Peignot's "théologie positive" refers to theology based on God's revelations to man, but two professors in a divinity school did not recognize the term. I am all the more sympathetic with them when I read in Neville Braybrooke's account of Christianity in England the comment on Mr. Billy Graham: "In his way he stood for 'positive theology'."—Cited from The Commonweal, LX (1954), 194. Here the term seems to mean "a convincing religion for the man in the street."

Peignot does not offer an index of subjects because he believes that his table of contents and his alphabetical arrangement make it unnecessary. This belief is not well-founded because he subdivides many long articles and gives no cross-references and no indication of subdivisions in the table of contents. The bibliography of an individual classical author appears in its alphabetical place in the article "Classiques" (pp. 155-244) and of a religious order in "Ordres monastiques" (pp. 432-437). Without a cross-reference from "Bible" (pp. 26-32) one will perhaps fail to find a list of polyglot Bibles under the heading "Polyglottes" (p. 447). It is not immediately obvious that Peignot has arranged his valuable list (pp. 40-75) of catalogues of public libraries alphabetically according to places. He would have added little to the size of his book by adding cross-references and he would have made it much easier to use.

Although Peignot feels the temptation that comes to every bibliographer to wander afield and include works of little pertinence to the task, he apologizes for yielding to it in a prefatory "Nota" to the useful article "Bibliothèques" (pp. 32-135). He includes here such works as Richard de Bury, Philobiblon (a book about collecting books); Claudius Clement, Musaei (a general treatise on library science that contains little bibliographical information); and Louis Jacob, Traicté des plus belles bibliothèques (an excellent account of European libraries in the early seventeenth century). In general, however, Peignot adheres very strictly to his intention of listing only bibliographies.

We must look with a critical eye at Peignot's classification. Since he has an article on the bibliography of bibliographies, he should not put Labbé, Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, in "Des livres en général" (p. 387). Boulard's treatise on bibliographical method stands on the border of what is admissible and should certainly not be placed with "Des livres rares," a list of catalogues of rare books (p. 396). Georg Draud, Bibliotheca classica, a classified compilation of titles listed in the semi-annual catalogues of the German booktrade, includes juridical works as a matter of course, but it is not correctly placed in "Droit" (p. 254). Anton Francesco Doni's La libraria is a catalogue of Italian books and is not, as Peignot lists it (p. 95), a catalogue of a private library.

Peignot has seen many of the books that he cites and in this regard surpasses his predecessors. He does not, however, report German authors' names and titles (even titles written in Latin) with satisfactory accuracy.[130] I am not disposed to judge him very harshly for this fault because the language was no doubt strange to him and the books were probably not available. A more serious fault is, it seems to me, his neglect of obviously important books that he either could have seen or should have known. I cannot understand how he overlooked such authorities on church history and theology as Louis Ellies Du Pin, Jacques LeLong, and J. G. Walch. He knows only two of the six eighteenth-century bibliographies of diplomatics that Namur commends (pp. xvii-xix), but all of them are, it must be acknowledged, German works and therefore probably not within his reach.

These comments on Peignot's faults can easily obscure our estimate of his merits. His succinct and abundant comments were no doubt useful when he wrote and are still valuable. His chronological arrangement of titles is a spur to historical meditations on the development of many fields of study. A modern scholar finds it hard to duplicate some information that Peignot has assembled. Where else can he easily find bibliographies of the collections of Latin poets,[131] dictionaries,[132] encyclopedias,[133] translators of the classics,[134] and accounts of royal and noble writers?[135] His review of bibliographies of incunabula lays a foundation for a history of such works,[136] and so also does his survey of bibliographies of medicine.[137] The most amusing list in Peignot's Répertoire is a collection of bibliographies of men who practised trades or were members of professions having little connection with literature.[138]

Peignot's abundant and informative critical notes deserve special praise. For example, he comments on catalogues of public libraries (pp. 40-75), and although we have longer lists of these catalogues, his comments have not been superseded. A modern cataloguer would probably have separated the catalogues of manuscripts from the catalogues of books. An even more important survey deals with catalogues of private libraries (pp. 75-135) arranged according to the owners' names. He tells the number of lots offered for sale, remarks on the presence or absence of indexes, and warns us when the catalogue was printed in a small edition. He praises the superb Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunavianae (p. 86), calls attention to varying editions of the Cambis catalogue (pp. 87-88), and commends the Imperiali catalogue (pp. 104-105). He points out the noteworthy collections of journals entitled Mercure and books on the theatre in the Pompadour catalogue (p. 119). He often notes the use of a novel system of classification. One could only wish that Peignot had devoted even more effort to this list. He would have enriched the comments and would have eliminated various works that are not properly included among catalogues of private libraries.[139]

In sum, then, Peignot's Répertoire represents a definite advance in the progress of bibliographies of bibliographies for its relative accuracy and its abundant comments. It is what he intended it to be: a survey of eighteenth-century bibliography rather than a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies.

Pie Namur, who wrote a very large bibliography of bibliographies a short generation after Peignot, regarded the Répertoire and two contemporary compilations by T. H. Horne and A. F. Delandine as his only predecessors. Although these compilations are brief selective lists of a sort not included in this essay, Namur's recognition of them makes it necessary to characterize them briefly.

The bibliographical portion (pp. 403-758) of Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862), An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography (1814) is mentioned here only because Pie Namur, the author of a bibliography of bibliographies next to be discussed, names it along with A. F. Delandine's "Bibliographie spéciale" and Peignot's Répertoire as a predecessor. Like other writers of handbooks of bibliography, Horne cites bibliographies without aiming at completeness. Horne's Part III, "A Notice of the Principal Works, Extant on Literary History in General, and on Bibliography in Particular," gives the information that it promises but contains no subject bibliographies and therefore cannot be called a general bibliography of bibliographies. It contains a brief account of "Dictionaries of Literary History" or works that we would call universal biobibliographies (pp. 403-408). The interesting survey of "Treatises, &c. on Literary History" (pp. 408-418) includes G. M. König, Bibliotheca vetus et nova (1678) and J. P. Niceron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres (43 v.; 1726-1745) that should have appeared in the preceding section and two histories of philosophy for which his plan had no place. "Writers on British Literary History" (pp. 419-431) and "Writers on Foreign Literary History" (pp. 431-447) are accounts of national biobibliographies, histories, and bibliographies of literature, and of specialized biobibliographical writings. One finds in them occasional titles of infrequent occurrence like Christopher Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Biography, or Lives of eminent men connected with the history of religion in England, from the commencement of the Reformation to the Revolution (6 v.; London, 1810) or Giovanni Agostini, Notizie istorico-scritiche intorno la vita e le opere degli scrittori Vineziani (2 v.; Venice, 1752). His rather full account of British works has some value but his incomplete foreign list is noteworthy chiefly for such curiosities as Matthias Bellus, Exercitatio de vetere litteratura Hunno-Scythica (pp. 433-434) or Giambattista Toderini, Della letteratura turchesa (p. 447). Horne devotes the following sections to writers on the materials used in writing and printing (pp. 448-450), writers on the origin of languages, letters, and writing (pp. 451-469), and writers on the history and the art of printing (pp. 469-513). A strictly bibliographical "Chapter IV. Books" (pp. 513-550) contains books on bibliomania, handbooks of bibliography, catalogues of rare books and incunabula, dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma, and lists of burned, suppressed, or censured books. The most valuable part of Horne's Introduction is the fifth chapter, on bibliographical systems and catalogues. The account of bibliographical systems (pp. 551-563) is not very important, but the review of British and foreign public and private library catalogues (pp. 564-733) has not been entirely superseded. Although far from complete, it contains information not easily found elsewhere. It resembles Peignot's similar review, on which Horne has drawn heavily. He concludes with a brief survey of publishers' catalogues (pp. 733-741), references (pp. 741-742) to two of Peignot's bibliographies that he believes to be adequate guides to subject bibliography, and addenda (pp. 743-758). Horne did not intend his Introduction to be a bibliography of bibliographies and we need say no more about it.

A "Bibliographie spéciale et chronologique des principaux ouvrages sur l'imprimerie et la bibliologie" by Antoine François Delandine (1756-1820) is printed in his Bibliothèque de Lyons (Paris, 1816). I have not seen Delandine's original list but have used a later and slightly enlarged version. In this, Etienne Psaume has, according to Namur, added a few books printed between 1812 and 1822 and the new title "Appendice de l'Essai sur la bibliologie" (1824). This, is an annotated chronological list of nearly three hundred and fifty books on the history of printing, catalogues of public and private libraries, and bibliographies of miscellaneous scope. This somewhat casual performance is useful at best for a few curious or informative notes. The bibliographies do not amount to many more than a hundred and do not offer either in number or variety a satisfactory survey of bibliography. A selection of good catalogues of private libraries (chiefly French) is the best feature of the "Appendice." The distressingly careless citations show that the compilers did not see some of the books. This list shows some originality and is worth reading, but it deserves no significant place in the history of bibliographies of bibliographies.

Almost a generation passed after the publication of Peignot's Répertoire before anyone tried again to write a bibliography of bibliographies. [Jean] Pie Namur (1804-1867), a librarian ("second bibliothécaire") at the University of Liége, gave a sample of such a work in his Manuel du bibliothécaire in 1834 and published his complete Bibliographie paléographico-diplomatico-bibliologique générale in 1838. Despite its many serious faults this forgotten book deserves some recognition. Namur emphatically disclaimed (I, p. xiv) any dependence on Peignot's Répertoire, which he called a "chaos" that yielded only a few titles. In writing his Manuel he had perceived that there were no adequate bibliographies of paleography, diplomatics, and "bibliologie" and he therefore set about compiling them. In the section of "bibliologie" he recognized only Peignot's Répertoire, Horne's Introduction, and Delandine's or Psaume's list as predecessors. Although he found them unsatisfactory, he would have left his collections unpublished but for the urging of friends, especially Baron de Reiffenberg, librarian of the Royal Library at Brussels (see I, p. xx). The announcement of his plan led L.-A. Constantin, who wrote a short handbook of library science a few years later, to send two hundred slips and to renounce the idea of making a bibliography of bibliographies (I, pp. xxi-xxii).

We can best appreciate the not inconsiderable merits of Namur's Bibliographie by squarely facing its faults. A comprehensive bibliographical account of paleography, diplomatics, the history of printing and the booktrade, bibliography, the history of libraries, and literary and critical journals is too large a task for one man or one book. I confine my comments to a discussion of the fourth section, which deals with bibliography.[140] Here as well as elsewhere Namur's choice of a classified arrangement involves great difficulties in arrangement. Namur's table of contents is inadequate and he provided no subject index. In assigning books to categories Namur fails sadly. He apologizes in a footnote (II, 5, n. 1) for a confused alphabetical list of 198 general bibliographies by saying that he has been unable to see the books and therefore cannot classify them. In this tangled heap lists of books recommended for various kinds of specialized libraries, trade catalogues, critical journals, Giovanni Cinelli (later Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli), Della biblioteca volante (a bibliography of ephemeral publications), G. F. DeBure's Musaeum typographicum (a list of rare books),[141] and general bibliographies lie side by side. Even if he had had to leave a few titles unidentified, he had sufficient bibliographical resources within easy reach to bring order into this confusion. But, he should not be judged on the basis of a list that he confessed himself unable to classify. The following section 3, which should have been numbered 2, is entitled "Bibliographie des livres rares, etc." (II, 12-14). This heading gives the reader no good idea of what to expect. Namur includes here lists of rare books, lists of ana, John Hartley's Catalogus universalis (which is described by its title), and J. B. B. van Praet's catalogues of books printed on vellum. The anomalous items are in all perhaps a dozen of the fifty-two titles in this section. If we disregard the interlopers, which could easily have been put elsewhere, this section is a not altogether unsatisfactory account of a very important variety of eighteenth-century bibliography. Almost all catalogues of rare books can be readily recognized by their titles and a critical account of them—an account which is greatly to be desired—might begin with Namur's list. In section 4, the bibliographies of anonyma and pseudonyma, Namur succeeds better than in section 3. These bibliographies are usually sufficiently identified by their titles and mistakes should not occur. Two black sheep have, however, found a way into the fold (II, 14, Nos. 272, 273). Books like these with the title Bibliotheca anonymiana are sale catalogues and not lists of anonymous writings. The title corresponds to the modern "Library of a Distinguished Collector" and Namur should have recognized it. This error shows the dangers that a bibliographer runs in classifying books without examining them.

Bibliographies of the individual languages and literatures are ordinarily easy to recognize, but Namur makes a few egregious mistakes in classifying them. One example is sufficient. He puts a book on Icelandic literature correctly in the same class with books on Danish and Swedish literature and then enters it once more among American bibliographies. He introduces a further complication by copying "Irlandiae" that a predecessor had misread for "Islandiae" in the title of a second book by the same author and puts it among British biobibliographies. Nor is this enough. He cites the author's name, Hálfdan Einarsson, as both "Hálfdanus Einar" and "Einari, H." and enters the first under "H" and the second under "E" in the index of authors.[142] One can grant that the proper form of entry for Icelandic names is difficult for foreigners, but a bibliographer must learn it or at least adopt a consistent rule of his own making. Although Namur knows directly or indirectly many bibliographies, he has failed to find obvious titles. A librarian at Liége who knows Anton Sander's Flemish biobibliography should also have known his local books of similar character for Bruges and Ghent.[143]

Enough of this! The picture is not all black. Namur's account of dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma[144] contains more titles printed before 1838 than any other bibliography. There are some duplications but few outright errors. His important list of books dealing with the history of libraries and including catalogues of institutional libraries[145] is the most useful one that I know. He has ranged so widely as to cite the library catalogues of the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia and (inaccurately) the Harvard College Library catalogue of 1790. Such titles rarely come to the knowledge of European bibliographers. The following section (II, 167-226, Nos. 721-2573) is an equally full review of catalogues of private libraries. As he says in a footnote at the beginning, he has made a special effort to attain completeness. I can cite no list of trade catalogues and publishers' catalogues comparable to Namur's (I, 171-193, Nos. 1283-1857). I cannot judge competently his list of printer's type facsimiles (I, 144-146, Nos. 673-768), but its extent and the variety of printers named is impressive. His list of national biobibliographical dictionaries (II, 106-122, Nos. 86-390) is far from complete, but I see in the Italian section (II, 108-110, Nos. 129-169) several unusual titles. The subject bibliographies seem less rich to me, but there are one hundred and sixteen bibliographies of medicine (II, 77-83, Nos. 1457-1573) and eight bibliographies of veterinary medicine (II, 84, Nos. 1574-1581). More examples of Namur's diligence would be wearisome and would add nothing to the picture. In spite of vexatious errors of all kinds Namur often names a title not easily found elsewhere.

A development characteristic of nineteenth-century bibliography consists in the publication of collectanea at more or less regular intervals in appropriate journals. These collectanea may be lists of recently published books and articles, books received, or brief critical accounts of current publications. Since they do not intend to be comprehensive, we need not examine at length those including bibliographies. A. G. S. Josephson mentions perhaps a score of such periodical bibliographies of bibliographies.[146] Perhaps the earliest and most influential publications of this sort were those in the Anzeiger für Literatur der Bibliothekswissenschaft (1840-1846), which was continued until 1886 by the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswissenschaft. The editor, Julius Petzholdt, used these lists of current bibliographical publications, bibliographies of particular subjects, and critical comments on antiquarian catalogues in the making of his Bibliotheca bibliographica, but those published after 1866, when the Bibliotheca appeared, are not very well-known. Various other journals devoted to bibliography, bibliophily, library science, criticism, and the interests of publishers and dealers printed similar collectanea. For example, a very full and carefully compiled list of current bibliographical publications may be found in the Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, which was founded in 1884. These numerous lists are convenient collections of useful materials, but I am not sure that the makers of bibliographies of bibliographies have, with the exception of Petzholdt, made full use of them. With the rise of annual bibliographies of bibliographies[147] that aim at comprehensiveness their importance has somewhat declined. I have mentioned these collectanea because they represent a new development and are to some extent the foundation of the book next to be discussed.

After the lapse of nearly three generations the Bibliotheca bibliographica (1866) by Julius Petzholdt (1812-1891) is still a standard bibliography of bibliographies. Its position will doubtless remain unchallenged. More recent works—notably Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies—contain more titles and naturally include those published after 1866, but Petzholdt's critical comments and careful collations are still indispensable. The Bibliotheca bibliographica deserves its reputation for its great merits. It also owes this reputation to some extent to Petzholdt's position as head of the famous library at Dresden with a long and honorable bibliographical tradition,[148] his editorship of a successful journal of library science, his standing as the author of professional handbooks, and, last but not least, his vigorous condemnation of other bibliographies. Petzholdt's self-assurance now and again arouses resistance, and leads one to judge him as severely as he judged others, but the Bibliotheca bibliographica will remain a landmark in bibliographical history.

Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is noteworthy for its extent, its careful organization, its detailed collations, and its useful critical comments. We must nevertheless admit some qualification of all these merits. In extent, Petzholdt falls short of his predecessor Pie Namur. Namur had in 1838 cited 10,236 titles. Many of these did not, to be sure, fall within the limits set by Petzholdt for his work. A generation later Petzholdt cited only an estimated 5500 titles (I take the figure from Besterman). He achieved this figure by excluding many old bibliographies (chiefly works of the seventeenth century), disregarding bibliographies published as journal articles, and including antiquarian catalogues and a few catalogues of private libraries. Although completeness is desirable, it is also unattainable. A comparison in terms of numbers is not very important.

In the matter of organization the Bibliotheca bibliographica has long been regarded as a model. Nevertheless one cannot defend Petzholdt's inclusion[149] of a detailed list of schemes for classifying books. He had collected a great deal of information about such schemes because they interested him as a librarian, but the subject is not pertinent to a bibliography of bibliographies. Petzholdt's relegation of the alphabetical index of authors to a clerk or, if he did have a clerk, to as inaccurate a clerk as he chose, was unfortunate. His decision to provide no alphabetical index of subjects makes the Bibliotheca bibliographica hard to use. His exclusion of articles in journals denies the purpose and spirit of bibliography. If bibliographical collections are to guide seekers after knowledge to information, then a bibliographer cannot justify the deliberate neglect of materials which do not happen to be in a particular physical condition. The best bibliography of the Tuamotus may be, let us say, in a journal article. The bibliographer who is aware of it and omits it merely because it is a journal article is guilty of a serious fault. We can pardon him for not finding it, but we cannot pardon him for rejecting it. We must not confuse the situation by making such an excuse as "avoiding the burden of inconsequential references." Petzholdt deliberately omitted journal articles and therefore does not serve the man who comes to his book as fully as he might have served him. Petzholdt's inclusion of books dealing with the invention, history, and practice of printing stretches the definition of his purpose, but custom is on his side and we shall not protest unduly. Lists of books issued by a famous publisher are of course within the scope of the Bibliotheca bibliographica.

A serious criticism of Petzholdt's plan concerns the inclusion of bibliographies, which (although pertinent) can be easily found and might have been dealt with briefly. The bibliography of individuals "Personale Literatur," (pp. 156-272) is a branch of bibliography and must therefore be included. Nevertheless, few bibliographies are more easily found than lists of an author's works. The great biobibliographical dictionaries from Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis of 1545 down to the various editions of the Biographie universelle and the Nouvelle biographie universelle contain this information. Biographies, wherever published, ordinarily contain bibliographies of the books written by the author in question. There are excellent indexes of these biographies. Antoine Teissier had added, in his Catalogus and Auctuarium, some two thousand biographies to Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. E. M. Oettinger had just published two editions of the Bibliographie bibliographique universelle,[150] which is still a very convenient and full list of biographies. Any good edition of a classical text is almost certain to contain bibliographical information, and scarcely needs to be cited in a bibliography of bibliographies.[151] He could have written an entirely adequate bibliography of bibliographies of individuals in much less than a hundred and sixteen pages. He might, for example, have omitted the bibliography of R. Salomo b. Abraham b. Adereth (p. 166)—I cite the first name in his list—that is found in a biography of this worthy and the bibliography of Martial (p. 226) that is found in an edition of his works. Such omissions would not have impaired his book and would have substantially reduced its bulk.

This section devoted to bibliographies of individual authors exhibits some faults typical of Petzholdt's plan. A subdivision (pp. 156-166) without any heading begins the section and is terminated by three asterisks in the middle of the page. Although it is set off typographically, the lack of a heading makes it difficult to perceive that we have in it a list of the very important biobibliographical dictionaries of religious orders and learned academies. There is no indication of this category in the table of contents and the names of the religious orders and the academies do not appear in the index. I do not see how one can readily find a biobibliographical dictionary of the Dominicans or the Jesuits in this arrangement. Not all of us can bring to mind immediately the names Quétif and De Backer that are needed to find the references. In his list of individual bibliographies Petzholdt goes so far as to include books (not bibliographies, be it noticed) dealing with such artists as Jost Ammann, Rembrandt, and Velasquez. He could have found another place for books about famous publishers named Aldus and should probably have made a special place for dictionaries of homonyms.[152] He follows this section of individual bibliographies with a list of books containing portraits ("Ikonographische Literatur," pp. 273-279). Its pertinence to a bibliography of bibliographies seems debatable to me.

Petzholdt's execution of his plan leaves something to be desired. He provides the obviously necessary table of contents, but fails to include in it many subdivisions that he expresses by means of headings or typographical devices or only implies by the arrangement of titles. Experience teaches a reader that Petzholdt begins a section with general works, often a modern annual bibliography, proceeds through a chronological list, and concludes with specialized antiquarian catalogues. This is an altogether logical order. Subdivisions of a large category follow the general section. After the general bibliography of medicine, for example, Petzholdt continues with bibliographies of pathology and therapeutics (pp. 597-600). This arrangement makes necessary a full record of the subdivisions in an index, but Petzholdt's index is only an author index. There are occasional failures to include authors' names in the index. We must judge these flaws kindly, for all men are fallible, and bibliographers are no exception to the rule.

Writers of bibliographies of bibliographies have usually preferred a classification according to subjects to an alphabetical arrangement of titles with subject indexes. Joris Vorstius defends their preference eloquently and with good arguments.[153] There is, however, something to be said against it. Convenient as a classified bibliography is as first issued, it cannot be easily revised or enlarged.[154] When library cataloguers adopt new methods, when new categories are set up in science, theology, law, and literary history, a classified bibliography of bibliographies becomes difficult to use.

In the history of bibliographies of bibliographies we can look back to at least three occasions when men discarded the classified bibliographies made by their predecessors. Men of the seventeenth century seem to have made little use of Gesner's Pandectae, men of the eighteenth century found as little use for the difficult classification employed in Labbé's and Teissier's books, and few of us can use Petzholdt's categories easily. The lesson is that each age must create its own bibliography of bibliographies.

Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is a classified bibliography that shows signs of obsolescence. The organization of knowledge and the categories that seemed suitable to Julius Petzholdt in 1866 are often confusing rather than helpful today. Keenly interested as he was in the theory of classification, no one was more competent than he to select the right headings. But a modern scholar who consults the Bibliotheca bibliographica must put himself in the place of a man who lived almost a century ago. For example, he must remember that Hungary was associated politically with Austria and Austrian cataloguers and dealers listed and sold Hungarian books. Consequently, Petzholdt cites (pp. 320-321) bibliographies of Hungarian books along with bibliographies of German books and makes no entry in the table of contents for Hungarian bibliographies. I do not say that he was wrong, but I do say that a modern reader must remember the political situation of 1866 to use Petzholdt's book.

Petzholdt's adoption of a classified arrangement required him to be very careful in assigning books to categories and to provide abundant cross-references. As we have seen, his subdivisions of categories are not clearly marked and may escape the notice of an experienced user of bibliographies. For example, a bibliography of "Programme" (learned essays issued with the annual reports of German secondary schools) appears (p. 293) properly enough among the bibliographies of German and Swiss publications but few will find it. A few pages later (pp. 298-299) Petzholdt lists bibliographies of German and Swiss journals. Since these two categories are not named in the table of contents or the index, the information is almost completely buried. "Prognostica" or prophecies of future events—a genre of writings that was very popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance—gave Petzholdt trouble. Some of these are listed as pseudo-philosophy (see p. 467: Heuschling), and others are perhaps more appropriately found with almanacs ("Calenderliteratur," pp. 539-540). A bibliography of Swedish almanacs (p. 399) appears in the section for Swedish literature without a cross-reference to or from the bibliography of almanacs. "Loosbücher" or books telling how to interpret omens are in the section for psychology (p. 467), and this is a heading under "Philosophische Litteratur." Examples are wearisome, and I shall give no more.

A classified bibliography must have an exhaustive table of contents, a full index of authors, and an adequate alphabetical subject index. Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is probably as carefully made as any such book can be made, but its table of contents is a scanty recapitulation of the very largest headings, its index of authors is incomplete, and a subject index is lacking. I have already expressed sincere admiration for the book and feel all the more keenly the presence of these defects.

Petzholdt's frequent disparaging remarks show that he did not esteem highly the bibliographical achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need not defend them here, but we must recognize that his low opinion of them explains many omissions of early bibliographies in his own work. His admirable survey of books that a scholar would find useful in 1866 gives no adequate account of the historical development of bibliography or of the wealth of bibliographical work before 1750. His very convenient chronological arrangement of titles in the various categories does often suggest the historical development and at times his choice of older books is generous.

Petzholdt has not compared his accounts of some fields with easily available bibliographies and therefore fails to include obviously important books. In the field of national bibliographies, Petzholdt chose to pass over many older bibliographies that seemed to him to be no longer useful. Both the Latin and the German editions of Heinrich Pantaleon's rare sixteenth-century German biobibliography could perhaps be dispensed with, and I shall not object to his omission of them.[155] I think he should not have passed over without mention Henning Witte's biobibliographical dictionaries, which are still useful sources of information about obscure seventeenth century writers. To be sure, Witte's Repertorium biblicum is cited (p. 286), but this is the least useful of Witte's books. Petzholdt's account of German regional biobibliographies (pp. 299-322) can only be called superficial. In Robert F. Arnold, Allgemeine Bücherkunde zur neueren deutschen Literaturgeschichte,[156] which I have compared only for the first page (the entries extending from Aargau through Bayern), I find twelve books published before 1866 that Petzholdt does not name. If we turn to works of larger scope, one cannot easily find a reason for omitting D'Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale. First published in 1697, improved and enlarged in later editions, and brought up to date by J. T. Zenker's continuation of 1846-1861, it remains the only general account of Oriental studies for its period. Petzholdt neglects to mention the seventeenth-century biobibliographies of Italian and French Orientalists compiled by Paul Colomies and deemed worthy of revision by no less a scholar than J. C. Wolf. With all its faults Namur's Bibliographie could have helped Petzholdt to fill such gaps.

Petzholdt lavishes labor and space on antiquarian catalogues. He cites them in closely printed pages in double columns at the end of every major subject division and obviously intends the reader to regard them as subject bibliographies. Some antiquarian catalogues are very valuable and others are worthless for this purpose. We have no adequate appraisal of them except these lists by Petzholdt and for this reason he deserves high praise. In fields where no good bibliography is available we are glad to use these catalogues, even though the books have been dispersed. When institutions have purchased the collections en bloc, the catalogues have a special importance because the books can still be found with little difficulty. Kuczynski and Knaake are such well-known guides to the poorly-recorded books of the Reformation that they are ordinarily cited simply by the authors' names.[157] The sale catalogues of the libraries of K. W. L. Heyse, K. H. G. Meusebach, and Viktor Manheimer are indispensable aids in the almost uncharted sea of German seventeenth-century literature.[158] Bibliographers and bibliophiles use antiquarian and sale catalogues in tracing the history of particular copies of famous rarities.[159] A student of the Dance of Death consults the Susan Minns catalogue,[160] and Mario Praz compiled a bibliography of emblem books almost exclusively from antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries.[161] Indispensable, then, as these catalogues often are, the compiler of a list should be alert to reject those of little value. Petzholdt should not have devoted seven pages (pp. 691-696) to antiquarian catalogues of classical Latin and Greek authors. Excellent bibliographies were available and a highly selective list of catalogues would have been sufficient. He could surely have omitted a catalogue (p. 696) of twenty pages issued by E. Weingart in 1864 that contains chiefly ordinary German books. The choice of catalogues for permanent record in a bibliography of bibliographies calls for the judgment and experience that Petzholdt had and did not use.

The list of catalogues (pp. 98-101) appended to the general bibliographies is perhaps the most unfortunate exhibit of Petzholdt's selections. His wide experience in this field should have told him the right catalogues to cite. He offers us a strange hodgepodge consisting of one early eighteenth-century catalogue (the Duboisiana), a handbook of bibliography, several nineteenth-century catalogues of private libraries, and a few dealers' catalogues. The Duboisiana, Michael Denis's Einleitung in die Bücherkunde, and Part II of the Libri catalogue (1861) are not hard to justify, but the remaining titles appear to be a random selection. Inasmuch as he devotes almost one quarter of the space to a full-length citation of a part of the Libri catalogue, he should have taken the trouble to find the other parts. Although Petzholdt's list of catalogues interesting to bibliographers has the merit of being more international in scope than most of his lists for special disciplines, he overlooked many large and admirable polymathic catalogues. He does not mention the Thott and Heber catalogues or the Firmiana, to name no others.

Petzholdt's abundant descriptive and critical comments ensure the Bibliotheca bibliographica of a permanent place on every bibliographer's desk. He expresses an extensive analysis and usually accurate opinion about almost every book that he cites. It did not occur to him to tell the reader the number of titles in these books, but bibliographers have been slow to realize the value of this detail.

There are, however, some qualifications of any praise of Petzholdt's comments. His unsympathetic feeling for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bibliographers leads him to dismiss (p. 7) Teissier's bibliographies of bibliographies with "Virtually worthless today (Gegenwärtig so gut wie werthlos)." His condemnation of Raffaelle Soprani's Genoese biobibliography (pp. 360-361) and Leo Allacci's Apes Urbanae (p. 362) for listing authors by their first names can be properly called naive. In describing Agostino Oldoini's similar book for Perugia (p. 363), he says that this was the usual procedure in the seventeenth century and involved only the inconvenience of consulting an index of last names. These Renaissance bibliographers had inherited this procedure from medieval scholars who knew men by their Christian names and used other designations only when a differentiation of individuals was necessary. Even today a bibliography arranged in this fashion can prove to be a useful tool. The medieval mathematician Richard Suisset, whose last name occurs in various spellings, can be easily tracked down by use of his Christian name. He is not easy to find in a modern book unless one remembers the particular spelling of his name that the author prefers.

Petzholdt passes some very severe judgments on some books that were once highly esteemed and on some that are unique surveys of a particular field. Whatever defects such books may have, they should not be damned hastily and completely. For example, Petzholdt's rejection (p. 160) of Johannes Tritheim's catalogue of Carmelite writers as "bibliographically completely worthless (Bibliographisch ganz ohne Werth)" is far too harsh. In 1576, after it had circulated in manuscript for almost a century, the Carmelites believed it deserved to be printed. Three more editions (1596, 1624, and 1643), all of which Petzholdt cites, came out during the next seventy years. Men obviously found it useful, and it is the basis of the modern Carmelite bibliography. The remark "Of altogether inferior bibliographical value (Bibliographisch von ganz untergeordnetem Werthe)" is even more unjust to Theodore Petreius's Carthusian bibliography (p. 161). However bad it may be, Petzholdt knew no other Carthusian bibliography. The only bibliography of a field may be incomplete, inaccurate, or badly arranged and it may even have all these defects, but it cannot be altogether worthless. Paul Lehmann, a competent authority in medieval bibliography and literary history, mentions Petreius and some other early writers of biobibliographies of religious orders and says that scarcely one of these writers has been superseded, although details in their work may need correction.[162]

Petzholdt's critical remarks on bibliographies written in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century are very full and informative. Rarely does he err as badly as he does in a comment on Emil Weller's Annalen. This partial revision of G. W. Panzer, Annalen der deutschen National-Literatur (1792-1805) is, like the original work, still valuable for German publications between 1500 and 1525. Weller's notes on books that he had seen contain no great number of serious mistakes. Nevertheless, Petzholdt says (p. 708): "A book that deserves very much to be noticed, although it by no means lacks bibliographical defects and [shows] hastiness and carelessness. It owes its great value to the wealth of the collections that the compiler was able to use." Weller was as difficult in his manners as Magliabecchi, Fontanini, and other bibliographers have been on occasion and had spoken unkindly of Petzholdt, but he did not deserve such a patronizing slur.

Petzholdt's self-assurance carries him to the length of condemning books that he has not seen. Of a Catalogo di commedie italiane published in 1776 he says: "It is said to be an extremely rare pamphlet that contains all the Italian comedies arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors' names. The rarity of the pamphlet seems to be greater than its bibliographical value."[163] As he indicates by an asterisk, he has not seen the Catalogo. Any complete or relatively complete account of Italian comedies is obviously a useful book.

All that I have said in qualification of Petzholdt's merits does not diminish my admiration for him and his book. The Bibliotheca bibliographica deserves a close and critical reading and only a great book survives such study. It is a masterpiece of modern bibliography.

I turn now to a smaller book by another famous bibliographer. It is one of his minor efforts and will not detain us long. Joseph Sabin (1821-1881), a bibliographer of Americana, found John Power's little Handy-Book about Books (London, 1870) very unsatisfactory. Although Power intended only to offer a brief selective list of books useful to a bibliographer or bibliophile, Sabin rejected it and wrote a much larger list. He entitled it Bibliography of Bibliography, or a handy book about books which relate to books, being an alphabetical catalogue of the most important works descriptive of the literature of Great Britain and America, and more than a few relative to France and Germany (1877). It names perhaps twelve hundred titles and includes a few bibliographies printed as parts of non-bibliographical works and a few journal articles. The word "literature" in the title means publications in any field of learning and not merely belles lettres. Since Sabin provides neither a table of contents (his strictly alphabetical arrangement did not call for one) nor a subject index, one must read his book from cover to cover to find what it contains or to discover a particular subject bibliography. His occasional brief critical comments are often drawn from Petzholdt. As his subtitle indicates, he has included many books that are not bibliographies. Some he has carried over from Power's list that he has included in its entirety, although with misgivings, and some he has added on his own responsibility. Beloe's Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books contains much bibliographical information, but can hardly be called a bibliography. Bonnardot's treatises on repairing bindings, Botford's and Clarke's books about libraries, and Constantin's treatise on library economy are books about books in the modern sense of the term. Like most writers of a bibliography of bibliographies, Sabin includes works dealing with the history of printing.

In his title Sabin announces an intention of naming chiefly bibliographies written by British and American scholars or dealing with British and American subjects. Since he was an agent and bookdealer specializing in Americana and the author of a bibliography in that field, his account of bibliographies of Americana is naturally adequate. It begins with Bishop White Kennett's Bibliothecae Americanae Primordia (1713) and extends through later standard works down to the antiquarian catalogues of such dealers as Frederik Muller, Otto Rich, and Henry Stevens in Sabin's own day. His selection of strictly British bibliographies is more cursory. Although he had Petzholdt's description before him, he reports John Bale's sixteenth century biobibliographies inaccurately. He passes over John Pits's Renaissance account of British authors without mention. Thomas Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, which was still a very valuable reference work when Sabin was writing, either was so rare that it escaped his notice or seemed, although wrongly, to have been replaced. Sabin is obviously not much interested in British biobibliographies. His account of bibliographies in special fields is fairly satisfactory. He gives many useful references to British and American catalogues of private libraries, and his comments on them are often helpful. His arrangement of these titles is extremely clumsy. I cite the catchwords under which Sabin lists a few of these catalogues: Askew, Bibliotheca Heberiana (he neglects to mention the thirteenth part), Bibliotheca Smithiana, Catalogue of Books ... in the Collection of Colonel Joseph Aspinwall, and Crevenna. These are references now to the collector's name and now to the first word in the title. The Catalogue of the Valuable Library of Stanesby Alchorne, Esq. is under the compiler's name, T. F. Dibdin. There are no cross-references and the arrangement is confusing. Sabin's interest in T. F. Dibdin led him to cite an autobiography, a book that cannot be called a bibliography.

Sabin promises to give "more than a few" bibliographies relative to France and Germany, but does not make clear how he chooses them. He passes over Johannes Tritheim and Conrad Gesner without mention and seems to know little about other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bibliographies. His wide acquaintance with Americana leads him to mention Antonio León Pinelo's Epitome of 1620, perhaps the first important bibliography of Americana. On the whole, his choice of eighteenth century bibliographies is judicious. He cites the encyclopedic Georgi and such standard catalogues of rare books as Clement and Freytag, although he does not know the last and largest edition of Johannes Vogt, Catalogus librorum rariorum. He makes a good selection of eighteenth-century subject bibliographies, which were for the most part still valuable reference works in the 1870's. History is sufficiently represented by Lenglet du Fresnoy and Meusel's edition of Struve. Cave, Du Pin, and Walch are the right books to recommend to a theologian. As far as he goes, Sabin is generally successful in naming histories, which are virtually bibliographies, of national literatures, but J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca mediae et infimae latinitatis and J. C. Wolf, Bibliotheca hebraea are lacking. He mentions only a few regional biobibliographies and seems to have had no plan in selecting them. I have examined only his references to Italian examples of this genre, but these are well-known and easily found. In other fields than history and literature he has usually chosen wisely. He knows Pritzel's botanical bibliography and Van der Linden's medical bibliography. He has a blind eye for bibliographies of the religious orders. As we might expect, De Backer's Jesuit bibliography is present, but it is surprising to see no mention of Wadding's account of the Franciscans, who had a large share in the cultural development of the Spanish colonies in America, or Quétif and Echard's biobibliographical dictionary of the Dominicans. In brief, Sabin's book is probably as good a book as can be written in one hundred and fifty pages. A classified and an alphabetical index of subjects would have vastly increased its usefulness. Had he made them, he would have perceived and filled the gaps.

Sabin's purpose in writing A Bibliography of Bibliographies remains somewhat mysterious. I cannot understand how he failed to see the necessity of making indexes. How, for example, is the user to discover the bibliographies of precocious children, mnemonics, and chess in F. Cancellieri, Dissertazione intorno agli uomini dotati ad [read ed] a quelli divenuti smemorati, colle biblioteche degli scrittori sopra gli eruditi precoci, la memoria artificiale ed il giuoco degli scacchi (pp. xxviii-xxix) without a subject index? We can commend Sabin for enlarging Power's dilettante list into a reference work. We can commend his care in citing books and his industry and judgment in choosing them, but accuracy, industry, and learning are not the only virtues required of a bibliographer. A bibliographer must be a practical man who sees how his book will be used.

Sabin's book has remained almost unknown, but the next book to be discussed has an unenviable reputation. No one has a kind word for Léon Vallée, Bibliographie des bibliographies (1883-1887), but in damning it few have effectively supported their opinions. It is not a good book, but it has perhaps been judged too severely. As an example of a sweeping and unsupported condemnation I cite what A. G. S. Josephson wrote in 1901:

This work is of comparatively slight value in spite of the vast material that it contains. It is very uncritical and gives in most cases no hint as to the whereabouts of bibliographical materials in the books referred to. The alphabetical arrangement by authors, even with the subject index, makes the work difficult to consult. [It may] be a useful basis for a more scholarly work.[164]

This is not only Josephson's judgment but also the judgment that bibliographers have generally passed on Vallée. Reviewers contemporary with Vallée are perhaps somewhat more favorable in their estimates, but make their dissatisfaction altogether plain. In an article suggested by Josephson's bibliography in which this criticism appears, Vilhelm Grundtvig expressed an equally condemnatory opinion about Vallée's book.[165] He declares that only Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica and Henri Stein's Manuel (which is yet to be mentioned) deserve mention among bibliographies of bibliographies. This means passing over Labbé, Teissier, and Peignot, who were very respectable workers indeed. He goes on to say that Vallée's book does not even deserve review and is altogether unworthy of a member of the staff of the greatest library in the world. Theodore Besterman's judgment (I, p. x) is equally severe:

It is difficult to say much in praise of this compilation, which has, indeed, been universally condemned. Its general plan is basically wrong, and it contains far too many irrelevancies, mistakes, omissions, and second-hand descriptions. To indicate the general standard of accuracy maintained by Vallée, it is perhaps enough to say that, although a large part of his volume was taken bodily from Petzholdt, that scholar's name is spelt incorrectly throughout the entries under his name.

Vallée's book is unsatisfactory, but I cannot listen to this chorus without examining the criticisms briefly. Josephson's damning notice signifies very little. As far as such rough tests as I have used can show, Vallée does not include an unreasonable proportion of unsuitable titles. I have examined the first entry on page 25, and each succeeding twenty-fifth page without finding an instance of a non-bibliographical title. If Josephson means that Vallée gives many unnecessary references, I should agree with him. Vallée should not choose to cite Thomas Stapleton's biography of Sir Thomas More (p. 519, No. 6048) because it contains bibliographical information or to give hundreds of similar references. I cannot however agree with Josephson's remark that Vallée fails to indicate where this bibliographical information appears in the books cited. It seems altogether unnecessary to cite a bibliography found in a biography, an edition of a classical Latin or Greek author, or a general treatise on some subject, but when Vallée cites it, as he does in imitation of Petzholdt with distressing frequency, he ordinarily gives reference to pages. I cannot see that an alphabetical arrangement according to authors with a subject index is very much more difficult to use than an alphabetical or classified arrangement according to subjects with an author index, but in this opinion I stand alone against general bibliographical practice and shall say no more here. In any event, Vallée's choice of arrangement seems a comparatively minor fault, when compared with Petzholdt's and Stein's choice of a classified arrangement with altogether unsatisfactory subject indexes and hastily-made author indexes. I speak in Vallée's behalf partly because of Josephson's arrangement of a bibliography to be mentioned at the end of this essay. Josephson chose to arrange the titles in chronological order without providing either an author or a subject index. No one has ever recommended such an arrangement.

I shall let Vallée's book speak for itself. Like the bibliographers who immediately preceded and followed him, Vallée struck out for himself and gave little heed to earlier work. This appears even in his references to bibliographers of bibliographies. In an "Avertissement" he recognizes only three predecessors: Tonnelli in 1782, Petzholdt in 1866, and Sabin in 1872 [the date is wrong]. This is a bad start. Francesco Tonnelli's book[166] is a worthless mixture of a biobibliographical dictionary and a bibliographical handbook. The biobibliographical information is a disorderly collection of notes, referring chiefly, but by no means exclusively, to men whose names begin with the first letters of the alphabet. The bibliographical information is a miscellany of facts about libraries. Tonnelli, who has occasionally buried bibliographies in this rubbish heap, had no intention of writing a bibliography of bibliographies. I cannot guess what use Vallée made of Tonnelli's queer book. If he actually consulted it, he should have objected to its disorderliness and its lack of materials for his needs. Petzholdt's book is, as Vallée says, a classified bibliography of bibliographies made by a competent scholar. It is regrettable that he did not fully accept it as his model. He gives the wrong date for Sabin's book, which began to appear serially in 1875 and was published in 1877. He does not make it clear that he has seen and used it.

If we turn to Vallée's references to the works mentioned in this essay, we find nothing to encourage us. He puts Peignot's Répertoire, Teissier's edition of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, and Labbé's first edition in the Novae bibliothecae specimen[167] of 1653 in a section entitled "Bibliographies générales." In other words, he does not consider them to be bibliographies of bibliographies. I cannot see that he cites Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum at all. Namur's Bibliographie is in a section entitled "Bibliologie" (p. 621) with a mistake in its title. All this indicates, I am afraid, that Vallée did not recognize a bibliography of bibliographies when he saw it. This grievous fault is all the more grievous because he emphasizes in his preface the importance of careful classification.

Vallée is guilty of many more faults. He includes titles that do not belong in a bibliography of bibliographies.[168] As I have already said, their number does not seem to me to be very large and many of them lie on the fringes of bibliography. His descriptions and entries are incomplete and inaccurate.[169] He cites bibliographies that can be easily found and scarcely need mention.[170] He fails to analyze the long subject entries in his index.[171] He makes serious errors in names, dates, titles, and places of publications and is careless about editions and the continuations of works that spread over several years. In his supplement of 1887, he fails to repair the faults that reviewers had pointed out. More serious than anything in this long list of faults is, in my opinion, his rash attempt to survey all bibliographies anew with little or no regard for his predecessors.

Two things must be said in reduction of this severe judgment on Vallée. He is the first compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies to base his work on the books in a particular library and to indicate, although incompletely and inaccurately, what he has seen there. He has included many references to bibliographical sections in non-bibliographical books. Although these and other references of slight value are numerous, he has accumulated a very large number of bibliographies. Almost everyone will find something useful in Vallée's book. The first volume contains 6894 titles, and the supplement raises the total to 10,246. In a savage criticism[172] Henri Stein declared that perhaps 2500 titles should have been omitted and 3000 should be added. This amounts to saying that Vallée collected about three-quarters of the bibliographies he should have found. I cannot vouch for the correctness of these estimates but they may suggest what the book is worth. It is regrettable that Henri Stein, to whom we now turn, did not give the additional titles as a supplement instead of writing a new bibliography of bibliographies.

In the Manuel de bibliographie générale (1897) Henri Stein (b. 1862), a member of the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale, offered the world a new bibliography of bibliographies. He calls it nothing less than a summary of all bibliographies published before 1897,[173] but seems at times to be content to supplement Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. He falls far short of completeness and does not make his intention entirely clear. Although the task that he undertook is beyond any man's strength, his treatment of his colleague Vallée does not awaken sympathy for him.

Stein yields to the same temptation to which his predecessors had succumbed. He includes material of little pertinence to a bibliography of bibliographies. For example, he could have omitted a long list (pp. 555-636) of places where books were printed before 1800 and the names of the printers. This information is very useful to a historian of printing, but has no proper place in Stein's book. His list of indexes to journals is useful but is also not altogether pertinent.[174] His long list of printed catalogues of public libraries, a list which is limited almost exclusively to rather recent publications, is something of a luxury.[175] Neither logic nor custom justifies an objection to the inclusion of bibliographies of individual authors, but Stein could have reduced their number without loss.[176]

Stein based his classification on Petzholdt's book but introduced modifications of his own. As Vilhelm Grundtvig correctly says, the classification is "at times nothing less than amazing, for example, hippology is under 'sciences pédagogiques' [and] dentistry under 'medicine interne.'"[177] Although he provides a table of contents and an alphabetical subject index, he has not made his book easy to use. There is no index of authors' names.

The Manuel does not contain all the available bibliographies or even a satisfactory collection of the best ones. Stein's surveys of universal and national bibliographies are inadequate and so, too, are the sections dealing with philosophy, chemistry, education, sport, and linguistics.[178] He shows very little interest in bibliographies printed before 1800. He does not carry out systematically or successfully an announced intention of expressing critical judgments.[179] Finally, he is inaccurate in details.[180]

This recital seems to leave little to be said in Stein's favor, but no bibliographer who has made a serious effort to write a useful book has ever failed to be helpful. Any list of 5500 bibliographies—the figure is Besterman's—will contain titles and information worth noting and remembering. He calls attention to books that other men have not seen or have neglected to cite. For example, I have not seen "Ahm. Zeki-Bey, Elmevsonat (Boulak, 1904)," which he describes (p. 264) as a bibliography of Arabic encyclopedias, mentioned elsewhere. We owe to him the interesting and important fact that the unpublished manuscript of Mazzuchelli's enormous work, Gli scrittori d'Italia, is in the Vatican Library.[181] He adds many titles to those cited by Petzholdt and Vallée. I lay aside the Manuel with the regret that Stein's zeal has given us a less useful book than we might have hoped for. Had he named, as I have suggested, the three thousand bibliographies lacking in Vallée and had he continued the collection from Vallée's supplement of 1887 to his own publication in 1897, he would have given us an invaluable book. What we have is one more demonstration of the unwillingness of bibliographers in his century to join hands with their predecessors and contemporaries.

Chapter V
Bibliographies of Bibliographies as Periodical and Cooperative Enterprises

In the historical development of bibliographies of bibliographies two aspects become especially prominent after 1900. Periodical surveys become a characteristic form of publication and cooperation in the making of bibliographies becomes more frequent or is at least more frequently called for. I shall speak only briefly about periodical publications because they aim at completeness, if they make such an effort at all, only for annual or other limited periods of time. Julius Petzholdt published lists of bibliographies that came to his attention around the middle of the nineteenth century in the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswissenschaft. Editors of other journals for bibliography, library science, the book trade, and related fields have published similar lists and have in some instances endeavored more or less successfully to convert them into surveys of current bibliographies of current bibliographical publications. A rapid growth of periodical bibliographies of special fields is characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. At the end of the century bibliographers advanced to the stage of compiling annual bibliographies of bibliographies. Such periodical surveys had long been established in fields like theology and classical literature and were now somewhat tardily created for bibliography itself.

The first annual survey of current bibliographical publications seems to be the Bibliographia bibliographica, which appeared in six volumes between 1898 and 1903. Librarians inspired and guided this cooperative enterprise. The list, which includes bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works, is arranged according to the decimal system of classification and was no doubt handicapped by this fact. Since the editors offer a brief outline of the decimal classification in place of a table of contents and provide no alphabetical index of subjects, the Bibliographia bibliographica is not easy to use. The lack of an author index was remedied by the publication of an index for the first two volumes that appeared at the end of the second volume. The Bibliographia bibliographica aroused very little interest among librarians and bibliographers. I have found no reviews of it in the contemporary journals for bibliography and library science. Harvard University Library purchased only the first two issues and these were so little used that, after the lapse of fifty years, they are still unbound.

A second annual survey of the current output of bibliographies is the Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens, edited by Adalbert Hortzschansky from 1905 to 1925 with an interruption of eight years from 1913 to 1921. This supplement to the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen had a longer and more successful life than its predecessor. It surveyed all publications that fell within the field of the journal and therefore included much more than the bibliography of bibliographies. In 1926 it became an independent publication with a slightly different title but with no change in the subjects reported upon. This Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens continued to be issued down to the outbreak of war in 1939. An enterprise of somewhat similar scope, the Literarisches Beiblatt der Zeitschrift (later: zum Jahrbuch) des deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schrifttum began to appear in 1924 and continued to 1939. Since these annual surveys include more than the bibliography of bibliographies, I shall not discuss them further.

Three reviews of contemporary bibliographical work have appeared during the last twenty-five years. One of them is limited to bibliographies of a particular kind, and the other two are more or less complete periodical surveys of bibliographical writings. I mention them here as the last examples of the development of periodical bibliographies of bibliographies and as a means by which one can estimate the task of any modern compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies. The first of these, the Index bibliographicus, which first appeared in 1925, offers an interesting example of specialization within the field of bibliographies of bibliographies. The Index bibliographicus is general in scope but cites only bibliographies of bibliographies that appear as current serial publications. In the six years between its first appearance in 1925 and its republication in enlarged and improved form in 1931 the number of currently appearing serial bibliographies rose from 1025 to 1900. Some of these had been overlooked in 1925, but many of the additions concerned bibliographies of bibliographies that had been established during the six years between the two editions. The Index bibliographicus, which was compiled with the assistance of the League of Nations, assumed a more definitely international and cooperative aspect when Joris Vorstius joined Marcel Godet as editor.[182] A third edition of the Index made by Theodore Besterman in 1952 is still larger than either of its predecessors.

The Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie, which flourished from 1930 to 1940 under the editorship of Joris Vorstius, enables us to survey quickly the current annual production of bibliographies. Critical comments attached to the titles make it one of the most readable bibliographies of bibliographies. Like caviar, the genre is digestible only by those who have acquired a taste for it. The organization of the Internationaler Jahresbericht is skillful, and the comments are judicious and instructive. Since Vorstius was editor of the previously mentioned Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens as well as the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, he saw a very large number of bibliographies. He was compelled to hold very carefully to the definitions of his closely related and very similar tasks. The Internationaler Jahresbericht of course lists only bibliographies.

The H. W. Wilson Co. has published the most comprehensive of all periodical surveys of bibliography. Starting in 1938, the quarterly issues are cumulated in annual volumes and these are, in turn, cumulated in volumes for periods of variable length. A cumulation of the bibliographies published in the years between 1937 and 1942 appeared in 1945, and a second cumulation for the years 1943-1946 appeared in 1948. This is the first virtually complete account of current bibliographical production, and the picture is amazing. Between 1937 and 1942 some fifty thousand bibliographies were published. The editors of the Bibliographic Index have classified them in almost ten thousand categories.

The foregoing discussion of these annual or otherwise chronologically limited surveys of bibliography is incidental to the main historical purpose of this essay. Such surveys illustrate very effectively an emphasis which has become characteristic of much modern bibliographical work, and especially of bibliographies of bibliographies, since Gabriel Peignot's book of 1812. Being concerned solely with the current production of bibliographies, they have obviously had no occasion to deal historically with bibliographies or to cite bibliographies published before the limits that they set for themselves. This emphasis on currently useful bibliographical tools goes hand in hand with the cooperative aspect of making bibliographies that I shall stress in this chapter. Already in his Répertoire of 1812 Gabriel Peignot had reviewed eighteenth-century bibliography with occasional citations of earlier works that had not been superseded. In 1866 Julius Petzholdt had dealt somewhat more generously than Peignot with Renaissance and seventeenth-century bibliographies, but had scarcely included enough of them to give a picture satisfactory to a historian. Like these predecessors, Joseph Sabin, Léon Vallée, and Henri Stein had shown a marked preference for contemporary works. The uses which bibliographies of bibliographies ordinarily serve explain this preference and make it a reasonable one.

The history of mass-production methods in the making of bibliographies has not yet been written. I conjecture that it begins with bibliographies produced more than a century ago by the German publisher Wilhelm Engelmann. His firm continued and revised some bibliographies established by Johann Samuel Ersch (1766-1828), whose scholarly and bibliographical activity began in the eighteenth century. It is not entirely clear whether Ersch himself had already adopted something like mass-production methods. However this may be, the titles and the nature of many bibliographies produced by T. C. F. Enslin (1787-1851) and Wilhelm Engelmann (1808-1878), who made new editions of some of Enslin's bibliographies as well as many of his own, virtually imply such methods. Information about the making of these bibliographies and those of F. A. Wilhelm Müldener (1830-1900), who seems to have worked in the same way, is difficult to obtain.[183] The compilation and publication of bibliographies by printers and publishers rather than scholars has been continued by such American firms as the Library Bureau (now no longer in existence), R. R. Bowker & Co., and H. W. Wilson Co. These firms have actively supported the making of bibliographies in this country for more than two generations.[184]

An admirable essay, Some Aspects of Bibliography (1900), by John Ferguson (d. 1916) suggests the cooperative aspect that is characteristic of bibliographical studies in the last two generations. Although it is not a full-length bibliography of bibliographies, it reviews the kinds of bibliographies that have been made and appeals to scholars to compile the bibliographies necessary to satisfy the most obvious needs. Ferguson's modest list of some four hundred bibliographies is intended to serve two purposes. It is an effort to show the great variety of bibliographies that have been made and it offers a supplement to Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. Ferguson's clear and very instructive classification of bibliographies is as follows: bibliographies according to (1) date; (2) place; (3) printer; (4) material;[185] (5) type;[186] (6) size;[187] (7) illustrations; (8) language; (9) subject; (10) groups of authors;[188] (11) individuals; (12) single books;[189] (13) anonymous books;[190] (14) suppressed books;[191] (15) rare books; (16) general bibliographies.

Some categories of bibliographies might be added to this list. For example, he probably includes bibliographies of private presses in (3). He has no good place for bibliographies of translations, which do not fit easily in the ninth category of bibliographies according to subjects. Nor is there a convenient place for bibliographies of belles lettres according to genres like the novel, the essay, or the book review.

The first bibliography of bibliographies published in the twentieth century is A Register of National Bibliography with a selection of the chief bibliographical books and articles printed in other countries (3 v., 1905-1912) by W. P. Courtney (1845-1913). It is also the first effort of this sort to be made by an Englishman. Like the American Sabin, Courtney limits the bibliographies published in languages other than English to a selection. In the course of twenty years Courtney had accumulated a great many references and four years of work in preparation of the Register greatly increased the number. He acknowledges the assistance of G. L. Apperson, who later published a useful collection of English proverbs, and Robert A. Peddie, who wrote a very large subject bibliography. He has taken references from Henri Stein's Manuel, especially references in the Slavic languages.

He found that the vast number of bibliographies in print made necessary some limitations on the scope of his work. He excludes sale catalogues (although a few are cited), catalogues of manuscripts, and lists of maps and charts. Probably few will quarrel with his decision. He also omits many headings in the bibliography of geology, India, and other unspecified large fields. Here it would be helpful to know more accurately what these omissions were.

Courtney's Register lists some 30,000 titles in a main and two supplementary alphabets. The rapid growth of the material as he proceeded with his work explains this inconvenient division. The very numerous citations of bibliographies in non-bibliographical works contribute to this large figure. I cannot estimate closely the number of small headings, which run into the thousands. The bulk of the Register and the ease with which it can be used make it valuable. As examples of the wealth of information in it, I cite his references to thirteen bibliographies of bacteriology, seventeen bibliographies of hymns, nine bibliographies of insanity, and three bibliographies of swimming. One will rarely leave the Register empty-handed.

Courtney could have greatly reduced the size of his book without a sacrifice of convenience or the loss of significant references. His alphabetical arrangement makes it unnecessary to repeat the headings in the index. He could have profitably used the space saved to add a descriptive word that would differentiate the various works by one author. The dozen references to J. C. Pilling, who wrote bibliographies of American Indian languages, might, for example, have been identified by appropriate adjectives. Courtney could have reduced the size of his book substantially and without loss by omitting bibliographies printed in obvious places, to which one needs no reference. For example, he could have spared references to bibliographies in four editions of Beowulf. The poorly-organized longer articles in the Register are often burdened with miscellaneous or unnecessary information. The article "Bibliography" includes, for example, the universal bibliographies by Georg Draud and Theophil Georgi, (but not Conrad Gesner); Olphar Hamst, Aggravating Ladies, which is a list of pseudonymous books written by "A Lady";[192] the bibliographical journal La Bibliofilia;[193] and a bibliography of church history. This is not a display of good workmanship. The article "Libraries" is a similar farrago of Namur's bibliography of bibliographies, Wheatley's book on how to make a library, Edward Edwards' book on libraries and their founders, Meusel's biographical dictionary of German artists, and other books of as little pertinence. There is very useful information to be gleaned from Courtney's Register and one can easily find it in the chaff.

We are still too close to the latest bibliographies of bibliographies to see them in a true perspective.[194] Efforts to make a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies continue and a new development that was foreshadowed in Sabin's restriction of his work to a single language with "more than a few" titles added to fill it out is apparent in some less extensive but very excellent bibliographies of bibliographies.

The death of Vilhelm Grundtvig (1866-1950) and the destruction of his collectanea during the war make it certain that the bibliography of bibliographies that he and Joris Vorstius planned will never appear. He had called for help in the enterprise in an article[195] published in 1926 and had obtained approval of it at the international meeting of librarians at Madrid in 1935. During the course of his work he succeeded in gaining the assistance of Joris Vorstius, whom we have learned to know as the editor of annual surveys of current bibliographies. He wrote in 1940 in a review of Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, that his collectanea were arranged according to countries for submission to various workers who might criticize and supplement them.[196] The loss of this compilation is greatly to be regretted because the experience and good judgment of the two editors make it certain that the book would have been comprehensive, well-planned, and satisfactorily executed.

On several occasions Grundtvig stated briefly the task of making a bibliography of bibliographies. His ability to see clearly its difficulties, his wide reading, and his recognition of the many types of bibliographical works that must be considered make these preliminary statements valuable. A long article of 1903 entitled "Gedanken über Bibliographie"[197] was suggested by A. G. S. Josephson's pamphlet, which will be mentioned later. Here Grundtvig points out the varieties of existing bibliographies and their defects and gives examples of unfamiliar or neglected varieties. For example, he comments (pp. 415-417) on the lists of antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries. Although we now have more information about these catalogues than Grundtvig found in 1903, we still have no critical bibliographies of them. He points out (p. 418) the unsatisfactory quality of bibliographies of ephemeral publications (chapbooks and the like) and surveys the available lists. He has, to be sure, overlooked one of the earliest of such lists—Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli, Della biblioteca volante (Padua, 1677-1716; 2d ed., 1734-1747. ICN [2d ed.])—but it is rare and virtually unknown. He comments incisively on the lists of collective biographies (pp. 420, 441) and suggests the need for a more critical survey of them.[198] Although Grundtvig's article is not easy reading, it is a very stimulating survey of bibliographies. Any writer of a bibliography of bibliographies should read it attentively.

Grundtvig's pamphlet of 1919, entitled Om Bibliografi og Bibliografier, is much more conveniently arranged than the article of 1903. It is a review of the bibliographical chapter in Svend Dahl, Haandbog i Bibliotekskundskab. He finds it very unsatisfactory and shows how it might have been written. He gives a brief survey of bibliographies in general (pp. 8-10), comments on the making of collectanea and their arrangement (pp. 10-13) and the varieties of bibliographies including those in non-bibliographical works (pp. 14-19), and surveys bibliographies of bibliographies (pp. 19-23), international bibliographies (pp. 23-25), and national bibliographies (pp. 25-29). In keeping with his purpose, he names only the most obvious works.

We come now to the largest of all bibliographies of bibliographies: Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies (1939-1940; 2d ed., 1947-1949). Since the two editions do not differ essentially in character, I have found it convenient and probably more helpful to the reader to cite illustrations of Besterman's method from the second edition and to conclude my remarks with brief comment on the changes and improvements made in this edition. The plan of Besterman's book is novel in many details. It is, like Peignot's Répertoire of 1812, an alphabetical list of many small headings. Courtney had adopted the same plan in his Register (1905-1912), but few others have seen the great merits of this arrangement. In giving bibliographical details Besterman goes far beyond anything that had been previously attempted. He gives more complete collations than any of his predecessors except Petzholdt had given, and in several regards surpasses Petzholdt. He describes carefully such long sets as the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Surgeon Generals Office (cols. 1866-1867), the many national bibliographies made by booksellers or librarians, and the annual bibliographies of special fields like The Record of Zoological Literature and its continuation (cols. 3187-3189). He goes beyond Petzholdt and most other bibliographers by estimating the number of titles cited in the books that he lists. He ranges farther afield than any of his predecessors. He includes lists of maps and printed music, registers of documents and charters, and indexes of laws and patents. He includes catalogues of manuscripts and specialized catalogues of books in institutional libraries but not general catalogues of books owned by the same libraries. He includes a generous selection of specialized catalogues of private libraries. He brings more Finnish, Hungarian, and Slavic titles than anyone before him and regrets his inability to include books in Oriental languages. In the first edition he intended to cite all bibliographies printed as books that had appeared before 1936 and succeeded in picking up a large number of those printed between 1936 and 1939. He says that he has cited three times as many bibliographies printed before 1860 as Petzholdt had found. This comparison gives an idea of the amazing extent of Besterman's work.

Besterman sees clearly the difficulties inherent in his choice of an alphabetical arrangement of many small headings and finds perhaps the only answer. It is to offer an abundance of cross-references. Although these headings can be found in special dictionaries that cite synonyms and related words, it remains to be seen how well they will stand the test of time. A suggestion of what may happen is perhaps already to be found in the general unfamiliarity of scholars with these dictionaries. Librarians know and use them, but scholars do not. The time may come when only a specialist and indeed only a specialist acquainted with the history of his discipline will know the meaning of many headings. The headings used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are obsolete. As we have seen, Petzholdt did not recognize the meaning of philosophy that was accepted in the early seventeenth century. I have remarked upon the unfamiliarity of modern students of theology with Peignot's term théologie positive. Can we expect future scholars to perceive readily the difference between psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Unless they do, they will not find it easy to use a bibliography of bibliographies arranged as an alphabetical dictionary of many small headings. There is, as a matter of fact, no better illustration of these difficulties than the word "bibliography" itself. This very interesting word needs a historical and lexicographical investigation that will continue Pierre Frieden's article, "Bibliographie. Etymologie et histoire du mot," Revue de synthèse, VII (1934), 45-52. During this century "bibliography" has been used more and more often to refer to either a study of a book as a physical object or to a list of titles having some common quality. In such titles as Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, and Norman E. Binns, An Introduction to Historical Bibliography (London, 1953), the word has two quite different meanings.

Besterman's enormous compilation does not include all the available bibliographies. Vilhelm Grundtvig found some four hundred titles that had escaped Besterman in the first edition and came regretfully to the conclusion that the hope for a wholly satisfactory international bibliography of bibliographies was now unlikely to be realized.[199] His judgment is severe and the second edition has no doubt gone a long way toward removing these defects. A third edition of the World Bibliography (1955) is now in process, with the first volume already off the press. It will contain some 80,000 titles, an increase of one-third over the second edition.

A few difficulties in Besterman's bibliography concern what have been called "linked" books. These are works having their own title pages but issued in conjunction with another book.[200] Unless they have been catalogued as separate works, they are virtually impossible to identify. We have already seen what annoyance a title of this sort can cause in the case of Labbé's bibliography of bibliographies published in 1653.

I cannot reach a decision altogether satisfactory to myself regarding Besterman's inclusion of "abridgments of patent specifications" (I, p. xv). These contain bibliographical information not readily obtainable from any other source, and my disposition is inclined toward generosity. By including them Besterman offers a much more adequate representation of scientific and technological bibliography than would otherwise have been possible. As he correctly says (I, p. xvii), an interest in the fields of humane studies has been predominant in earlier bibliographies of bibliographies. On the other hand, Besterman seems, in including these abridgments, to have stretched to the breaking point his rule for the exclusion of bibliographies contained in non-bibliographical works. If these abridgments are to be included, then one is tempted to call attention to the fact that many German doctoral dissertations offer good bibliographies of small subjects and can be very useful on occasion.[201]

Any definition of a bibliography is difficult to formulate and even more difficult to adhere to. I cite only one more illustration of the problems that arise. Besterman cites (col. 1040) Antti Aarne's catalogue of printed and manuscript versions of Finnish tales. This is clearly within his definition of a bibliography. Perhaps a score of similar catalogues for the tales of countries from Iceland to Rumania are in existence and might equally well have been cited. Although it is not made according to Aarne's pattern, the Typen türkischer Volksmärchen (Wiesbaden, 1953) by Wolfram Eberhard and P. N. Boratav is a similar catalogue of tales. How far shall one go in seeking out such extremely technical reference aids as these? The specialist will know them, and few others can use them with any comfort. Students of folklore have done a great deal of indexing and cataloguing and have produced works that can only be separated from bibliographies with difficulty. What shall one say of John Meier, Kunstlieder im Volksmunde (Halle, 1906)? This is a catalogue of German songs that have been heard in oral tradition but can be traced back to known authors. Meier gives full references to the sources in both the printed works of the authors and the collections of folksongs. To return to tales once more, I mention two books of an apparently wholly bibliographical nature that Besterman does not mention. A. C. Lee, The Decameron. Its Sources and Analogues (London, 1909) is, as its title indicates, a compilation of tales related to those in the Decameron. The Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (5 v.; Leipzig, 1913-1932) by Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka is a bibliography of parallels to the Household Tales.

Some details in Besterman's work call for comment or correction, but their number is negligible in view of the vast number of titles with which he deals. There are instances in which I should disagree with him in the classification of titles. For example, the Augsburg library catalogue of 1600 (col. 626) is not a bibliography of classical literature but a general catalogue of books and manuscripts in the Augsburg municipal library. Furthermore, its inclusion contradicts the principle stated in the Introduction (I, p. xiv) according to which general catalogues of institutional libraries are omitted. J. B. Mencken's Gelehrten-Lexicon with the second and third editions by C. G. Jöcher is cited (col. 331) as a universal bibliography, but Jöcher's later and much larger revision with its continuations is cited (col. 343) in a different category as a select universal bibliography. Errors in names, place names, and dates appear to be very few. I note that Thomas Cremius (col. 340) should be Thomas Crenius. Such details scarcely call for comment, and their lack of importance is itself a characterization of Besterman's skill. I could wish that the Preface to volume III had explained at greater length the alphabetization of anonymous titles beginning with such words as "Catalogue" or "Index." For example, I cannot find the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature in the Index, although Section N for Zoology is cited in col. 3188. Nor is the International Catalogue in the article "Science" (cols. 2725-2749), where a List of Journals connected with it is cited (col. 2727).

Besterman's bibliography deserves special praise for the fact that it rests on a personal inspection of virtually all the works cited. It needs scarcely to be said that he could have executed this task only at the British Museum or in a few other very great libraries. We can probably infer that Conrad Gesner handled the bibliographies that he cited in 1548, but few later workers have been equally successful in seeing all the books that they name. In this regard Gabriel Peignot made a long step in advance in the Répertoire of 1812. The character of his comments makes it clear that he had a firsthand knowledge of the books that he cites. In 1838 his successor Pie Namur yielded countless times to the temptation to cite books from secondary sources, which moreover he does not name. In 1866 Julius Petzholdt established the standards of bibliographical accuracy that ought to be observed and indicated the books that he had not consulted, but his successors have not in general approached these standards. It is therefore altogether gratifying to praise Besterman's attention to such bibliographical details as collations, the citation of editions, and the identification of pseudonyms. In addition to these merits the correctness of the Index calls for particular mention. The bibliographies named in this essay have not always required an index, but those which do contain one have usually served their readers poorly. Philippe Labbé was the first but by no means the last of our bibliographers to offer his reader an unsatisfactory index. Even Julius Petzholdt left much to be desired in this regard. The index to Henri Stein's Manuel is conspicuous for its faults. In comparison with his predecessors Besterman's success in the making of an index is all the more meritorious.

In a second edition published between 1947 and 1949, Besterman revised his bibliography to include books printed as late as 1944 and 1945. Since I have referred to this and not to the first edition in my comments, it is sufficient to quote Besterman's statement of the differences between the two editions. The improvements and changes are important to every user of the book but do not affect its nature in any fundamental way.

Large parts of the field have been surveyed anew, the text has been minutely revised throughout, and improvements made. The number of cross-references has been multiplied. Most important, however, are the new entries, which make this edition over 55 per centum bigger than the first. The number of volumes recorded and separately collated is now about 65,000. Nearly all intermediate editions [between the first and last] have now been deleted; they have only been retained, in fact, for bibliographies first published before 1800, and for those of special interest or importance.[202]

And now, five years after the completion of the second edition, Besterman has begun to print a third edition, which he declares to be a "final" edition. As he writes in a letter of July 27, 1954, the new edition will show "the normal increase in size due to the passage of time." A systematic check of Library of Congress holdings has enabled him to strengthen considerably the coverage of American bibliographical publication, north and south. He has also made renewed efforts to improve the representation of scientific and Slavic books. The first volume, which is now in proof, will appear early in 1955 and three more volumes will follow. One lays A World Bibliography of Bibliographies aside with astonishment that one man had the courage to conceive the task and the strength to complete it. In its conception of universality and its success in approaching completeness Besterman's book is a climax in this history of bibliographies of bibliographies.

An emphasis on the current usefulness of the works cited is characteristic of the last four bibliographies of bibliographies that I shall name. These compilations by Bohatta, Funke, and Hodes; by Collison; by Malclès; and by Totok and Weitzel are intentionally selective in nature and will therefore require only brief comment. Incidentally, they do not owe their origin to Besterman's suggestion: "it will no doubt eventually become necessary to publish a general bibliography of best bibliographies" (I, p. xvii), although they serve this purpose more or less adequately. The practical emphasis in these four bibliographies betrays the training of their authors in librarianship.

There is a significant difference between the idea of a bibliography as a complete record of books on a particular subject or of a particular kind and that of bibliographies of bibliographies as they have been ordinarily made. To some extent every bibliography serves a practical need, but bibliographies of bibliographies have at first served this need somewhat unconsciously and have served it more and more deliberately as time has passed. As my comments in this essay have shown, the bibliography of bibliographies has been characteristically a tool having immediate practical usefulness. There are few exceptions to this rule: Namur's careless book of 1838, Besterman's book that we have just examined, and Josephson's bibliography of bibliographies of bibliographies that we shall mention at the end of this chapter include works that the compilers regarded as having historical interest rather than practical value. Conrad Gesner named in 1548 a considerable number of classical Greek and Latin works because they seemed to his contemporaries to serve their needs. This aspect of immediate contemporary usefulness has remained characteristic of bibliographies of bibliographies down to the present time. References to classical authorities had still a certain degree of practical value for Labbé (1664) and Teissier (1686, 1705). They have disappeared completely or almost completely from later bibliographies of bibliographies. During the last century this emphasis on immediate contemporary usefulness has perhaps expressed itself more clearly in acts than in words. For example, Peignot in 1812 is already looking in this direction. Although subsequent bibliographers may include outmoded books, their eyes turn, as Petzholdt's did in 1866, more and more consciously to modern writings. The four most recent bibliographies of bibliographies recognize fully that they intend to be primarily guides to the best modern sources of information.

In spite of its brave title, Internationale Bibliographie der Bibliographien (1939-1950), this book by Hanns Bohatta (1864-1950), Walter Funke, and Franz Hodes belongs on the level of bibliographies by Durey de Noinville and Michael de San José. It will only rarely aid either the beginner or the more advanced scholar. It is a selective bibliography and the choice of titles will satisfy no one. Obvious books are lacking[203] and worthless compilations are present.[204] The authors pay little attention to the categories that they set up.[205] The references are incomplete and inaccurate.[206] The comments are often misleading or erroneous. For example, the remark that Giuseppe Fumagalli, La bibliografia, is much less complete than Giuseppe Ottino and Giuseppe Fumagalli, Biblioteca bibliografica italiana, is a fundamental misapprehension of both works. The first is a handbook of general bibliography; the second is a bibliography of bibliographies written in Italian or concerned with Italy. The second book belongs elsewhere and the supplements to it should be cited at length because they were written, in part, by other authors. A comparison of the two books is without point. With all its faults this disorderly Internationale Bibliographie der Bibliographien yields useful information.[207]

The most ambitious and the best of these four modern selective bibliographies is L.-N. Malclès, Les Sources du travail bibliographique, I (Geneva, 1950). This deals with general works and cites almost exclusively bibliographies. A second volume (2 pts., Geneva, 1952), which deals with the humanities, has recently appeared. A third volume, which will deal with the sciences, is promised. An abbreviated edition has been published even though volume 3 has not yet been issued. Both the second and the promised third volume are subject bibliographies and therefore need no mention here. The first volume contains some information about books that are not bibliographies, although they are somewhat similar in nature to bibliographies. There is, for example, a very interesting chapter on encyclopedias (pp. 213-224) and another chapter (pp. 225-237) on collective biographies. The wholly practical spirit of Mlle. Malclès's endeavor appears clearly in her list of German encyclopedias. She is right in thinking that a modern worker will rarely look at a German encyclopedia older than Ersch and Gruber ("1818-1889, 97 vol. 4o [A-Z]"). The reference is, incidentally, not quite accurate, since large portions of the alphabet were never written. We hear nothing of the early German encyclopedist J. H. Alsted, who lived and wrote two generations before Louis Moréri (he is mentioned as the first French author of an encyclopedia on p. 219), or of Krünitz and Zedler, who wrote vast encyclopedias almost two centuries ago. Such German works are not appropriate to Mlle. Malclès's purpose, but their absence means that her book does not serve a student who wishes to inform himself about the historical development of encyclopedias. In other words, Mlle. Malclès has deliberately and successfully satisfied the needs of French scholars.

Mlle. Malclès's admirably organized and very rich list of currently useful bibliographies is, as Joris Vorstius says in his review, indispensable to every librarian. Particularly interesting are the introductory remarks in each chapter. These describe the general nature of the works listed and offer comparisons and critical comment on the value and purpose of the different works. This excellent orientation supplements the brief descriptive remarks attached to the titles. As I have already implied, Les Sources du travail bibliographique has been written for French reference librarians. For this reason Mlle. Malclès is often content to cite secondary authorities for bibliographies not written in French or concerned with subjects of minor interest to French students. This admirable book stands at the peak of selective bibliographies of bibliographies and is therefore a companion to Besterman's comprehensive work.

Robert L. Collison, Bibliographies Subject and National. A Guide to their contents, arrangement and use (London, 1951) is a pleasant little book containing the information promised in its title. It is a rare example of a bibliography written in a descriptive style that relieves the tedium of a list. The author has intended to offer no more than a brief handlist of currently useful works with some interpretative comments. He has succeeded well in his purpose.[208]

A recently published German counterpart to Malclès and Collison is Wilhelm Totok and Rolf Weitzel, Handbuch der bibliographischen Nachschlagewerke (1954). Less comprehensive than the French book and much richer than the English one, it is a meritorious compendium of currently useful bibliographies in all fields. The authors list bibliographies, library catalogues, biographical and biobibliographical handbooks, general and specialized encyclopedias, and treatises of various sorts that contain bibliographical information. Historical and descriptive remarks that are often very instructive introduce the chapters and sections and critical comments usually are appended to the titles cited. The choice of titles will, as the authors no doubt intended, serve best German readers. For example, no Spanish, Latin American, or Russian dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma are mentioned (pp. 70-73). I should scarcely agree with the opinion (p. 70) that interest in dictionaries of this sort subsided after the first decades of this century. An emphasis on modern writing often leads the authors to overlook earlier bibliographies that have not lost their usefulness. For example, Mundt's incomplete list (extending only to R) of European dissertations published before 1900 (p. 75) is not "the only means of identifying older university publications (dissertations)." The Catalogus dissertationum academicarum quibus nuper aucta est Bibliotheca Bodleiana MDCCCXXXII (Oxford, 1834) will serve this purpose very well and extends to the end of the alphabet. Bibliographies of university dissertations were, moreover, published in the early eighteenth century. I cannot understand why the authors chose to omit John Meier's enormous bibliography of German folklore in Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, III (2d ed., Strassburg, 1909) or why they preferred Wilhelm Pessler's handbook of German folklore to the exclusion of the convenient bibliography in Adolf Spamer, Die deutsche Volkskunde (2d ed. [unchanged], Berlin, 1934-1935). Suggestions of this sort occur readily enough to any attentive reader and are intended to characterize the book rather than to point out its deficiencies. In my opinion, the authors have succeeded well in their intention which was to write a book occupying a position between a bulky guide to information and a beginner's handbook ("Vorwort," p. v).

We have come finally to the last bibliography of all. Its date (1901) entitles it to the first place in this chapter, but it stands last because it is an even more specialized compilation than a bibliography of bibliographies. This bibliography of bibliographies of bibliographies, that is to say, a bibliography in the third degree, is entitled Bibliographies of Bibliographies. The author is Aksel G. S. Josephson, a former member of the staff of the John Crerar Library. It is a chronological list of one hundred and fifty-six bibliographies of bibliographies. The conception is not new, but this pamphlet is the first separate publication of such a list. Similar lists are found of course in Peignot's Répertoire of 1812, Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica of 1866, and a great variety of other reference works. The pertinent sections in handbooks of library science, bibliography, and the like are usually of little interest or value, but Josephson lists them carefully. Perhaps forty titles that he names are significant. He has chosen the strange plan of a chronological arrangement of titles and adds to its inconvenience by providing neither an author nor a subject index. He has yielded to the temptation to include titles of no pertinence like treatises on systems of cataloguing (Nos. 41, 43),[209] H. B. Wheatley's What Is an Index? (No. 59), a guide for making a pastor's library (No. 77), a list of fictitious books (No. 80), and guides to the use of a library (Nos. 67, 69, 104). The many references to bibliographies in the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswesen are no doubt pertinent but are scarcely as important as they are numerous. He has probably more references to bibliographical lists published in journals of library science than any other source of information.[210] The value of Josephson's pamphlet lies in an arrangement that makes apparent the historical development and emphasizes the growth of bibliographical lists in journals. Mistakes seem to be few.[211]

In making a second edition of the Bibliography of Bibliographies Josephson profited greatly from the long criticism by Vilhelm Grundtvig that we have already discussed. He replaced the chronological arrangement by a classified arrangement, within which he arranged titles chronologically. He added many new titles that he had found or had excerpted from Grundtvig's criticism. His retirement from active duty and long delays in publication greatly handicapped him in producing a satisfactory piece of work.

Chapter VI
Conclusion

Four centuries have elapsed since Conrad Gesner published the first modern bibliography of bibliographies in the Pandectae of 1548. Although it was only a section in a general subject index, it shows Gesner's clear understanding of the task and a competent choice and arrangement of materials. Few later efforts have been equally successful. His definition of a bibliography is both narrower and broader than the one that has since found general acceptance. He does not include, for example, biobibliographical accounts of religious orders and nations. He was familiar with them but probably looked upon them as historical rather than bibliographical compilations. Like most later bibliographers, he does not include publishers' catalogues and catalogues of books owned by institutions and individuals. In 1598 Israel Spach employed what is virtually the modern definition of a bibliography. Like Gesner, he includes bibliographers who wrote in classical times. In 1628 Francis Sweerts almost takes the decisive step of making an independent list composed of bibliographies of bibliographies. The three folio pages in his Athenae Belgicae on which this list appears have no organic connection with that biobibliographical dictionary. Sweerts includes, furthermore, no ancient bibliographers. His work has a modern look.

In 1643 the bibliography of bibliographies comes of age with the announcement of Jodocus a Dudinck, Bibliothecariographia. The book is lost or more probably was never published, but its subtitle shows a clear comprehension of the nature of a bibliography of bibliographies. Philip Labbé published a bibliography of bibliographies in 1653 and a new edition of it in 1664. His loyalty to Catholicism and his exclusively French associations hindered its wide acceptance and use. Few of his contemporaries understood what he had done, and few learned how to use his book. Even Antoine Teissier, who revised and enlarged it, showed an imperfect understanding of its nature. The age was not ready for a bibliography of bibliographies. Cornelius a Beughem, a man of many bibliographies, may have perceived the situation, for he never published the compilation that he had announced in 1680. With the publication of a supplement to Teissier's revision of Labbé, efforts to make a bibliography of bibliographies came to a dead stop in 1705. They had resulted in a formulation of the task.

After 1705 no bibliography of bibliographies appeared for more than a century. The fragmentary tradition of listing books entitled bibliotheca, i.e. bibliography or catalogue, that might have led to one produced only withered shoots and ended in 1758 with Durey de Noinville's wretched compilation. During the eighteenth century the bibliography of bibliographies is, at best, only a chapter in surveys of learning. No doubt the great encyclopedias of the time satisfied scholarly demands so well that men did not perceive the place that a bibliography of bibliographies might fill.

Conrad Gesner, whom I regard as the first modern writer of a bibliography of bibliographies, aimed at comprehensiveness and included works of all ages as far as they came to his knowledge. He named Amphicrates and his contemporary Jakob Rueff in the same list without making a distinction between them. Almost immediately the bibliography of bibliographies became a guide to currently useful reference works and it has retained that function. Writing in the early years of the seventeenth century, Paul Bolduan and Francis Sweerts took a step away from comprehensiveness. They included no classical Greek and Latin authorities and very few medieval ones. This exclusion of classical writers runs parallel to the similar treatment of classical writers of history. In a list of classical historians we no longer cite Xenophon and Caesar along with Grote and Gibbon. No one thinks of naming a bibliographer like Cicero, Suetonius, or St. Jerome in the company of Petzholdt and Brunet. Although this rejection of ancient bibliographers began in the early seventeenth century, neither Labbé in 1664 nor Teissier in 1705 fully accepted it.

By 1812 we find a completely modern conception of bibliography. Gabriel Peignot cites no bibliographer from classical times and names only such older writers of the Renaissance as have not been superseded by more recent authorities. This definition of the bibliography of bibliographies makes it practically useful to the writer's contemporaries. With the exception of Theodore Besterman, the subsequent writers of bibliographies of bibliographies have been practical men who see a modern librarian's needs and more especially, when that functionary is invented, the needs of a reference librarian. Julius Petzholdt admits many old bibliographies to his Bibliotheca bibliographica of 1866, but gives them room only for historical reasons or in the absence of a modern work. Joseph Sabin goes somewhat farther by restricting himself to British and American bibliographies with only a side glance at those in other than European languages. Léon Vallée, Henri Stein, W. P. Courtney, and those who come after show a more and more definitely acknowledged restriction to modern works and especially those within the easy reach of their readers. The bibliography of bibliographies becomes an ever more skilfully fashioned key to unlock modern learning and modern libraries. In the last two generations cooperative effort has become characteristic of much bibliographical work and the publication of periodical surveys limited to brief periods and cumulated for longer intervals reflect both the difficulty of the task and the emphasis on contemporary usefulness. The standards of accuracy and, within the limits that have been accepted, the standards of completeness have enormously improved.

This brief historical summary makes it plain that a bibliography is or, at least, it has become a reference work that gives a limited amount of information of a very special kind. It is immediately useful in an emergency and less likely to be helpful in surveying historically any particular field of study. A corollary is the fact that a bibliography of bibliographies will ordinarily give a student little or no new information about a subject with which he is familiar, but can be a valuable aid to him in an unfamiliar field. A student of Renaissance English literature will not consult a bibliography of bibliographies to learn of such works as the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature or A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England ... 1475-1640. He already knows them. He may be very glad to find the titles of bibliographies of theology, history, or science that meet his needs. He should consult, also, the older books that Besterman alone among modern writers of the bibliography of bibliographies is likely to cite. Joris Vorstius rightly emphasizes the fact that a bibliography of bibliographies serves primarily a reference librarian.[212] I should only enlarge upon his remark by saying that the older bibliographies of bibliographies are invaluable and all too little known aids to understanding the historical development of a discipline or the background of an earlier period.

With all their faults and insufficiencies—and what human works lack them?—bibliographies of bibliographies are very valuable aids to scholars. As an introduction to a strange field one will naturally consult only the most recently published examples, beginning with Julius Petzholdt, Bibliotheca bibliographica (1866) or perhaps even with Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies (2d ed., 1947-1949; 3d ed., 1955-). In studying the historical development of a discipline or subject one can neglect the four oldest bibliographies of bibliographies. Gesner's Pandectae, Spach's Nomenclator, and Bolduan's Bibliotheca philosophica are general subject bibliographies of a sort that I hope to discuss at another time. These books and Sweert's Athenae Belgicae contain little or nothing as far as bibliographies are concerned that cannot be more easily found in other books. With the sole exception of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, which was absorbed into Teissier's Catalogus auctorum, a student of the historical aspect of a subject must consult all the bibliographies of bibliographies printed after 1664. They are independent or almost independent compilations and supplement one another. Fortunately they are not extremely difficult to obtain. In consulting them the modern scholar should give thanks to those who have labored so diligently in his behalf.

Bibliography

I indicate the libraries where the rare books cited below may be found by the following abbreviations: CU (University of California, Berkeley); DLC (Library of Congress); ICN (The Newberry Library, Chicago); MH (Harvard University Library); NN (New York Public Library). Books for which no locations are given will be found in most large libraries. I have not tried to record all the copies owned in the United States.

Besterman, Theodore. A World Bibliography of Bibliographies. London, 1939-1940. Pp. xxiv, 588; [iv], 644. 2d ed.; London, 1947-1949. Pp. xxviii, cols. 1450; [i], cols. 1451-3196; [i], cols. 3197-4111. 3d ed.; Geneva, 1955-. The author index in the third volume of the second edition is printed in three columns. The second edition is cited as Besterman.

Reviewed: Vilhelm Grundtvig, "En Verdensbibliografi over Bibliografier," Nordisk tidskrift för bokväsen, XXVII (1940), 58-65; Marc Jaryc, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXVI (1942), 321-324.

Beughem, Cornelius a. Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. Never published.

Bibliographia bibliographica, I (1898)-VII (1904). Bibliographia universalis, Contribution No. 31. Brussels: Institut Internationale de Bibliographie, 1900-1906.

For a collation see Besterman, I, cols. 324-325 (only vols. I-VI). The first five volumes were issued with a new titlepage as Bibliotheca bibliographica universalis ... 1898-1902 (Brussels, 1904. DLC).

Bibliographic Index. A Cumulative Bibliography of Bibliographies. 1937-1942. New York, 1945. Pp. [xxxiii], 1780. Printed in two columns.

——. —— 1943-1946. New York, 1948. Pp. [xx], 831. Printed in two columns.

The Bibliographic Index appears in quarterly issues, which are cumulated in annual volumes. The first annual volume was that for 1937 and was issued in 1938. The annual volumes are cumulated in volumes of irregular extant. For a collation see Besterman, I, cols. 328-329.

Reviewed: H. B. Van Hoesen, The Library Quarterly, X (1940), 272-274.

Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens. "Beihefte zum Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen," XXIX and subsequent issues (not continuously numbered). Bearbeitet von Albert Hortzschansky. Leipzig, 1905-1925.

There were no annual issues for 1913-1921. It was continued by the Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens (which see). For a collation see Besterman, I, cols. 325-326.

Bohatta, Hanns, Walter Funke, and Franz Hodes. Internationale Bibliographie der Bibliographien. Frankfurt a.M., 1939-1950. Pp. 652.

Reviewed: Theodore Besterman, The Library, 4th Ser., XXII (1943), 49-52.

Bolduanus, Paul. Bibliotheca philosophica. Jena, 1616. Pp. [xxiv], 647, [viii]. ICN; Library of Archer Taylor (enlargement of microfilm).

Collison, Robert L. Bibliographies Subject and National. A Guide to their contents, arrangement and use. London, 1951. Pp. xii, 172.

Courtney, W. P. A Register of National Bibliography, with a selection of the chief bibliographical books and articles printed in other countries. London, 1905-1912. Pp. viii, 314; [iv], 315-631; v, 340.

Delandine, Antoine François. Bibliothèque de Lyon. Catalogue des livres qu'elle renferme dans la classe des belles-lettres. I (Paris, 1816).

Contains (pp. 108-176) "Bibliographie spéciale et chronologique des principaux ouvrages sur l'origine et l'histoire de l'imprimerie, les bibliothèques, et les premiers essais de l'art typographique dans les diverses villes de l'Europe."

Not seen; cited from Petzholdt, p. 444.

Dudinck, Jodocus a. Bibliothecariographia. Enumeratio omnium autorum, operumque, quae sub titulo Bibliothecae, catalogi, indicis, nomenclatoris, athenarum etc. prodierunt. Cologne, 1643.

A bibliographical ghost.

Durey de Noinville, J. B. Dissertation sur les bibliothèques. Paris, 1758. Pp. 156, [3]. ICN; MH; Library of Archer Taylor.

Ferguson, John. Some Aspects of Bibliography. Edinburgh, 1900. Pp. [8], 102, [2].

Gesner, Conrad. Pandectae sive partitionum universalium ... libri XXI. Zurich, 1548. Fols, [vi], 375. CU (photostat); DLC; ICN (lacking the section on law); MH (two copies); NN.

Godet, Marcel. See Index bibliographicus.

Hoecker, Rudolf. See Internationale Bibliographie.

Hortzschansky, Adelbert. See Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens.

Index bibliographicus. Répertoire international des sources de bibliographie courante (périodiques et institutions). Ed. Marcel Godet. Geneva, 1925. Pp. xvi, 233. 2d ed. by Marcel Godet and Joris Vorstius. Berlin, 1931. Pp. xxiii, 420. 3d ed., with the subtitle Directory of Current Periodical Abstracts and Bibliographies, by Theodore Besterman. 2 v.; Paris: Unesco, 1952. Pp. xi, 52; pp. xi, 72.

For collations of the first two editions see Besterman, I, col. 327.

Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bibliographie. Bearbeitet von Rudolf Hoecker und Joris Vorstius. Neue Folge, I (1926)-XIII (1940).

For collation see Besterman, I, col. 326 (vols. I-X only).

Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie, I-XI. Ed. Joris Vorstius. Leipzig, 1930-1940.

For collation see Besterman, I, cols. 327-328 (vols. I-X only).

Josephson, Aksel G. S. "Bibliographies of Bibliographies," The Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of America, II (1910), 21-24, 53-56; III (1911), 23-24, 50-53; IV (1912), 23-27; Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, VII (1912-1913), 33-40, 115-124.

A revised, re-arranged, and enlarged edition of the following.

——. Bibliographies of Bibliographies, chronologically arranged with occasional notes and an index. "Bibliographical Society of Chicago. Contributions to Bibliography," No. 1. Chicago, 1901. Pp. 45.

Krüsike, Johannes Christophorus. Vindemiarum litterarium specimen. I. quo de re libraria universe agitur. Accedit appendix de scriptis rei bibliothecariae adfectis. II. quo index scriptorum exhibetur, qui de libris, illorumque scriptione, commentati sunt. Hamburg, 1727-1731. Pp. 40; [6], 64.

Cited from Josephson, "Bibliographies," The Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of America, II (1910), 23; Vilhelm Grundtvig, Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, XX (1903), 435. Although Josephson refers to a copy in the United States, I have been unable to find it. Petzholdt's comment (p. 443) shows that he misunderstands the nature of this book. It is necessarily a very slight work because it is a supplement to Johannes Andreas Schmid (Schmidt) and J. J. Mader, De bibliothecis atque virorum clarissimorum libelli et commentationes (Helmstadt, 1702-1705). For the contents of Schmid-Mader, which was the standard eighteenth-century treatise on library science, see Peignot, Répertoire, pp. 34-35. Petzholdt does not mention it.

Labbé, Philip. Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. Paris, 1664. Pp. [32], 394. CU; ICN. Rouen, 1672. Pp. [32], 398. ICN. Rouen, 1678. Pp. 32, 398, 27. MH; Library of Archer Taylor. Leipzig, 1682. Pp. [72], 671, 38. ICN; Library of Archer Taylor.

Josephson suggests ("Bibliographies," II, 21-22) probably correctly that the 1678 edition consists of the sheets of the 1672 edition with a new title page and John Selden's numismatic bibliography.

——. Novae bibliothecae specimen. Paris, 1653. CU (positive microfilm); ICN (positive microfilm); NN.

The tenth appendix (pp. 389-428) is entitled "Supplementorum Novae bibliothecae, sive speciminis antiquarum lectionum, coronis libraria. Hoc est, Bibliotheca bibliothecarum & Catalogus catalogorum, nomenclatorum, indicum, elenchorum &c. quibus scriptores in quavis arte ac professione praecipui & libri ferme omnes, partim editi, partim inediti, representantur."

Josephson seems to have confused this book with Labbé, Nova bibliotheca MSS. librorum (Paris, 1657); see his "Bibliographies," II, 21.

——. Sexdecim librorum initia. Paris, 1662, 1664. CU, ICN. Microfilms of both editions in both libraries.

This work consists of the first eight pages of ten bibliographies on which Labbé was working and description of six more. The pagination is necessarily not continuous.

Literarisches Beiblatt zur Zeitschrift (later: zum Jahrbuch) des Deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schrifttum, I-XIII. Leipzig, 1924-1936.

For a collation see Besterman, I, cols. 326-327.

Malclès, L.-N. Les Sources du travail bibliographique. I: Bibliographies générales. Geneva, 1950. Pp. xvi, 364. II: Bibliographies spécialisées (sciences humaines). Geneva, 1952. Pp. 954.

Reviewed: Joris Vorstius, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, LXV (1951), 460-463 (volume I).

Moëtte, Charles. Bibliotheca alphabetica. A lost manuscript.

Namur, [Jean] Pie. Bibliographie paléographico-diplomatico-bibliographique générale ou Répertoire systématique indiquant 1o tous les ouvrages relatifs à la paléographie; à la diplomatique; à l'histoire de l'imprimerie et de la libraire; à la bibliographie; aux biobibliographies et à l'histoire des bibliothèques; 2o la notice des recueils périodiques, littéraires et critiques de différents pays. Liége, 1838. Pp. xxvii, 226, [2]; vi, 306.

Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec, worinnen der studirenden Jugend und deren curieusen Liebhabern guter Unterricht von Bibliothequen, nebenst bequemer Anleitung dieselben anzulegen, wohl zu unterhalten, und nützlich zu gebrauchen, an die Hand gegeben wird. Welchen angefügt die vornehmsten Bibliothequen in Europa und was Reisende vornehmlich bey deren Besichtigung zu beobachten haben. Hamburg, 1702. DLC; ICN. Hamburg, 1704. Library of Archer Taylor. Hamburg, 1711. CU. The Harvard copy is Theil 2 of Der geöffnete Ritterplatz (Hamburg, 1705-1706). The pagination of all copies is the same: pp. [x], 298.

Peignot, Gabriel. Répertoire bibliographique universel, contenant la notice raisonnée des bibliographies spéciales publiées jusqu'à ce jour, et d'un grand nombre d'autres ouvrages de bibliographie, relatifs à l'histoire littéraire, et à toutes les parties de la bibliologie. Paris, 1812. Pp. xx, 514.

Petzholdt, Julius. Bibliotheca bibliographica. Kritisches Verzeichnis der das Gesammtgebeit der Bibliographie betreffenden Litteratur des In- und Auslandes in systematischer Ordnung. Leipzig, 1866. Pp. xii, 939.

Psaume, Etienne. Dictionnaire bibliographique, ou Nouveau manuel du libraire et de l'amateur de livres. 2 v. Paris, 1824.

See "Appendice de l'Essai sur la bibliographie," I, 216-264.

Sabin, Joseph. A Bibliography of Bibliographies, or a handy book about books which relate to books. Being an alphabetical catalogue of the most important works descriptive of the literature of Great Britain and America, and more than a few relative to France and Germany. New York, 1877. Pp. cl, i.e. 150.

This was published as a supplement to the American Bibliopolist, VII (1875)-IX (1877).

San José, Michael de (Michael a S. Joseph). Bibliographia critica. Madrid, 1740-1742. 3 v. DLC; ICN; Library of Archer Taylor.

See the articles beginning with the word bibliotheca, I, 472-533.

Spach, Israel. Nomenclator philosophorum et philologicorum. Hoc est: succincta recensio eorum, quo philosophiam omnesque eius partes quovis tempore idiomateve usque ad annum 1597 descripserunt, illustrarunt, & exornarunt, methodo artificiosa secundum locos communes ipsius philosophiae. Strassburg, 1598. ICN (microfilm); Library of Archer Taylor (enlargement of microfilm).

Spizelius, Theophilus (Gottlieb Spitzel). Sacra bibliothecarum illustrium arcana retecta, sive MSS. theologicorum, in praecipuis Europae bibliothecis extantium designatio; cum preliminari dissertatione, specimine novae bibliothecae universalis, et coronide philologica. Augsburg, 1668. Pp. [200], 384. CU; ICN; MH; Library of Archer Taylor.

Spitzel's comments (pp. 344-355) on Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum were reprinted in J. A. Schmidt and J. J. Mader, De bibliothecis nova accessio collectioni Maderianae (Helmstadt, 1703), pp. 181-183. The reprint does not include Spitzel's additions to Labbé.

Stein, Henri. Manuel de bibliographie générale (Bibliotheca bibliographica nova). Manuels de bibliographie historique, 2. Paris, 1897. Pp. xx, 805.

For reviews see H. C. Bolton and Charles Martel, Publisher's Weekly, LV (1899), 386-389; F. J. Teggert, Library Journal, XXIV (1899), 73-75; Charles Martel, Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes, 1899, pp. 521-525.

Sweertius, Franciscus (Francis Sweerts). Athenae Belgicae. Antwerp, 1628. Pp. 16, 727. DLC.

See "Syllabus eorum qui bibliothecas, elogia, effigies vitasq. virorum litteraria illustrium scripserunt et evulgarunt," pp. 56-58.

Teissier, Antoine. Catalogi auctorum qui librorum catalogos, indices, bibliothecas, virorum litteratorum elogia, vitas aut orationes funebres, scriptis consignarunt auctuarium ... sive ejusdem Catalogi pars altera. Geneva, 1705. Pp. [6], 368. ICN; MH; Library of Archer Taylor. Cited as Teissier, Auctuarium.

——. Catalogus auctorum qui librorum catalogos, indices, bibliothecas, virorum litteratorum elogia, vitas, aut orationes funebres, scriptis consignarunt. Geneva, 1686. Pp. [6], 559, 27, 3. ICN; MH; Library of Archer Taylor. Cited as Teissier, Catalogus.

Totok, Wilhelm and Rolf Weitzel. Handbuch der bibliographischen Nachschlagewerke. Frankfurt a.M., 1954. Pp. xxii, 258.

Unger, Johannes Godofredus. De libris bibliothecarum nomine notatis, ubi centum et triginta libri antiqui pariter atque et novi secundum seriem facultatum ac disciplinarum, intermixtis ultro citroque virorum judiciis, exhibentur, atque ad illustrandum historiam litterariam operose collecti recensentur disserit.... Leipzig, [1734]. Pp. 24. CU (microfilm); ICN (enlargement).

Vallée, Léon. Bibliographie des bibliographies. Première partie. Catalogue des bibliographies générales et particulières, par ordre alphabétique d'auteurs.... Séconde partie. Répertoire des mêmes bibliographies par ordre alphabétique des matières. Paris, 1883. Pp. vi, [2], 773, [1].

——. ——. Supplément. Paris, 1887. Pp. [2], 354.

For reviews see Phil. Min., Le Livre, IV (1883), 400-402, VIII (1887), 525-526; C. A. C[utter], Library Journal, VIII (1883), 104-105, XII (1887), 305; Henri Stein, Bulletin critique, V (1883), 265-269, IX (1888), 89-95; The Nation, XXXVI (June 21, 1883), 535-536; Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, I (1884), 35-36.

Vorstius, Joris. See Index bibliographicus; Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens; Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie.

Index of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

- Besterman, Theodore, 35, 114, 115-122, 123, 133, 134, 135, 137

- Beughem, Cornelius a, 44-45, 134, 137
- Bibliographia bibliographica, 105-106, 137
- Bibliographic Index, 108, 138

- Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens, 106, 138

- Bohatta, Hanns, Walter Funke, and Franz Hodes, 124-125, 138

- Bolduan, Paul, 16-18, 19, 132, 135, 138

- Collison, R. L., 127, 138

- Courtney, W. P., 111-113, 116, 133, 139

- Delandine, A. F., 71-72, 139

- Dudinck, Jodocus a, 21-23, 131, 139

- Durey de Noinville, J. D., 57-58, 124, 132, 139

- Ferguson, John, 48, 110-111, 139

- Funke, Walter. See Bohatta, Hanns

- Gesner, Conrad, 4-13, 16, 19, 21, 80, 121, 123, 131, 132, 135, 139

- Godet, Marcel. See Index bibliographicus

- Grundtvig, Vilhelm, 95, 113-115, 118, 130

- Hodes, Franz. See Bohatta, Hanns

- Horne, T. H., 69-71, 72

- Hoecker, Rudolf. See Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens

- Hortzschansky, Adalbert. See Bibliographie des Bibliothek- und Buchwesens

- Index bibliographicus, 107, 139-140

- Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekwesens, 106, 140

- Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie, 107-108, 140

- Jerome, St., 1-3

- Josephson, A. G. S., 76-77, 95-96, 114, 123, 129-130, 140

- Krüsike, J. C., 140-141

- Labbé, Philip, 3-4, 21, 23-39, 47-50, 51, 80, 95, 98, 121, 123, 131-132, 135, 141-142

- Literarisches Beiblatt der Zeitschrift (later: zum Jahrbuch) des deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schrifttum, 106, 142

- Malclès, L.-N., 125-127, 142

- Moëtte, Charles, 45, 63, 142

- Namur, J. P., 72-76, 78, 98, 123, 142

- Neu-eröffnete Bibliothec, Die, 50-53, 59, 142-143

- Peignot, Gabriel, 64-69, 72, 95, 98, 108, 109, 116, 121, 124, 133, 143

- Petzholdt, Julius, 16, 77-91, 95, 100, 109, 110, 116, 121, 124, 133, 135, 143

- Placcius, Vincent, 37

- Psaume, Etienne, 71-72, 143

- Sabin, Joseph, 91-95, 97, 98, 133, 143
- San José, Michael a, 56-57, 124, 143
- Spach, Israel, 13-16, 19, 131, 135, 143-144
- Spitzel, Theophilus, 37-39, 144
- Stein, Henri, 95, 100-103, 121, 133, 144
- Sweerts, Francis, 18-19, 131-132, 135, 144

- Teissier, Antoine, 4, 40-44, 80, 95, 98, 123, 132, 135, 144-145

- Totok, Wilhelm and Rolf Weitzel, 127-129, 145

- Unger, J. G., 53-56, 145

- Vallée, Léon, 95-100, 133, 145

- Vorstius, Joris, 107, 108, 114, 134, 144

- Weitzel, Rolf. See Totok, Wilhelm

- Wilson Co., H. W. See Bibliographic Index

FOOTNOTES:

[1] St. Jerome has in mind the De illustribus grammaticis and De rhetoribus by Suetonius. For a discussion of Latin writers of biobibliography see Wilhelm Ludwig Schmidt, De Romanorum imprimis Suetonii arte biographica (Diss.; Marburg, 1891).

[2] Hermippus of Smyrna wrote on legislators, the Seven Sages, and the pupils of Isocrates. He or another Hermippus wrote a De viris illustribus, which is probably the book intended by St. Jerome. For more information about Hermippus and the other writers mentioned in this passage see Joannes Jonsius, De scriptoribus historiae philosophiae (Frankfurt a.M., 1659) and such a modern authority as Wilhelm von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (6th ed., Munich, 1920). I recommend Jonsius because he makes clear the bibliographical aspect of these writers. There is no adequate account of classical Greek and Latin bibliographical writings.

[3] Antigonus, who is often cited by Diogenes Laertius in his biobibliography of philosophers, wrote a general biobibliography that is now lost.

[4] Satyrus wrote a De viris illustribus in dialogue that may have been Plutarch's model.

[5] The polymath Aristoxenus is credited with a book on the writers of tragedy. This may be the book intended here. Plutarch admired his biographical dictionary. See Jonsius, pp. 73-78.

[6] Pliny (Natural History, 35.2) cites Varro's De imaginibus which contained five hundred or more imagines or characterizations, probably with illustrations. Varro also wrote accounts of poets, rhetoricians, and libraries.

[7] Like the following authors, Santra wrote a biobibliographical dictionary.

[8] Quoted from the edition of St. Jerome's De viris illustribus in J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca ecclesiastica, Hamburg, 1718, p. 13. I have used this edition because it contains useful notes on these authors.

[9] A pupil of the Milesian historian Hellanicus and author of an account of the ancestors of the men who fought at Troy, a catalogue of tribes and cities, and a book on poets and sophists.

[10] The author of various geographical treatises, among which I see nothing clearly bibliographical in nature. See a very interesting account in Jonsius, pp. 173-175, which begins by raising the question whether Agatharcides is to be considered a writer of bibliography.

[11] The author of a general biobibliography.

[12] The author of a book on famous women.

[13] The author of four books on famous men and four books on famous women.

[14] A disciple of Aristotle and the author of a collection of biographies.

[15] The author of a treatise on Heraclea in Pontus and its famous men. This is an early instance of a regional biobibliography.

[16] See Bibliotheca bibliothecarum (Rouen, 1672), p. 40, Leipzig, 1682, p. 67. I have not tried to run down Labbé's reference to "St. Jerome, p. 62." Something has gone wrong with Labbé's introductory words: "Ex antiquis Damastae Sigiaeo facile quoque fuerit plures qui de vitis Eruditorum Hominum scripserunt, puta Agatharcidem Cnidium,..." The sense is, however, obvious.

[16a] For the bibliographical details of the bibliographies of bibliographies cited in this essay see the "Bibliography."

[17] Fols. 1a-42b. This meaning of grammatica (grammar) is still seen in the titles of such books as Cardinal Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London, 1870); Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science (London, 1892); and Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1945). For other references see A New English Dictionary, s.v. "grammar," 6.

[18] "De varijs," fols. 18a-30b.

[19] There is an unpublished translation by Conrad Clauser. Gesner gives this information and the information in the four following notes. I have quoted it to show his careful procedure as a bibliographer.

[20] Stephanus Niger (fl. 1498) has translated a large portion and there is also, it is said, a translation by Hieronymus Parisetus (1520-1600). A complete translation, which is said to exist in Italy, has not yet been printed.

[21] Fragments are extant, and scraps have been printed in Heraclides Ponticus, De furtis poetarum. [This is a reference to Heraclitus (sic) Ponticus, Allegoriae in Homeri fabulas ... Conradi Gesnero interprete (Basel, 1544. MH)].

[22] Except for Melanchthon's translation of Book VII, c. 6, this is not available in translation.

[23] Rodolfus Gualtherus has translated Pollux. Both the Latin and the Greek Onomasticon have been printed. The Greek Onomasticon has a Latin and a very rich Greek index.

[24] This is a reference to fols. 321a-322b.

[25] "Cur autem illorum, qui Varia scripserunt (quibus etiam Locos communes adnumero) potius quam illorum qui certum quodpiam argumentum tractaverunt, capita Pandectis nostris inseruerim, haec causa est: quoniam in uno argumento qui quaerendum sit facile intelligitur, in variis non idem."

[26] This is evidently the anonymous Miscellanea ex diversis historiographis, oratoribus et poetis excerptis (Paris: Joannes Gormont, 1519), which I cite from G. W. Panzer, Annales, VIII (Nuremberg, 1800), 59, No. 1122, or the [1520] edition, for which see Panzer, VIII, 69, No. 1230.

[27] He gives no precise reference, but intends the reader to turn to fols. 192b-194b.

[28] This is Ludovico Ricchieri (1450-1520), Lectionum antiquarum libri triginta (Basel, 1517). There are later editions.

[29] Again he gives no precise reference. The pertinent passage is Liber I, Titulus XVIII (fols. 32b-34b).

[30] I can find no reference to a publication of this book. See Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca (ed. Josias Simler; Zurich, 1583), s.v. "Bassiani Landi," where we read "praeterea fertur scripsisse librum cui titulus est Epiphyllides."

[31] Hugh G. Dick calls attention to some interesting remarks on the development of pagination as an answer to the needs of scholars in P. S. Allen, Erasmus Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford, 1934), pp. 32-34.

[32] He promises to give a longer list of library catalogues and redeems his promise on fols. 29a-29b, where he adds a reference to his discussion of libraries in classical antiquity in the preface to the Bibliotheca universalis. Such cross-references show Gesner's control of his materials.

[33] Fols. 22b-23a (misnumbered 24a).

[34] I do not find this book by Anton Rabe or Zythogallus (1501-1553) in the catalogues of the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Nationale. C. G. Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrtenlexikon, I (Leipzig, 1750), cols. 2125-2126, cites "argutissima quaeque apophthegmata ex Erasmi operae selecta," without date or place of publication. For a reference to the edition of Magdeburg, 1534, see Bibliotheca Belgica, Series 2, Vol. VIII (Ghent, n.d. [1891-1923]), p. 377. I am indebted to Dr. Arnold Weinberger for these references.

[35] This is Thomas Palmer, Hibernicus, whose Flores omnium pene doctorum was published in several editions with varying titles in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

[36] A short title for the Pandectarum Veteris et Novi Testamenti libri XXII (Strassburg, 1532). There are other editions.

[37] "De Bibliothecis, id est, catalogus scriptorum ordine literarum; deinde etiam de locis librorum [,] custodia, insignibus, & structoribus eorum." A literal translation of the first two words would be "Concerning Bibliographies," or "On Bibliographies," but this does not seem to me to be current English style and I have preferred to give a modern idiomatic rendering here and elsewhere of titles in foreign languages. I have also quoted the original titles.

[38] Compare such modern works as Arnim Graesel, Grundzüge der Bibliothekslehre (Leipzig, 1890 and later eds.); Svend Dahl (ed.), Haandbog i Bibliotekskundskab (Copenhagen, 1912 and later eds.); Fritz Milkau (ed.), Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft (Leipzig, 1931-1940).

[39] For Albertus Magnus see George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II (Baltimore, 1937), 937 and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, II (New York, 1923), 692-717. The Speculum astronomiae, which Gesner has in mind, has also been ascribed to Roger Bacon, but this is probably an error.

[40] See an important article on sixteenth-century legal bibliography: Wilhelm Fuchs, "Die Anfänge der juristischen Bibliographie im 16. Jahrhundert," Archiv für Bibliographie, Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, II (1929), 44-54.

[41] These are bibliographies of Latin dialogues (a favorite Renaissance literary form for exposition and controversy), epistolographers, bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, Greek grammars, and Hebrew grammars.

[42] Spach knows only the editions of 1494 and 1531 and overlooks the largest and best edition of 1546.

[43] The date should be 1557. He does not know the first or the latest edition of this book.

[44] See above, n. 35.

[45] See "Joan. Castelli, Catal. officinae Goltzianae." For references to Hubert Goltzius, a famous printer at Bruges in the second half of the sixteenth century, see Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des savans (Amsterdam, 1725), V, ii, p. 66; Michael Maittaire, Annales typographicae (The Hague, 1719-1741), III, 568; H. Marcel, "Hubert Goltzius, éditeur et imprimeur," Annales de la Société d'émulation pour l'étude de l'histoire de la Flandre (Bruges), LXVIII (1925), 21-34. Spach also cites "Joan. Oporini, Exuviae," a publisher's catalogue that, like the Goltzius catalogue, often appears in lists of bibliographies; see J. W. Spargo, "Some Reference Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXI (1937), 145. Book titles in quotation marks indicate books that I have not examined.

[46] "Stephanus, Francofurdiense emporium," which was published at [Geneva] in 1574 and translated by James Westfall Thompson, The Frankfort Book Fair. The Francofordiense emporium of Henri Estienne (Chicago, 1911).

[47] Muzio Pansa (not Pensa), Della libraria Vaticana (Rome, 1590. ICN).

[48] Catalogus Graecorum Codicum qui sunt in Bibl. Reip. Augustanae Vindelicae (Augsburg, 1595). For a reference to it see J. M. Francke, Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunavianae, I (Leipzig, 1750), i, 840. David Hoeschel compiled this catalogue, which was four times as large as the catalogue made twenty years earlier by [Hieronymus Wolff].

[49] Published at Vienna, but Spach gives no date. For many studies of Lazius see Karl Schottenloher, Bibliographie zur deutschen Geschichte im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, 1517-1585 (Leipzig, 1933-1940), I, 437-438 and V, 151. These do not seem to deal with the Catalogus.

[50] For an excellent account of this catalogue see E. A. Savage, "Notes on the Early Monastic Libraries of Scotland, with an account of the Registrum Librorum Angliae and of the Catalogus scriptorum of John Boston of Bury St Edmunds," Publications of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, XIV (1928), 1-46.

[51] See the edition entitled "Centum dicta, sive fructus librorum suorum" in Claudius Ptolemy, Opera (Basel, 1541. MH). The British museum, catalogue lists it as Centiloquium.

[52] I cannot follow further the only clue to information that I have discovered. In J. C. Fischer (ed.), B. G. Struve, Introductio in notitiam rei litterariae (Frankfurt a.M., 1754), p. 394, where libraries in Germany are discussed, I read "Stolpensis: Chr. August. Freybergii Programma de Bibliotheca Stolpensi, Dresdae 1723. Eiusdem Programmata VIII. de Scholarum praesertim Saxonicarum, hyeme, (in quibus simul Bibliothecae Stolpensis memorabilia sistit,) Dresdae, 1726. 1738. 4-to." No doubt Freyberg mentioned Bolduan.

[53] J. F. Jugler (ed.), B. G. Strove, Bibliotheca historiae litterariae selecta (4 v.; Jena 1754-1785), I, 88.

[54] Bibliotheca philosophica, pp. 644-648.

[55] 2d ed.; [Oxford] and London, [1936].

[56] See pp. 56-58.

[57] I am indebted to Johannes Vogt, Catalogus librorum rariorum (5th ed., Frankfurt a.M., 1793, p. 313) for these details. The reference to Groschufius is "Praefat. de Libris rarior. p. 16." This is the Nova librorum rariorum conlectio, qui vel integri inseruntur, vel adcurate recensentur (5 pts.; Halle, 1709-1716).

[58] Valerius Andreas, Bibliotheca Belgica (editio renovata; Louvain, 1643), p. 593.

[59] For references to the use of Kalcoven's name by the Blaeus see Emil Weller, Die falschen und fingirten Druckorte (Leipzig, 1858), p. v and "Jost Kalcoven," Serapeum, XXVIII (1867), 303-304. The subject needs more investigation.

[60] For the Latin title see the "Bibliography" below.

[61] Palatium Apollonis ac Palladis, h. e. [hoc est] Descriptio praecipuarum bibliothecarum veteris et novique seculi. Louis Jacob undertook and completed a book on this subject; see the Traicté des plus belles bibliothèques (Paris, 1644).

[62] Mundus Marianus, hoc est: Specificatio omnium mundi locorum, in quibus B. Virgo Deipara miraculose colitur. This work and Dudinck's promised Synopsis bibliothecae Marianae were duplicated by Hippolytus Marraccius (1604-1675). His Bibliotheca Mariana (Rome, 1648) filled the place of the Synopsis. Marraccius, who gave his life to the service of the Virgin, tried vainly to find Dudinck's books. He said in 1648 of his search for the Mundus and Synopsis: "Illa etenim licet ardentissima concupitata, videre adhuc non meruit" (Bibliotheca Mariana, p. 813). If Marraccius, whose brother listed one hundred and fifteen works from his pen, published and unpublished, all dealing with the Virgin, could not find Dudinck's books soon after their supposed appearance, we cannot hope to be more successful. The Mundus Marianus is now replaced by E. M. Oettinger, Iconographia Mariana oder Versuch einer Literatur der wunderthätigen Marienbilder, geordnet nach alphabetischer Reihenfolge der Orte, in welchen sie verehrt werden (Leipzig, 1852). Only three fascicles of L. Clugnet, Bibliographie du culte local de la Vierge Marie. France (Paris, 1902-1903) were published.

[63] This publication in 1653 or, perhaps more correctly, 1652 explains why Labbé called the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1664 a second edition. This designation confuses A. G. S. Josephson; see his Bibliographies of Bibliographies, p. 7. For the details of these publications see Augustin and Aloys de Backer and Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus (nouvelle edition; Brussels, 1893), IV, cols. 1319-1320, No. 68 and cols. 1322-1323, No. 71.

[64] This and subsequent references will be found in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum under the writer's Christian name. The pagination of the editions varies and a page reference would be useful for only one edition. I have usually made no effort to identify the authors and books, since the quotations concern Labbé's bibliographical technique and not the books.

[65] His name is often misspelled. He is the author of a famous catalogue of the Ingolstadt university library that employed a novel scheme of classification. All or almost all the references to Ferg and the catalogue have been made at second-hand. I have seen half a dozen different dates of publication. I believe it was never published. At any rate, the manuscript catalogue by Ferg was carried off in 1945 "by unknown persons in an unknown direction" from the place where the manuscripts belonging to the library of the University of Munich were stored.

[66] Typical examples are the entries in the eighth index, where one should supply the name Arnoldus Wion in the blank space after "Benedictina" and Christophorus Ferg in the blank space after "Ingolstadiensis." I have not discovered what name Labbé meant to put in the blank space after "Philologica."

[67] I cannot find Thomas de Malvenda among the bibliographers of the Dominicans, Thomas De Minis among the bibliographers of the Camaldolese order, and Thomas Reinesius, the polymath, in the places where they should respectively appear. They are in the text.

[68] See, for example, the article "Juris Auctores."

[69] For example, the reference to "Thomas Reinesius ep. 38" in the article Joannes Frinsheimius was not very difficult to find in 1664. Only the Epistolae addressed to Caspar Hoffmann and C. A. Rupert (Leipzig, 1660) were then in print. Henri Stegemeier has kindly verified the reference, which will be found on p. 311, in the copy at the University of Illinois. There are, to be sure, other collections of letters by Reinesius, but these were published after 1664.

[70] For the reference to "Theatri" see Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, ed. 1688, p. 217 and ed. 1682, p. 366.

[71] See the previously cited entry under Joannes Frinsheimius (sic). It concerns Freinsheim's edition of Quintus Curtius Rufus. The editor gives a bibliography of recent studies on Alexander the Great.

[72] See as examples the entries Bostonus; Buriensis; Martinus Salius; and Claudius Flemmus.

[73] The authority cited in the article on Claudius Flemmus is "in Parnasso Euganeo," which a modern reader will probably find difficult to identify immediately. Labbé is referring to Jacobus Philippus Tomasinus (Jacopo Filippo Tomasini, 1597-1654), Parnassus Euganeus sive de scriptoribus ac literatis huius aevi claris (Padua, 1647. 28 leaves). In the article on Tomasinus Labbé damns the Parnassus wholeheartedly: "In fact, this book is so full of errors [I use the modern bibliographer's cliché] that one scarcely finds three or four articles correct and complete. (Verum hic liber mendosissimus est, ut vix tria quatuorve nomina sincera atque integra reperias)." This Parnassus, which is the only one that Labbé knew or, at least, chose to cite, is different from Tomasini's Parnassus Euganeus sive museum clarissimorum virorum et antiquorum monumentorum simulacris exornatum (Padua, 1647. 10 leaves). The first is a collection of biobibliographies, and the second is an account of the portraits on the walls of Tomasini's villa. For comment on these works see Christian Bruun's essay on Tomasini's friend, Johan Rode, in Paa Hundrede-aarsdagen efter at det store kongelige bibliothek blev erklaeret for at vaere et offentligt bibliothek (Copenhagen, 1893), p. 45.

[74] This remark shows that Meibom did not understand the subject indexes. Meibom's review does not display any clear understanding of what Labbé had written. It is perhaps pertinent to say that Vogler's book is not a bibliography of bibliographies, although Theodore Besterman includes it in A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, 2d ed., I, 322. There are copies of the 1670 edition in ICN, NN, and my own library. This passage is quoted from the edition published at Helmstadt in 1691, of which there is an enlargement from a microfilm in my library; see pp. 160-161.

[75] Meibom is correct in his objection, but (it seems to me) somewhat captious. The title of the book is deceptive and if Labbé had cited it in full, he would have given his reader some useful information and would have made clear that the book belonged to a class that his contemporaries often regarded as closely akin to bibliographies. The title is: Bibliotheca, seu cynosura peregrinantium, hoc est, Viatorium ... in duas partes digestum: quarum prior ... complectitur I. Centuriam cum decuria problematum apodemicorum. II. Multiplicia peregrinationis praecepta. III. Methodum rerum explorandum. IV. Indicem viarum, etc. Posterior pars exhibet I. Geographiam apodemicam. II. Historiographicam apodemicam. III. Diarium apod[emicum] perpetuum, etc. IV. Precationes et hymnos apodemicas (Ulm, 1643-1644. MH [Prior Pars only]). The book is curious and little-known.

[76] Vestibulum ante ipsum nobis hic quasi Hodegeta & Janus Patulcis excubat Philippus Labbaeus. Quoted from Morhof, Polyhistor, I, c. 18 (ed. Lübeck, 1747, I, 196). The first edition of the Polyhistor appeared in 1688.

[77] See Baillet, Jugemens des savans (Amsterdam, 1725), IIA, p. 24. This book was first published in 1685-1686. For Sallo's review see Le Journal des sçavans, Feb. 2, 1665.

[78] Morhof cites Placcius's plan in the passage quoted in n. 76 above.

[79] Sacra bibliothecarum illustrium arcana retecta (Augsburg, 1668. ICN), p. 344. He says of his additions: "Quam multa in ea [Bibliotheca bibliothecarum] Bibliothecarum pariter ac Authorum qui de iisdem scripsere nomina desideruntur, ex nostro hocce supplemento apparebit" (p. 351).

[80] A copy in the Bibliothèque nationale. For a bibliographical description see Augustin and Aloys De Backer and Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus (nouvelle édition; Brussels, 1894), V, col. 1535, No. 44.

[81] See Reimann, Versuch, I, 227 and 229. There are copies of this book in the University of Chicago Library (in part, at least, a later edition) and my own library. Reimann's mention of the wretched Bibliographia shakes one's faith in his critical judgment. The Bibliographia, an unauthorized edition of J. H. Boecler's orientation lectures at Strassburg, was first printed in 1677 and reprinted in 1696. It deserved neither publication nor reprinting. In 1715 J. G. Krause added new materials from Boecler's lecture notes and improved the quality of the critical remarks without remedying the bibliographical defects. This new edition was entitled Bibliographica critica (Leipzig, 1715). There are copies of the 1677 and 1715 editions in the Newberry Library and in my own library.

[82] See Catalogus, p. [4]. He estimates the number of bibliographies in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum at eight hundred and in his own book at fifteen hundred.

[83] See as examples the entries Rudolphus Hospinianus (Catalogus, p. 285) and Samuel Rachelius (Catalogus, p. 287).

[84] He writes Guilielmus Ersengrenius (Catalogus, p. 187). The name is Eysengreinus. He omits Labbé's incomplete reference to a philological bibliography; see note 10 in this chapter.

[85] In casually turning the pages of the Catalogus, I note Moroffius for Morhoffius (p. 39), the omission of Claudius Chelemont (p. 49) in the list of Cistercian bibliographers (p. 296), Christophorus Hemdrich for C. Hendreich (p. 45), Ioannes Seldemel for Ioannes Seldenus (p. 361). Alfonsus de Roxas (p. 9) and the Orden de la Merced are not mentioned in the bibliographies of religious orders (pp. 295-296).

[86] Theodore Besterman estimates the number at 3000, but this must include the biographies. A generous guess would be 1500.

[87] See A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue (London, 1926), No. 13582. Teissier calls him Hugo Hollandus for some reason. Since the Auctuarium is arranged according to first names, this is an annoying mistake.

[88] Ioannis Rossi Antiquarii Warwicensis historia Regum Angliae. E codice MS. in Bibliotheca Bodleiana descripsit, notisque & indice adornauit Thom. Hearne (Oxford, 1716).

[89] The numbers are actually much larger because I have, for convenience, cited either the Catalogus or the Auctuarium as an illustration and the work that I do not cite gives more references in all these categories, except the last.

[90] See Auctuarium, p. 297, citing a book by Christian Serpitius. H. B. Wheatley overlooked it in his excellent study, Of Anagrams (London, 1862).

[91] For references to these books see Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (2d ed.; [Oxford] and London, [1936]) and A World Bibliography of Bibliographies (2d ed.; [Oxford] and London, 1947-1949).

[92] For a contemporary reference to the book see Teissier, Auctuarium, p. 53. Beughem made the announcement in his Bibliotheca juridica & politica (Amsterdam, 1680), p. [vii]. The subtitle translated above reads in the original: Enarratio ac plenior Enumeratio, omnium Librorum, Operumque quae sub titulo Bibliothecae, Catalogi, Indicis, Anthenarum &c. hactenus typis prodierunt. I have used a copy of the Bibliotheca juridica in my own library.

[93] See ed. 1664, pp. 21-22, eds. 1672 and 1678, pp. 30-31, ed. 1682, pp. 50-51.

[94] The only parallel that occurs to me is in John Ferguson's book that is discussed below.

[95] The noun "bibliotheca" is to be understood here and in conjunction with the following proper adjectives in his list. By Bibliotheca Augustana Labbé meant the library at Augsburg. At the time when he was writing, several catalogues of manuscripts and books in this library had been published. He could have referred to them by this short title made up for the purpose.

[96] Labbé refers to the library at Fleury and, in particular, to Joannes a Bosco (Jean du Bois-Olivier), Floriacensis vetus bibliotheca benedictina (3 pts; Lyons, 1605. Copy in the Bibliothèque nationale). For accounts of this library see Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries (London, 1859), I, 281-287, 2d ed. (Newport, Isle of Wight, 1885), pp. 54-60; E. G. Vogel, "Die Bibliothek der Benediktinerabtei Saint Benoit oder Fleury an der Loire," Serapeum, V (1844), 17-29, 46-49.

[97] For the unpublished catalogue of the university library at Ingolstadt see Chapter II, n. 65.

[98] I am not sure what Labbé means. He may be referring to the Ambrosian Library or to Cardinal Federicus Borromaeus, Meditamenta literaria (Milan, 1613), which contains an autobibliography. I cite this book, which I have not seen, from the Bibliotheca Cyprianica, sive Catalogus liborum historico-theologicorum, quos Ern. Sal. Cyprianus ... conquisivit (Gotha, 1726), p. 66.

[99] There were several early catalogues of the Bodleian Library.

[100] The library of Jacques de Thou and the De Thou family; see J. Quesnel (comp.), Bibliotheca Thuana (2 v.; Paris, 1679. ICN).

[101] The Royal Library at Paris.

[102] The Imperial Library at Vienna.

[103] The ducal library at Munich. See, for example, the Catalogus graecorum codicum manuscriptorum, qui adservantur in inclyta serenissimi utriusque Bavarice Ducis Bibliotheca (Ingolstadt, 1602. CS).

[104] Perhaps Labbé is referring to Thomas Gratianus (d. 1627), Anastasis Augustiniana in qua scriptores ordinis eremitarum s. [sive] qui abhinc saeculis aliquot vixerunt, una cum neotericis, in seriem digesti sunt (Antwerp, 1613) or Cornelius Curtius, Virorum illustrium ex ordine eremitarum D. Augustini elogia (Antwerp, 1636). I have not seen the first of these and a copy of the second is in my library. I do not find any bibliography of the Augustinians that might have been available to Labbé was entitled bibliotheca.

[105] Petrus Lucius (Pierre de Licht, d. 1603), Carmelitana bibliotheca, sive Illustrium aliquot Carmelitanae religionis scriptorum, & eorum operum cathalogus (Florence, 1593).

[106] Petrus Borellus (Pierre Borel, ca. 1620-1689), Bibliotheca chimica (Paris, 1654).

[107] Labbé is probably referring to one or another of the preacher's guides by such men as Louis (or Jean) Bayl, Pierre Blanchot, Francois Combefis, and G. B. Pontanus, all of whom wrote before the publication of the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum in 1664. Their works were entitled Bibliotheca concionatoria.

[108] Labbé is referring to various early legal bibliographies by such men as Laurent Bochel, Henri Justel, and Guillaume Voel.

[109] Georg Draud (d. 1635), Bibliotheca classica (Frankfurt a.M., 1611, 2d ed., 1625). See a copy of the first edition of this classified universal bibliography with an index of authors' names in the Newberry Library and copies of both editions in my library. The date of Draud's death is disputed, but Richard Browne, who has investigated it, prefers 1635.

[110] Antonius Possevinus (Antonio Possevino, 1534-1611), Bibliotheca selecta, qua agitur de ratione studiorum in historia, in disciplinis, in salute omnium procuranda (Rome, 1593). There are copies of this or a later edition in the Newberry Library and my own library.

[111] Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), Bibliotheca universalis (Zurich, 1545-1555). The identification of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that are cited by title only is often very difficult. I do not feel sure that I have always hit upon the book that Labbé was thinking of.

[112] See ed. 1704, pp. 294-298. Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec has a title of a sort that was popular at this time. The earliest parallel that I have noted is J. U. M., Neu-eröffnete Schaz-Kammer verschiedener Natur- und Kunst-Wunder (Nuremberg, 1689). See also P. I. M. [Paul Jacob Marperger], Die neu-eröffnete Kauffmanns-Börse (Hamburg, 1704) and I. M. P. a W., Die neu-eröffnete Berg-Werck (Hamburg, 1704). The latest example that I have found is the anonymous Neu-eröffnete Vorraths-Kammer allerhand rarer und nützlicher Kunst-Stücke (Frankfurt a.M., 1760). Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec is obviously a piracy containing an unnamed professor's lectures on the history of scholarship.

[113] For a description of this book see Jakob Burckhard, Historia Bibliothecae Augustae (Leipzig, [1744]), I, 148-150. For an ascription to Samuel Clodius see Otto von Heinemann, Die herzogliche Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (2d ed.; Wolfenbüttel, 1894), p. 72, n. 2 and Adelung's supplement to C. G. Jöcher, Gelehrtenlexikon, II (Leipzig, 1787), 376-377. I am indebted to Dr. Arnold Weinberger and Professor Heinrich Schneider for these references. The date 1650 is probably wrong. The foregoing authorities give the date 1660. The Catalogi Bibliothecae Thottianae, VI (Copenhagen, 1798), 386, No. 972, cites a copy with the date 1659. The Sciagraphia is strangely lacking in the first book to which one turns: Hermann Conring, De Bibliotheca Augusta (Helmstadt, 1661; "editio nova," 1684), which is reprinted in J. A. Schmid and J. J. Mader, De bibliothecis atque archivis (Helmstadt, 1702-1705). In this famous letter Conring discusses a proposal to make a catalogue of the books at Wolfenbüttel and reaches the conclusion that it cannot be executed. His neglect of his predecessor is curious.

[114] For a reference to this book see Petzholdt, p. 584 (he did not see the book). The author's name is Fuiren. There is a copy in the Royal Library at Copenhagen.

[115] This is Michael Kirsteinius (Michael Kirsten), Memoria bibliothecae Hamburgensis (Hamburg, [1651]). There are folio and quarto editions. For references to it see J. F. Jugler (ed.), B. G. Struve, Bibliotheca historiae litterariae selecta (Jena, 1754-1763), pp. 483-484 and the British Museum catalogue.

[116] This book, if it was ever printed, has probably disappeared. I can find no reference to a copy of it. In his Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, Philip Labbé continues the title as follows: "quarum prima omnium Scriptorum qui artem Medicam excoluerunt nomina, aetatem, libros, &c. continet; secunda per classes rerum praecipuas ac titulos artium digesta cujuvis materiae Medicae, &c. Dilingiae apud Gaspardum Sutorem in folio." I do not know where he found this information. Dr. Arnold Weinberger tells me that Bartholomäus Moser (d. 1678), "fürstlich augsburgischer Rat und Leibmedikus," wrote a biography of Francis Bacon (1645) and made a gift to the University of Dillingen in 1676. See Thomas Specht, Geschichte der ehemaligen Universität Dillingen (Freiburg i.B., 1902), I, 405.

[117] Cunibert Mohlberg collects information about this catalogue; see "Nachrichten von belgischen Sammelkatalogen des 15./16. Jahrhunderts," Historisches Jahrbuch, XXXIII (1912), 365-375. In "Quellen zur Feststellung und Geschichte mittelalterlicher Bibliotheken, Handschriften und Schriftsteller," Historisches Jahrbuch, XL (1920), 44-106, Paul Lehmann adds more information and corrects Mohlberg in some details. Lehmann makes a very interesting attempt to reconstruct the catalogue from quotations.

[118] I have been unable to see any books by this author and have been unable to collect much information about them or the author. Groeningius announced a Polyhistor bibliothecarius in 1700, which was to deal with law after the fashion of Morhof's "Polyhistor." He planned the Fasti rei litterariae as a continuation of Morhof and published it in 1702 under the title of Relationes rei publicae litterariae, but this was only a sample of what he had in his mind. See J. F. Jugler (ed.), B. G. Struve, Bibliotheca historiae litterariae selecta (Jena, 1754-1763), pp. 52-54. Petzholdt cites (p. 658) legal bibliographies by Groeningius and a Bibliotheca universalis, of which they formed a part.

[119] The book is in two parts. The list of dictionaries in the second part will not be discussed here, but see a contemporary parallel cited by Léon Vallée (p. 268, No. 3145: Joh. Heumann) and earlier bibliographers of dictionaries as cited by Teissier. The preface (pp. 1-66) to the Dissertation sur les bibliothèques is an account of ancient and modern libraries. I do not recommend it.

An excellent survey of theological reference works in the preface to J. G. Walch, Bibliotheca theologica selecta (Jena, 1757-1765) is sometimes called a list of books entitled bibliotheca. It contains many such books, but is not a list of them.

[120] "Table alphabétique tant des Ouvrages publiés sous le titre de Bibliothèque; que des Catalogues imprimés des Cabinets de France & des Pays étrangers," pp. 67-156.

[121] See pp. 75, 93-96, and 101-102, respectively.

[122] See pp. 114-116.

[123] See pp. 127-130.

[124] A few examples will suffice. Bucardi (i.e., Burkhardi) Gotthelffi Struvii appears under the letter "B" (p. 81) and later ("Philosophique," p. 137) loses his family name. In the entry "Belgique" (p. 75) the third item is credited to "id." which refers back to Valerius Andreas, but the book meant is by J. F. Foppens, whose name does not appear at all. A line or more has dropped out at the bottom of p. 83. The dates of publication are unreliable: Borellus, 1754 should be 1654 (p. 78); Justinianus, 1712 should be 1612 (p. 117); and Lambecius, 1610 should be 1710 (p. 118). Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum was printed in 1664, not 1674 (p. 118).

[125] I note (p. 155) a reference to an article on universal bibliographies in the Journal de Verdun, February, 1749, p. 89. I have not verified the reference.

[126] For identification and description of these bibliographies see Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (2d ed.; [Oxford] and London, [1936]) and Petzholdt.

[127] He probably consulted the many treatises on what was then called historia litteraria, but these were historical accounts of the development of the various disciplines rather than bibliographies. Two brief guides to these great specialized bibliographies are well hidden. They are Benjamin Hederich, Notitia auctorum antiqua & media, oder Leben, Schrifften, Editiones und Censuren der Biblischen und entweder noch gantz oder auch nur in considerablen Fragmentis vorhandenen fürnehmsten Griechischen und Lateinischen Kirchen-Scholastischen- und Profan-Scribenten (Wittenberg, 1714), "Einleitung," pp. 2-144 and G. C. Hamberger, Zuverlässige Nachrichten von den vornehmsten Schriftstellern vom Anfange der Welt bis 1500 (4 v.; Lemgo, 1756-1764), I, 1-54, "Erste vorläufige Abhandlung. Von der Kentnis der Schriftsteller." These very interesting and instructive compilations are selective guides to the best bibliographies and are intended to aid students. They are limited almost exclusively to bibliographies of classical Greek and Latin literature, church history, and the related disciplines. Since the books in which they appear deal only with authors and subjects belonging to the period before 1500 and the bibliographies are similarly limited in scope, the usefulness of the bibliographies is obviously confined to giving information about the best current reference works in a few fields. No doubt the abundant bibliographical information in such a work as Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (68 v.; Halle, 1732-1754) was sufficient for most scholarly needs.

[128] See Bibliotheca selectissima (Amsterdam, 1743), I, 340, No. 2985. There is a copy of this catalogue in the Newberry Library.

[129] For a discussion of these difficulties see H. B. Van Hoesen's review of the Bibliographic Index in the Library Quarterly, X (1940), 272-274.

[130] See a review by A. S., Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Literatur, 1812, pp. 644-656. The reviewer points out inaccuracies of various kinds, complains bitterly about the inconveniences of the alphabetical arrangement, and cites many lacking titles.

[131] Pp. 232-236.

[132] Pp. 249-252.

[133] Pp. 275-286.

[134] Pp. 470-472.

[135] Pp. 450-452.

[136] Pp. 263-274.

[137] Pp. 409-419.

[138] P. 427.

[139] He would have removed publishers' catalogues (p. 97 [Estienne] and p. 118 [Plantin]), a weekly catalogue of the booktrade (p. 103), various catalogues of libraries owned by institutions (pp. 101, 105). The last of these should have been put in the list on pp. 40-75.

[140] This section, which does not include biobibliographies, contains 1861 titles. There are 586 biobibliographies in the following, fifth section.

[141] For a description of this book, which was published in only twelve copies, see Petzholdt, p. 113. See an enlargement of a microfilm in the Newberry Library.

[142] See II, 26, No. 483; II, 131, No. 390; II, 121, No. 378.

[143] See II, 119, No. 7, where he cites "Sanderus, A. de scriptoribus Flandriae lib. III. Antv. 1624, in.-4.," but omits De Brugensibus eruditionis fama claris libri duo (Antwerp, 1624) and De Gandavensibus eruditionis fama claris libri tres (Antwerp, 1624).

[144] See II, 14-17, & 4, Nos. 268-312.

[145] See II, 140-167, Nos. 131-720.

[146] See "Bibliographies of Bibliographies," The Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of America, III (1911), 50-53.

[147] For brief comment on these bibliographies see below.

[148] In the eighteenth century J. M. Francke, who compiled the great Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunavianae (3 v.; Leipzig, 1750-1756), came, with the Bünau library, to the Dresden library. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century F. A. Ebert completed the Allgemeines bibliographisches Lexikon in the same library.

[149] Pp. 20-65.

[150] Leipzig, 1850; 2d ed., Brussels, 1854. These are many later indexes to biographies. See, as examples, Max Arnim, Internationale Personalbiographie, 1850-1935 (Leipzig, 1936) and a second edition (Leipzig, 1944-1952) that has been expanded backwards and forwards to cover the years between 1800 and 1943 and Luigi Ferrari, Onomasticon. Repertorio biobibliografico degli scrittori italiani dal 1500 al 1850 (Milan, 1947).

[151] I do not see what principle guides him in the choice of bibliographies published in the editions of an author's works. He does not include, for example, a very curious bibliography in Marcus Meibomius (ed.), Diogenes Laertius, De vitis, dogmatibus et apophthegmatibus clarorum philosophorum (Amsterdam, 1692). It is the first bibliography, as far as I know, to give systematically the locations of the books cited. The first example of a reference to the place where a book may be found is, I believe, in Giovanni Nevizzano (Johannes Nevizzanus), Quaestiones (ed. L. Gómez; Venice, 1525). I quote it from Wilhelm Fuchs, "Die Anfänge juristischer Fachbibliographie," Archiv für Bibliographie, Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, II (1929), 49.

[152] See, for example, a list of men named Alard (p. 167).

[153] "Petzholdt redivivus. Zur Theorie und Praxis eines allgemeinen internationalen Bibliographienverzeichnisses," Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, LXIV (1950), 413-438.

[154] I am of course aware that the Guide to Reference Books originally written by Alice Kroeger has passed through many editions and has had two subsequent editors. Its well-deserved success is no very strong argument for the usefulness of a classified arrangement. The Guide is, it must be recognized, a very special sort of reference work. It has been intended from the beginning to serve reference librarians and has been improved and enlarged for that use. In other words, it has always had very limited and highly trained readers familiar with its special methods. The latest edition is by Constance M. Winchell (7th ed.; Chicago, 1951).

[155] Prosopographia & heroum atque illustrium virorum totius Germaniae (Basel, 1656-1566); Teutscher Nation Heldenbuch (Basel, 1567-1570). The two editions differ somewhat in contents.

[156] Third ed.; Berlin, 1930, pp. 186-200.

[157] Arnold Kuczynski, Thesaurus libellorum reformationis illustrantium (Leipzig, 1870. ICN; MH. Supplement, 1874. MH); Oswald Weigel (comp.), Bibliothek J. K. F. Knaake. Katalog der Sammlung von Reformationsschriften des Begründers der Weimarer Lutherausgabe (6 pts. and list of prices. Leipzig, 1908. DLC [6 pts.]; ICN [complete]; MH [pt. 1]).

[158] These are, respectively: Bücherschatz der deutschen National-Litteratur des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1854. CU; MH); Verzeichniss von Büchern vorzüglich aus der Freih. v. Meuse-bach'schen Bibliothek (2 v.; Berlin, 1855, 1856. CU; MH); Karl Faber und Emil Hirsch, Sammlung Viktor Manheimer. Deutsche Barockliteratur von Opitz bis Brockes (Munich, 1927). The Prussian state library bought the Heyse and Meusebach collections.

[159] Examples of catalogues used for such purposes are the Bibliotheca Heberiana (13 pts.; London, 1834-1837. The thirteenth part was published in Brussels. ICN [pts. 1-12]); the Robert Hoe catalogue (5 v.; New York, 1911-1912); and the A. H. Huth catalogue (6 v.; London, 1911-1920).

[160] Illustrated Catalogue of the Notable Collection of Miss Susan Minns... (New York: American Art Association, 1922. ICN; MH). There are several other important catalogues of this sort in the bibliography of the Dance of Death.

[161] A Bibliography of Emblem Books, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2=Studies of the Warburg Institute, 3 (London, 1947).

[162] Historisches Jahrbuch, XL (1920), 49.

[163] See p. 712. This pamphlet (ICN) is an anonymous catalogue of the library of Tommaso Giuseppe Farsetti. G. A. E. Bogeng calls it a model piece of work; see Jahrbuch für Bücherkunde und Liebhaberei, II (1910), 44. In his treatise Die grossen Bibliophilen. Geschichte der Büchersammler und ihre Sammlungen (Leipzig, 1922), III, 30, Bogeng names Giacomo or Jacopo Morelli (1745-1819) as the author. Gustave Brunet, who has seen the Catalogo, says: "Ce petit volume de 207 pages offre l'inventaire raisonnée d'une collection fort importante de rarétés dramatiques appartenant au bailli Farsetti. De notes nombreuses et parfois d'une certain étendue lui donnent du prix" (Dictionnaire de bibliographie catholique [Paris, 1860], col. 631). Curiously enough, Frati's account of Italian book-collectors, bibliographers, and librarians does not include Farsetti and makes no mention of this and other catalogues of the Farsetti library in the article on Jacopo Morelli; see Dizionario biobibliografico dei bibliotecari e bibliofili italiani dal sec. XIV al XIX (Florence, 1933), pp. 379-384.

[164] Bibliography of Bibliographies (Chicago, 1901), pp. 25-26.

[165] Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, XX (1903), 406-407.

[166] Biblioteca bibliografica antica e moderna d'ogni classe e d'ogni natione (2 v.; Guastella, 1782-1783: MH). Those who cite this as a bibliography of bibliographies cannot have looked beyond the title page.

[167] He cites this book by the title Speciminis antiquarum lectionum supplementa decem, which is the title of the appendix to Labbé's book. See Chapter II, n. 63. Did Vallée actually see the work that he is citing?

[168] See, as examples, a list of characters performed on the stage by Jehn Bannister (No. 31) and a book on how to tell a Caxton (No. 844). Checklists of batrachia (No. 1687 bis) and other zoological genera (several entries after No. 1712) are accepted by Besterman, although he does not include these particular works because they are not separately published books.

[169] The description of the Catalogue de la bibliothèque du roy (No. 1336) is incorrect and incomplete, Nos. 2307 and 2398 bis should have been entered under the author's or the compiler's names. Francesco Agostino della Chiesa di Saluzzo (No. 2526) should not be under "F." Growaeus Sudovolgiensis (No. 2875) is William Crowe; see Donald Wing, A Short-Title Catalogue, C 7868. A cross-reference to Danz (No. 783) is needed under Walch (No. 6631).

[170] Bibliographies of classical authors found in standard editions might have been omitted; see No. 2652 (Aulus Gellius), Nos. 5897 and 5898 (Seneca). Bibliographies found in biographies (No. 4048) and bibliographies in doctoral dissertations (No. 2923) could be omitted without serious loss.

[171] See "Allemagne" (pp. 600-602), "Amérique" (pp. 603-604), and "Imprimerie" (pp. 685-687).

[172] Cited in the Bibliography below.

[173] "La synthèse de toutes les bibliographies publiées jusqu'à la fin de l'année 1896" (Introduction, p. [i]).

[174] See pp. 637-710. For a bibliography of such indexes see Vilhelm Grundtvig, Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, XX (1903), 428-430, 438-439. See such recent compilations as Norma Olin Ireland, An Index to Indexes. A subject bibliography of published indexes. Useful Reference Series, No. 67 (Boston, 1942); D. C. Haskell, Checklist of Cumulative Indexes to Individual Periodicals in the New York Public Library. (New York, 1942).

[175] See pp. 711-768. See a list of similar bibliographies in Grundtvig, pp. 439-440.

[176] See pp. 497-554. Compare my criticism of Petzholdt's list of bibliographies of individual authors, pp. 79-81, above.

[177] See Vilhelm Grundtvig, Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, XX (1903), 409, n. 2.

[178] Grundtvig, pp. 409-411.

[179] For example, he calls Bigmore and Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing, a rather poor piece of work (p. 438), but it has not yet been replaced and was recently found worthy of reprinting.

[180] He commends Johann Albert Fabricius, but fails to note that the last three volumes of the Bibliotheca graeca were not included in Harles's edition and that the first edition of the Bibliotheca latina was published in 1697 and not in 1728. See Stein, pp. 244-245. Petzholdt gives full and accurate information about these books.

[181] See p. 302. He might have added a reference to Enrico Narducci, "Intorno alia vita del conte Giammaria Mazzuchelli ed alla collezione de' suoi manoscritti ora posseduta della biblioteca vaticana," Giornale Arcadico, N.S. LII (1867). I have not seen this article, which is said to extend to sixty-four pages.

[182] Vorstius rightly believed in 1948 that the Index bibliographicus was entirely out of date; see his Ergebnisse und Fortschritte der Bibliographie in Deutschland seit dem ersten Weltkrieg, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, Beiheft 74 (Leipzig, 1948), p. 36. Besterman's third edition goes far to meet Vorstius's objections.

[183] The biographies of Enselin and Engelmann in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie are quite inadequate, and Wilhelm Müldener is not included in it. See several references to the Enslin and Engelmann firms in the Katalog der Bibliothek des Börsenvereins der deutschen Buchhändler (2 v.; Leipzig, 1885-1902), I, 221, II, 880.

[184] The United States Government might also be mentioned as a major supporter of bibliography.

[185] He is referring to lists of books printed on vellum or colored paper.

[186] He cites no example of such a bibliography.

[187] He is referring to lists of miniature books.

[188] He probably means bibliographies of religious orders but some of the examples could be put in other classes.

[189] Examples are bibliographies of editions of the Bible, the Imitatio Christi, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Tasso's Gerusaleme liberata.

[190] He includes dictionaries of pseudonyma.

[191] He includes bibliographies of obscene books here, but might perhaps have set up a separate class for them.

[192] This book by Ralph Thomas does not appear in the article "Pseudonyms."

[193] This does not appear in the list of bibliographical journals at the end of the article.

[194] I mention here Winslow L. Webber (b. 1898), Books about Books (Boston, 1937), primarily because of its title. This annotated list of books and articles useful to collectors of incunabula, English and American first editions and rarities, and Americana does not intend to be a general bibliography of bibliographies. Webber's comments are occasionally instructive or entertaining, but his references are distressingly careless. "Pretsholdt's" (p. 19) for "Petzholdt's" speaks for itself. The chapter "Magazine References" (pp. 136-162), which contains a survey of articles published in British and American journals between 1900 and 1937, is perhaps the most useful part of the book.

[195] "Bibliographie der Bibliographien—eine internationelle Angelegenheit," Archiv für Bibliographie, Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, I (1926), 188-200.

[196] Nordisk tidskrift för bok- und bibliotheksväsen, XXVII (1940), 61.

[197] Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, XX (1903), 405-444.

[198] See R. C. Christie's important remarks in "Biographical Dictionaries" in his Selected Essays and Papers (London, 1902), pp. 1-57.

[199] Nordisk tidskrift för bok- och biblioteksväsen, XXVII (1940), 65.

[200] See Joannes Rhodius's list of pseudonyms (col. 130). For the identification of this see Taylor and Mosher, p. 262.

[201] The example readiest to hand is a dissertation by Hugo Paas cited in Taylor and Mosher, p. 84, n. 14. This contains a good bibliography of German studies in the law of pseudonyms.

[202] The quoted passages will be found in the Preface to the Second Edition (I, p. [vii]) and the Introduction (I, p. xxiii).

[203] I choose examples from the first fascicle. The later fascicles do not rise above it in quality. Among general works on bibliography (pp. 3-4) the authors should have mentioned John Ferguson (see above, pp. 110-111) and David Murray, "Bibliography: its scope and method with a view of the work of a local bibliographical society," Records of the Glasgow Bibliographical Society, I (1912-1913), 1-105.

[204] Durey de Noinville might have been omitted.

[205] The category of bibliographies of bibliographies (pp. 3-4) includes bibliographical journals, general bibliographies, special bibliographies (which should have been put in later sections), and lists of medieval catalogues of libraries.

[206] For example, "J. B. Childs, Sixteenth-century books. Chicago, 1923" is inaccurate in details and lacks the essential information that it appeared in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XVII (1923), 73-152. Olga Pinto, Repertori bibliografici nazionali is a reprint from a journal and has been replaced by Le bibliografie nazionali (Milan, 1935), which is now in turn replaced by a second edition. The books by Alice B. Kroeger and Isadore G. Mudge are cited separately, but Miss Mudge's Guide to Reference Works is a revision of the earlier work. The earlier work need not have been mentioned.

[207] See references to an article on printed catalogues of Scotch libraries (p. 3), a Russian bibliography of library catalogues (p. 3), and several obscure studies of anonyma and pseudonyma (pp. 19-22).

[208] Bibliographies of bibliographies found in handbooks of library science and bibliographies of reference works (which may often be bibliographies) have not been included in this essay. There are good books of these kinds that might seem to have been overlooked. For example, Georg Schneider, Handbuch der Bibliographie (4th ed.; Leipzig, 1930) names only currently useful lists of books and no bibliographies of subjects. His account of the bibliographies of incunabula (pp. 85-103) is an excellent introduction to a difficult subject, but gives no idea of the historical development of these works and cites the earliest bibliographies (p. 92, n. 1) in such a way that only an expert can interpret the references. A good American parallel to Schneider's book is H. B. van Hoesen and F. K. Walter, Bibliography, practical, enumerative, historical: an introductory manual (New York, 1928); a new edition is in preparation. John Minto, Reference Books (2 v.; London, 1929-1931) and Constance M. Winchell, Guide to Reference Books (7th ed.; Chicago, 1951) are guides to reference books, not bibliographies of bibliographies, Frantz Calot and Georges Thomas, Guide practique de bibliographie (Paris, 1936; 2d ed., Paris, 1950) is often a helpful guide to information, but it is not a bibliography of bibliographies.

[209] The numbers refer to the edition of 1901.

[210] See especially Nos. 153-157. The section "Literatur und Miscellen" (No. 86) in the Neuer Anzeiger should have been listed under 1856, when the journal began, rather than under 1886, when it ceased to appear.

[211] Tosselli (No. 8) is Tonnelli. The description of F. Perennès, Dictionnaire de bibliographie catholique (No. 33) is incomplete.

[212] See his important article, "Petzholdt redivivus. Zur Theorie und Praxis eines allgemeinen internationalen Bibliographienverzeichnisses," Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, LXIV (1950), 413-438.

Transcriber's Note

Obvious typographical errors have been repaired.

P. 130: "criticism by Vilhelm Grundtvig that we have already discussed"; original displayed a footnote anchor after this text ([33]), for which there was no corresponding footnote. The anchor has been removed.

Footnote 202 had no anchor in the original text. Anchor placement assumed after block quote.

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Table of Contents

- A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

- Preface

- Chapter I Beginnings of the Bibliography of Bibliographies

- Chapter II The Bibliography of Bibliographies Comes of Age

- Chapter III Lists of Books Entitled "Bibliotheca"

- Chapter IV The Bibliography of Bibliographies Begins Anew

- Chapter V Bibliographies of Bibliographies as Periodical and Cooperative Enterprises

- Chapter VI Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of Bibliographies of Bibliographies
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE