A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

graphies as Periodical a

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 b

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

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 dow

ndex 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 the

bliographies. 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

f 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

ad 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 super

r 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 (183

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 o

He has no good place for bibliographies of translations, which do not fit easily in the ninth category of bibliographies according to subje

rt 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 inc

gh 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

liographical 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 wealt

f 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 bo

e bibliography of bibliographies continue and a new development that was foreshadowed in Sabin's restriction of his work to a single languag

nal 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

es 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 sur

atisfactory 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

eyond 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 ind

ipline 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 illustr

sion 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 remov

t issued in conjunction with another book.[200] Unless they have been catalogued as separate works, they are virtually impossible to identif

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

ram 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. Me

ording to which general catalogues of institutional libraries are omitted. J. B. Mencken's Gelehrten-Lexicon with the second and third editions by C. G. J?cher is cited (col. 331) as a universal bibliography, but J?cher'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 thei

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 pseudonym

ce 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 bet

, 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 editio

ss 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 fol

tok 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

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 L

thless 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 firs

s 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 alphab

isons 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.

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 autho

nish, 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 we

ts 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

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 h