3870 entries. Last updated May 17, 2013.

Bibliography Timeline

Theme

8,000 BCE – 1,000 BCE

The Word Bibliography is Derived from a Greek Word for Papyrus Circa 3,100 BCE – 3,050 BCE

The pith of the papyrus plant was used in Egypt at least as far back as the First dynasty, for boats, mattresses, mats and as a writing surface. The Egyptian word papyrus, meaning "that of the king," may indicate a Pharonic monopoly in the period.

"The English word papyrus derives, via Latin, from Greek πάπυρος papyros. Greek has a second word for papyrus, βύβλος byblos (said to derive from the name of the Phoenician city of Byblos). The Greek writer Theophrastus, who flourished during the 4th century BC, uses papuros when referring to the plant used as a foodstuff and bublos for the same plant when used for non-food products, such as cordage, basketry, or a writing surface. The more specific term βίβλος biblos, which finds its way into English in such words as bibliography, bibliophile, and bible, refers to the inner bark of the papyrus plant. Papyrus is also the etymon of paper, a similar substance" (Wikipedia article on Papyrus, accessed 01-03-2010).

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The Earliest Surviving Literary or Library Catalogues Circa 2,000 BCE

Two cuneiform tablets found at Nippur, (Mesopotamia; now Iraq) are inscribed with a list of Sumerian works of literature in no apparent order.  One has 68 titles, the other 48 works.  These represent the earliest surviving literary or library catalogues. 

Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (2001) 4. 

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The Earliest Surviving Detailed Bibliographical Entries Circa 1,400 BCE

Cuneiform tablets discovered at Hattusas (Hattusa), capital of the Hittite Empire in the Bronze Age, near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, contain detailed bibliographical entries.

"Each entry begins by giving the number of tablets that made up the work being recorded, just as modern catalogues give the number of volumes in a mult-volume publication. The entry identifies the work itself by giving the title, which may take the form of citing its first line, or by giving a capsule description of the contents. Then it tells whether the table marked the end of the work or not. At times the entry includes the name of the author or authors, or adds other useful information. . . . 

"In addition to noting missing tablets, the entries now and then provide information about shelving. There is an entry, for example, which in listing a work that happens to be in two tablets notes that 'they do not stand upright'; presumably, in the part of the palace holdings represented by this catalogue, most tablets were stored on edge while these two, exceptionally, lay flat. . . . The catalogue, it would seem, was of one particular collection that, to judge from the contents, was for use by the palace clergy. It would have been an invaluable tool: any priest who needed a ritual for a given problem, instead of picking up tablet after tablet to read the colophon if there was one, or some lines of text if there was not, had only to run an eye over the entries in the catalogue. It was a limited tool; the order of the entries is more or less haphazard (alphabetization, for example, lay over a millennium and a half in the future) and they give no indication of location. But it was, no question about it, a significant step beyond the simple listing of titles of the Nippur tablets. 

"The finds at Hattusas, in short, reveal the development of procedures for organizing a collection of writings. The palace holdings were certainly extensive enough to require them; the catalogue alone, representing as we have seen, just the clergy's working library, lists well over one hundred titles. . . ." (Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World [2001] 5-8).

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300 BCE – 30 CE

The Origins of Bibliography Circa 200 BCE

A digital recreation of the Library of Alexandria.

Kallimachos (Callimachus), a renowned poet and head of the Alexandrian Library, compiled a catalogue of its holdings which he called Pinakes (Tables or Lists). 

Supposedly extending to 120 papyrus rolls, this catalogue amounted to a systematic survey of Greek literature up to its time. It also represented the origins of bibliography. Only a few fragments survived the eventual destruction of the library, together with a scattering of references to it in other ancient works.

Callimachus’s bibliographical methods would not be out of place in a modern library; an analysis of the eight remaining fragments of the Pinakes shows that Callimachus

"1. divided the authors into classes and within these classes if necessary into subdivisions;

"2. arranged the authors in the classes or subdivisions alphabetically;

"3. added to the name of each author (if possible) biographical data;

"4. listed under an author’s name the titles of his works, combining works of the same kind to groups (no more than that can be deduced from the eight citations); and

"5. cited the opening words of each work as well as

"6. its extent, i.e., the number of lines" (Blum, p. 152).

"The Pinakes were neither an inventory nor an exhaustive catalog of the works in the library: they did not list all the copies of a work that the library owned and did not give an indication of how to locate a book in the library—actual access would have required consulting the librarian. The Pinakes built on preexisting practices of list making (including Aristotle's pinakes of poets), sorting (such as Theophrastus' doxographies sorted topically and chronologically), and alphabetizing, the principles of which were likely already understood although they had never been put to such extensive use before" (Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age [201] 17).

The surviving fragments of Kallimachos's Pinakes were first published in print in Hymni, epigrammata et fragmenta, edited by Theodor (Theodorus) J. G. F. Graevius et al. (2 vols, Utrecht, 1697). That edition included the first edition of the monumental 758-page commentary by Ezechiel Spanheim, and also incorporated the 420 fragments collected and elucidated by the English theologian, classical scholar and critic Richard Bentley, whose reading of these fragments represents “the earliest example of a really critical method applied to such a work" (Dictionary of National Biography). ". . . many even of his boldest conjectures have been completely confirmed by the papyri" (Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship 1300-1850, 154.) Among the other commentaries and notes assembled in Graevius's edition are those by Henri Estienne, Nichodemus Frischlin, Bonaventura Vulcanius, and Anne Dacier.

♦ Apart from his contributions to bibliography, Kallimachos is known in the history of books for his quip in Fragments (ed. Pfeiffer) 465 that a "big book is a big evil" (μεγα βιβλιον μεγα κακων), a statement that he made in defense of the short lyric and elegiac poems he wrote and favored over longer epic poems. This has also been translated as "A great book is a great evil."

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography. Its History and Development (1984) no. 1.  Blum, Kallimachos. The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Translated by Hans H. Wellisch (1991).

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The Earliest Bibliographical Classification System Circa 53 BCE – 23 CE

The Seven Epitomes is thought to have been compiled by the Chinese astronomer, historian and editor Liu Xin (Liu Hsin) during the Xin Dynasty. A by-product of a collation project commissioned by the Emperor Ch'eng Ti of the Han Dynasty, it was the catalogue of all collated books housed in the libraries of the Inner Court at the time, initiated under the supervision of Liu Xiang (Liu Hsiang). These had been recovered after the burning of the books under the rule of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 213-206 BCE.

Although the original classification system no longer survives, Chinese bibliographers believe that the majority of its entries, in a much abridged form, and its original classiﬁcation structure, have been preserved in the “Bibliographic Treatise” of the History of the [Former] Han Dynasty (Han shu “yi wen zhi”, compiled about a hundred years later. Scholars estimate that there were more than six hundred annotated entries in the Seven Epitomes arranged according to a carefully designed classiﬁcation system. The title of the catalogue seems to suggest that the system consisted of seven epitomes (classes). However, the “Treatise” included only six classes (without “Ji lüe” or the Collective Epitome). Since the Seven Epitomes is no longer extant, scholars have not been able to reach a consensus regarding the nature and content of Ji lüe. One speculation that has been widely accepted is that Ji lüe was the collection of brief summaries now seen at the end of each of the six main classes and their divisions. Nevertheless, no one disputes that the classiﬁcation in the Seven Epitomes was a six-fold scheme.

"There are six classes and divisions in the Seven Epitomes:

"1. Liu yi lüe (Epitome of the Six Arts) consisted of nine divisions, including one for each of the Six Classics (Odes, Documents, Rites, Music, Changes, and Spring and Autumn Annals), Analects of Confucius, Book of Filial Piety, and philology.

"2. Zhu zi lüe (Epitome of the Masters) consisted of ten divisions, including nine major afﬁ liations of thought commonly known during the Warring States and an added afﬁ liation of Novelists. "

3. Shi fu lüe (Epitome of Lyrics and Rhapsodies) consisted of ﬁ ve divisions, including three styles of poetry and two other genres. "

4. Bing shu lüe (Epitome of Military Texts) consisted of four divisions (tactics, terrain, yin/yang, and military skills).

"5. Shu shu lüe (Epitome of Numbers and Divination) consisted of six divisions, including astronomy, chronology, ﬁ ve phases correlative elements, divination, miscellaneous fortune-telling, and geomancy).

"6. Fang ji lüe (Epitome of Formulae and Techniques) consisted of four divisions, including medical classics, pharmacology, sexology, and longevity"  (Hurl-Li Lee, "Origins of the Main Classes in the First Chinese Bibliographic Classification" https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/hurli/www/Chinese/Lee_ISKO2008.pdf, accessed 01-11-2011).

Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, "A History of Bibliographic Classification in China," The Library Quarterly XXII (1952)  307-324.

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30 CE – 500 CE

The First Auto-Bibliography Circa 190 CE

Roman physician Claudius Galen of Pergamon wrote two classified bibliographies of his own writings: Peri ton idion biblion [Latin: De Libris propriis liber, On his own writings] and Peri tes taxeos ton idion biblion [Latin: De ordine librorum suorum liber, On the arrangement of his own writings].

These are the first auto-bibliographical works which survived, and they may also be considered the first bibliographies of any kind which survived after the listings from the library of Alexandria by Kallimachos (Callimachus), which survived only in the most fragmentary form.

"The De libris propriis liber opens with a general introduction, in which Galen refers to the books falsely attributed to him. The main text is dvided into seventeen chapters, in which Galen arranges his works under such headings as commentaries, anatomical works, Hippocratic writings, works on moral philosophy, grammar and rhetoric, and so on. This bibliography apparently did not suffice as a guide to the five hundred or so works Galen had put out (many of them now lost), for he added a second one. This is the De ordine librorum suorum liber, of which second bibliography unfortunately only a fragment has come down to us" (Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 3, nos. I & II).

Galen's bibliographies were first published in print in Part IV, ff.**1-6, of the editio princeps of his collected writings in Greek issued by the heirs of Aldus Manutius and Aldus's father-in-law, Andreas Asulanus, in Venice in 1525. They were revised and improved by Conrad Gessner for an edition published in Basel in 1562.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 2.

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The First Collection of Bio-Bibliographies 392 CE

In Bethehem in 392 St. Jerome composed De viris illustribus, the title and arrangement of which he borrowed from SuetoniusDe viris illustribus is considered the first biographical work to stress bibliography.

De viris illustribus "contains short biographical and literary notes on 135 Christian authors, from Saint Peter down to Jerome himself. For the first seventy-eight authors Eusebius (Historia ecclesiastica) is the main source; in the second section, beginning with Arnobius and Lactantius, he includes a good deal of independent information, especially as to western writers" (Wikipedia article on Jerome, accessed 01-04-2008).

"It is a simple enumeration of titles under each author, in no particular order; sometimes the number of 'books' (chapters) is stated" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] No. 3).

De viris illustribus was first published in print by Günther Zainer of Augsburg in an undated edition thought to have been issued before 1473:  ISTC No. ih00192000

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700 – 800

Partial Inventory of the Court Library of Charlemagne at Aachen Circa 790

The court library of Charlemagne at Aachen set an example for abbey and cathedral scriptoria throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

"The titles of classical books jotted down in a Berlin manuscript circa 790 have been shown to be a partial list of the library at Aachen. It is remarkable for the range and rarity of the authors represented—Sallust, Martial, Lucan, and Cicero, for example—some of whose books had scarcely survived the Merovingian period. Indeed, it is characteristic of many textual traditions propagated in Carolingian times from old (fifth- or sixth-century) manuscripts, with an intermediate stage. Very little that was recopied in the crucial ninth century was subsequently lost, and the diligent collecting of these earlier representatives themselves ensured the survival of many ancient codices in capitals and uncials.

"Many monastic libraries evidently relied upon copies taken from the palace library for their stock. Some such as Corbie on the Somme or St. Martin at Tours, seem to have benefited spectacularly from their close connection to the court. Other books would be bequeathed by wealthy patrons or procured from outside by persistent begging for loans such as Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières (south of Paris) in the mid-ninth century, engaged in for much of his life. Monastic and cathedral libraries also freely exchanged copies of works as they were needed, along regular routes of circulation. France, especially in the north and central areas, had the lions share of this general revival of learning in terms of numbers of books produced, but the old Irish monasteries in Germany — Fulda, Hersfeld, St. Gall-and more modern foundations such as the imperially favored abbey of Lorsch, south of Mainz, also housed and recopied large numbers of manuscripts old and new, some of them of great importance. Of the seven ancient Italian manuscripts on which the text of Virgil rests, at least four were preserved in Carolingian monasteries in France and Germany" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries," Stam (ed)., The International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 105-6).

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800 – 900

Inventories of Ninth Century Libraries 833 – 835

"The evidence for the arrangement and contents of libraries in and before the ninth century is sparse. In the earliest times the numbers to be stored were small. As there was no pressing problem of storage or access, the need for elaborate finding aids did not arise. Between 300 and 400 manuscripts—most with two or more works within them—was a good-sized collection for a Carolingian monastery: St. Gall owned 395 codices in 835 and the Cologne cathedral had 108 in 833. From the most prolific scriptorium of the age, that of Tours, 350 manuscripts still survive. The oldest library catalogs, such as that of Fulda in the mid-eighth century, are no more than lists of titles, often imperfect and for the most part simple inventories of the books as they stood on the shelf. The order of the lists reflects the usual subject arrangement: Bibles first, followed by glosses, liturgies, patristic works, philosophy, law, grammar, sometimes with historical and medical works at the end, and classical works scattered among the relevant headings. The Lorsch catalogs of the earlier part of the ninth century are a good deal lengthier and more detailed, with 590 titles arranged in 63 classes. Since monasteries were places of education as well as worship, many of the classical texts and nearly all the grammatical works would have been used as school texts. Books were usually stored in cupboards, either in the church or in the cloister closest adjoining it, sometimes in the refectory (for communal reading) as well. The separate library room was, in general, a later development, but in an early ninth-century plan believed to be an idealized scheme of a monastery with a bibliotheca and scriptorium attached to the church, survives in St. Gall" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) The International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 106).

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900 – 1000

The Earliest Universal Bibliography 988 – 990

Muhammad ib Ishaq (Abu al Faraj) called Ibn Abi al-Nadiim (Abi Ya'qub Ishaq al-Warraq al-Baghdadi), a bookseller, stationer and "court companion" of Baghdad, published Al- Fihrist, an annotated index of the books of all nations extant in the Arabic language and script.

The English translator of al-Nadim's work, Bayard Dodge, suggests that Al-Nadim, working in his father's bookshop, "wished to assemble a catalogue to show customers and to help in the procuring and copying of manuscripts to be sold to scholars and book collectors" (Dodge p. xxiii).  This was the earliest universal bibliography.

"It is reasonable to believe that when al-Nadim died the original copy of his manuscript was placed in the royal library at Baghdad, while other copies made by scribes about the time of his death were assigned to his family bookstore, where some of them were probably sold to customers who came to purchase interesting books. Farmer says: ' Yagut (d. 626/1299) averred that he used a copy of the Fihrist in the handwriting of al-Nadim himself. The lexicographer al-Saghani (650/1252) made a similar claim. Either of these autograph copies may have been in the Caliph's library, which was destroyed utterly in the sacking of Baghdad in 656/1258)' "(Dodge p. xxii).

This work did not appear in print until an edition of the Arabic text was issued by orientalist Gustav Flügel in Leipzig, 1871-72.

The text was first edited from the earliest manuscripts and translated into English by Bayard Dodge as The Fihrist of al-Nadim. A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 2 vols., New York, 1970. For the translation of part one Dodge used MS 3315 in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin:

"We know nothing about the history of the manuscript until it was placed in the library of the great mosque at 'Akka, when the notorious Ahmad Pasha-al-Jazzar was ruler there at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. After the fall of Ahmad Pasha, the manuscript was evidently stolen from the mosque. It was probably at this time that it became divided, as the Beatty Manuscript includes on the first half of Al-Fihrist. In the course of time the dealer Yahudah sold his first half to Sir Chester Beatty, who placed it in his library at Dublin" (Dodge p. xxviii).

For the translation of part two Dodge used MS 1934 which "forms part of the Shahid 'Ali Pasha collection which is now cared for in the library adjacent to the Sulaymaniyah (Süleymaniye) Mosque at Istanbul. In the library catalogue it is described as 'Suleymaniye G. Kutuphanesi kismi Shetit Ali Pasha 1934" (Dodge p. xxx).

Dodge indicated that he believed that each separate portion represents half of the same manuscript made shortly after the death of al-Nadim.

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1200 – 1300

The Arrangement and Cataloguing of Books Circa 1270

Humbert de Romans, Dominican scholar who promulgated the notion of arranging books by subject matter.

"The arrangement and cataloguing of books within the individual colleges and other university institutions were also influenced by the changes in book usage reflected in the union catalogs and location lists. In monastic institutions, book collections had traditionally been kept in book chests or armaria — though the individual volumes themselves doubtless were, for much of the time, parceled out among the members of the house. We find, however, in the writings of the Dominican Humbert of Romans, about 1270, instructions that books in the armaria should be physically arranged by subject matter, and that certain ones of them should be chained at lecterns for the common use of all, rather than being either locked away in a chest or loaned for the use of only one person. Before the end of the thirteenth century, both the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris and University College in Oxford had such a collection of chained books attached to reading benches. Early in the next century, about 1320, a member of the Sorbonne compiled a subject catalog of the hundreds of individual texts bound together in some three hundred chained codexes of his college. This development — arrangement of manuscripts by subject matter, affixing chains to selected books, an index of the content of a whole collection — corresponds in its way, in both purpose and inguenuity, to the making of concordances, distinction collections, subject indexes, and union catalogs; and it is in such a context that it should be considered. The common goal of all these devices was to facilitate access to desired information" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 238-39).

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Foundation of the Library of the Sorbonne, and "Perhaps the Earliest Specific and Organized System of Book Arrangement in a Library" 1271

From a late 14th century copy of Richard de Fournival's 'Biblionomia.' A catalog of the section on philosophy, in which books are described by their dimensions. (View Larger)

Theologian Gerard d' Abbeville, a Parisian master and neighbor of Robert de Sorbon, bequeathed nearly 300 volumes of manuscripts to the Library of the Sorbonne. This gift became the core of the Sorbonne Library, and of the roughly 300 volumes, 118 remain preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France today.

d'Abbeville's bequest incorporated the library of Richard de Fournival, author of the library catalogue entitled Biblionomia. Leopold Delisle characterized this catalogue as "one of the most curious monuments of the bibliographic art of the Middle Ages. The only manuscript which has survived of this small work is 'très-incorrect', and cannot be dated before the beginning of the 15th century. Having belonged to the Collège des Cho-Sorbonne, it is today part of the library of the Université de France at the Sorbonne. . . ." (translation mine, from the work cited below, 518-19).

According to Delisle, Fournival used a garden metaphor to describe his library, in which the various branches of knowledge each have their plot, but beyond the metaphor Fournival described a specific classification scheme, coordinating desk or shelf letters or numbers with different kinds of letters and colors of letters. The first division of the library was devoted to philosophy, which Fournival further broke down into nine categories on eleven shelves, arranged partly according to volume size:

1. Grammar

2. Dialectic

3. Rhetoric

4. Geometry and Arithmetic

5. Music and Astronomy

6. Physics and Metaphysics

7. Metaphysics and Morals

8. Melanges of Philosophy

9. Poetry

The second division of Fournival's Biblionomia was devoted to what Delisle calls "sciences lucratives"--medicine, civil law and canon law.

The third division of the library was theology, i.e. texts and commentaries on the Holy Scriptures and writings of the fathers of the church.

Fournival's Biblionomia is "Perhaps the earliest specific and organized system of book arrangement in a library" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries,"  Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

Delisle points out that even though Fournival described the exact content of books in 162 volumes it is difficult to say for sure whether these volumes were ever assembled outside of Fournival's imagination. However, whether it was a real library or an imaginary library Deslisle felt that the Biblionomia was "rich in valuable information for literary history" and he reprinted the Latin text of Biblionomia in Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale II (1874) 518-535.

According to the Wikipedia article on Fournival, 35 manuscripts from his library remain preserved in various libraries, which would indicate that Fournival owned at least a portion of the works that he described in Biblionomia.

Ullman, The Library of the Sorbonne in the Fourteenth Century. The Septicentennial Celebration of the Founding of the Sorbonne College in the University of Paris. [1953] 38-39.

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Organization of the Sorbonne Library, and the Way it Was Physically Arranged 1290

"We have seen that the first catalog of the college [The Sorbonne] was classified; the text of the 1290 catalog provides a full view of this classification system. It was a system common to the intellectual world of the thirteenth century, namely, the Scriptures, glossed and postillated books; Peter Lombard's Sentences, and questions and summas on the Sentences, whole works on the saints and doctors of the Church; questions and distinctions of the master; and whole works of the ancient philosophers, followed by works outside the realm of theology and philosophy — medicine, the quadrivium, jurisprudence and perhaps verancular writings. In this scheme, constructed for theologians, the works are arranged in descending order of their relative authority: Holy scripture, Doctors of the Church, modern masters, and ancient philosophers. This hierarchy of authority was detailed for example by St. Bonaventure: 'Sunt ergo libri sunt sacrae scripturae. . .; secundi libri sunt orignalia sanctorum, tertii, sententiae magistrorum, quarti, doctrinarum mundialium sive philosophorum.' It was only natural that this hierarchy also appeared in the organization of medieval book collections such as that at the Sorbonne.

"It has been suggested, furthermore, on the basis of the first catalog, that the books were grouped by subject and author in armaria similar to those described by Humbert of Romans ca. 1270, and that the classification of the catalog is a reflection of this arrangement. It is impossible, however, to judge on the basis of the catalog alone whether or not it reflects the physical arrrangement of the books themselves. We are fortunate in this instance to have collateral evidence which reveals the arrangement of certain books in the library just after the turn of the century.

"In 1306, Thomas Hibernicus, a fellow of the Sorbonne, unintentionally but effectively preserved a picture of the arrangement of the manuscripts of the major authors in the armaria, in the process of completing his Manipulus florum. This is a collection of extracts from the authorities grouped according to some 265 topics alphabetically arranged— abstinencia, abusio, acceptio, accidia, adiutorium, etc. Under of the the some 265 topics the extracts appear in a set order without significant variation: quotations from Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, Bernard, Hilary, Chrysostom, Isidore, and so on, concluding with the ancients. At the end of the Manipulus florum Thomas has appended a bibliography of 476 works, each with incipit and explicit, compiled from the Sorbonne's manuscripts. The authors in the bibliography are presented in virtually the same order as the extracts, works of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, etc. The order preserved here, the order in which Thomas used the books, is apparently that of the grouping of the books in the armaria of the library. The order is virtually the same as the order of authors in the catalogs of 1290 and 1338, originalia Augustine, Ambrosii, Hieronimi, Gregorii, Bernardi, etc. The combined evidence of the 1290 catalog and the Manipulus florum certainly implies, if does not prove, that the organization of the catalog reflects the physical arrangement of the manuscripts in armaria" (Rouse & Rouse, "The Early Library of the Sorbonne," Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 370-72).

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1300 – 1400

Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts Circa 1320

Oxford Franciscans compiled, on the basis of on-site surveys, the Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum ueterum — a manuscript union catalogue of some 1400 manuscript books in England, Scotland and Wales. It listed the works of 98 authors owned by 189 monastic or cathedral libraries.

"Although none of these libraries is Franciscan, the master list is organized geographically according to the division of Great Britain into the custodiae of the Franciscan order. The three surviving manuscripts of the Registrum date from the beginning of the fifteenth century; it is nevertheless possible to establish from external evidence that the Registrum must date from the first or second decade of the fourteenth century" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses. Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991] 237-38).

Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum. Edited with an introduction and notes by Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse. The Latin text established by R. A. B. Mynors (1991).

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The Second Catalogue of the Library of the Sorbonne 1338

The second catalogue of the library of the Sorbonne—the richest library in Christendom—was written in 1338. 

The library, divided into two parts, contained 1722 volumes. The first portion called the communis or magna libraria consisted of 330 volumes chained to the reading desks. The rest of the collection, designated the small library, consisted of 1090 volumes. About 300 volumes relisted from the prior catalogue written in 1290 were designated as missing or in circulation. The writer(s) of the 1338 catalogue

"furnished a large amount of information about each volume. He gives not only the contents, but also the name of the donor, the estimated value, and first words on the second leaf and on the next to the last leaf. This device, intended to help identification of books belonging to the Library and to prevent mutilation, is invaluable to us in trying to identify surviving volumes of the collection. Some professors kept out books on indefinite loan, like their successors today. Such books were appropriately called libri vagantes, 'strays' from the sacred precincts of the Library. It should be said that usually a money deposit was required of borrowers. We even have loan records of the Library during the fourteenth century. The appraisal of each book given in the catalogue was intended to facilitate payment for books lost by borrowers. Chained books were occasonally loaned but only after a faculty vote. There was even a rudimentary inter-library loan system. And that is not all: a union list of books in the monasteries of Paris was made as early as the thirteenth century for the use of the Sorbonnistes. The catalogue of the reference library is in two parts, a shelf-list and a classified catalogue" (Ullman, The Library of the Sorbonne in the Fourteenth Century. The Septicentennial Celebration of the Founding of the Sorbonne College in the University of Paris. [1953] 35-36).

"The collections of the other colleges of the period included no more than three hundred works. . . " (Martin, The History and Power of Writing [1994] 153).

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Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts Names 694 Authors Circa 1350

The Benedictine monk Henry of Kirkestede, prior of the royal abbey of St. Edmund at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and traditionally known as Boston Burienis, compiled a union catalogue of manuscripts in English libraries entitled Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis. He named 674 authors and assigned to them about 3900 works.

Richard H. Rouse & Mary A. Rouse, eds., Henry of Kirkested, Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis (2004).

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The High Point of Medieval Library Cataloguing 1389

"The high point of medieval library cataloguing is found in the three-part catalog of Dover Priory in England, made in 1389. Here every volume is listed and every tract identified, the tract's position within a volume entered by leaf number, the opening words (the incipit) of each quoted, and the whole rendered accessible by a shelf list and an alphabetical index of all the works in the library" (M. Davies, "Medieval Libraries" in D. Stam (ed.) International Dictionary of Library Histories I [2001] 107).

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1450 – 1500

The Earliest Surviving Remnant of Any European Book Printed by Movable Type Circa 1452 – 1453

The Sibyllenbuch fragment, the oldest surviving piece of a European book printed with movable type, contains a portion of a German poem about the fate of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Sibyllenbuch fragment, also known as Fragment vom Weltgericht, a small portion of a leaf from an early printed medieval poem containing prophecies of the fate of the Holy Roman Empire, may be the earliest surviving remnant of any European book printed by movable type.  It was printed in Mainz an early state of the DK font later used in the 36-line Bible. This state of the type was assigned by George D. Painter to the press of Johannes Gutenberg prior to his partnership with Johann Fust.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC no. is00492500) dates the Sibyllenbuch fragment to "about 1452-53," making it older than any other European document printed by movable type.

"The Sibyllenbuch fragment consists of a partial paper leaf printed in German using Gothic letter. It is owned by the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany. The fragment was discovered in 1892 in an old bookbinding in Mainz. The text on the fragment relates to the Last Judgment and therefore sometimes is also called “Das Weltgericht” (German for "Last Judgment"). The text is part of a fourteenth century poem of 1040 lines known as the 'Sibyllenbuch' (Book of the Sibyls) . . . . The British Library identifies the fragment as coming from a quarto volume, which is a book composed of sheets of paper on which four pages were printed on each side, which were then folded twice to form groups of four leaves or eight pages. From analysis of the location of the watermark on the fragment and the known length of the entire poem, it has been estimated that the complete work contained 37 leaves (74 pages) with 28 lines per page.

"The type face used in the Sibyllenbuch is the same as that used in other early fragments attributed to Gutenberg, an Ars minor by Donatus (a Latin grammar used for centuries in schools) and several leaves of a pamphlet called the Turkish Calendar for 1455 (likely printed in late 1454), and has been called the DK type after its use in the Donatus and Kalendar. Scholars have identified several different states of this type face, a later version of which was used in about 1459-60 to print the so-called 36-line Bible. For this reason, the various states of this type have collectively been called the '36-line Bible type.'

"Due to the 'less finished state of the [DK] font', scholars have concluded it was 'plausibly earlier than 1454', the approximate date of the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible. Although at one time some believed it dated to the 1440s, it is now believed to have been printed in the early 1450s. George D. Painter concluded that 'primitive imperfection' in the type face of the Sibyllenbuch indicated it was the earliest of the fragments printed in the DK type" (Wikipedia article on Sibyllenbuch fragment, accessed 07-10-2009). 

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The Earliest Surviving Book List Issued by a Printer June 1469 – September 1470

A portrait of Peter Schoffer.

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Printer Peter Schöffer issued a broadside offering for sale 21 printed books issued from 1458 to 1469. (ISTC no. is00320950).

"Sixteen of the items can be identied as products of Schöffer's own printing workshop in Mainz, while the rest probably were printed by Ulrich Zell in Cologne. All the works listed are in Latin, beginning with the edition of Bible co-produced by Fust and Schöffer in 1462, followed by theological, legal and humanist texts as well as a treatise dealing with merchants' contracts. The 13th book title, which has been cut off this copy, was certainly the Psalter edition of 1459, whose printing types are reproduced in a sample below the booklist. A note added by hand on the lower margin of the page indicates that the bookseller could be contacted in the in 'Zum wilden Mann', probably referring to a locality in Nuremberg.

"The advertisement is characteristic for the early phase of organised book trade. The intinerant bookseller — seldom the printer himself — travelled with an assortment of books wherever demand was to be found, leaving printed lists with a handwritten indication of where he was staying, for potential customers, the latter being mostly members of universities or monasteries, but also other citizens with some education. Such book lists contained no prices, since these were to be negotiated between the bookseller and the buyer" (Wagner, Als die Lettern laufen lernten. Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert (2009) no. 77).

Only a single copy of this broadside survived. It is preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München:

"It survived, albeit as binders waste cut in two halves and pasted printed side down on the inner cover of a manuscript (Clm 458) with astronomical-mantic texts which was owned by the well-known humanist of Nuremberg, Hartmann Schedel. At the end of the 19th century, it was discovered and removed from the book binding" (Wagner, op. cit.).

♦ You can download a digital facsimile of this broadside from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website at this link: http://inkunabeln.digitale-sammlungen.de/Exemplar_S-207,1.html, accessed 01-03-2010.

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The First Catalogue of the Vatican Library 1475

Under Pope Sixtus IV specific quarters were established to house the volumes of manuscripts and the archives that formed the nucleus of the Vatican Library. In 1475 the library prepared the first catalogue of its holdings.

"When its first librarian, Bartolomeo Platina, produced a listing in 1481, the library held over 3,500 items, making it by far the largest in the Western world" (Wikipedia article on Vatican Library accessed 09-16-2010).

Among his other accomplishments, Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel

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The Earliest Subject Bibliography 1494

Responding to the challenges of organizing the rapidly growing body of information caused by the development of printing, Johannes Trithemius (Tritheim), abbot of the Benedictine abbey at Sponheim, completed his manuscript for the earliest subject bibliography, Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (A Book on Ecclesiastical Writings) in 1492. It was the first bibliography compiled as a practical reference work. In 1494 the work appeared in Basel at the press of Johann Amerbach.

The work " lists in chronological order 982 authors with about 7,000 titles, the number of chapters in each work and the incipit when known. An alphabetical list, arranged according to the authors' first names, serves as an index. The title of the book is somewhat misleading since the work is not restricted to ecclesiastical writers but also includes authors such as Dante, Poggio, and Sebastian Brant" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History & Development [1984] no. 7).

"The contrast between the feeble theological bibliographies of the manuscript age and this first attempt in the printing era is very striking” (Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 7-8).

ISTC no. it00452000

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The First Great General Work on Mathematics November 10 – November 20, 1494

Between November 10 and 20, 1494 Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli published at the press of Paganinus de Paganinis in Venice Summa de arithmetica geometria, proporzioni et proporzionalita. This was “the first great general work on mathematics printed” (Smith, Rara arithmetica, 56).

“[The Summa] contains a general treatise on theoretical and practical arithmetic; the elements of algebra; a table of moneys, weights and measures used in the various Italian states; a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping; and a summary of Euclid’s geometry. . . . Although it lacked originality, the Summa was widely circulated and studied by the mathematicians of the sixteenth century. Cardano, while devoting a chapter of his Practica arithmetice (1539) to correcting the errors in the Summa, acknowledged his debt to Pacioli. Tartaglia’s General trattato de’ numeri et misure (1556-1560) was styled on Pacioli’s Summa. In the introduction to his Algebra, Bombelli says that Pacioli was the first mathematician after Leonardo Fibonacci to have thrown light on the science of algebra. . . . Pacioli’s treatise on bookkeeping, ‘De computis et scripturis,’ contained in the Summa, was the first printed work setting out the ‘method of Venice,’ that is, double-entry bookkeeping. [Richard] Brown has said [in his History of Accounting and Accountants, 1905] that ‘The history of bookkeeping during the next century consists of little else than registering the progress of the De computis through the various countries of Europe” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

ISTC no. il00315000 points out the very unusual aspect of the edition that two re-issues of the first edition exist with some sheets reprinted. One of these is thought to date after 1509 and another after 13 August 1502. Nevertheless, these re-issues bear the original publication date.  

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The First Printed Bibliography on Secular Subjects 1495

Abbot Johannes Trithemius (Tritheim) published Catalogus illustrium virorum Germaniae in Mainz at the press of Peter von Friedberg. 

A selective bibliography of German authors, listing 2000 works by 300 writers, including Trithemius himself, this was probably the first printed bibliography on secular subjects. 

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 9.

ISTC no. it00432800.

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Filed under: Bibliography

1500 – 1550

A Census of Print Runs for Fifteenth-Century Books 1500

In March 2013 A Census of Print Runs for Fifteenth-Century Books by Eric Marshall White, Curator of Special Collections at the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, came to my attention. White's research, published in the form of a database, and prefaced by a scholarly introduction which documented prior work on the topic, was published on the website of the Consortium of European Research Libraries, www.cerl.org. From White's introduction I quote a few representative selections. White's footnotes, not included here, will be found in the PDF downloadable from the website:

"Many historians seeking to measure the impact of the ‘printing revolution’ in fifteenth century Europe have taken a quantitiative approach, multiplying the total of all editions by the number of copies in a typical edition. However, whereas the Incunable Short Title Catalog (ISTC) lists more than 28,000 fifteenth-century editions that are represented by surviving specimens, the number of lost editions will always remain indeterminate. The second factor in the equation – the typical or ‘average’ fifteenth-century print run – is just as indeterminate as the first, if not more so. Inevitably, the ‘editions × copies’ formula has produced estimates of fifteenth-century press production that range anywhere from eight million to more than twenty million pieces of reading material. Such irreconcilable results (in which the margin for error may be larger than the answer itself) only serve to demonstrate that any effort to arrive at a meaningful quantification of fifteenth-century press production will require a much more systematic analysis of the available data on print runs. The present study, a census of print runs for fifteenth-century books, takes a step in that direction by asking a much more basic question: what is the available data?"

"Historically, as several scholars have conceded, our knowledge of early print runs has been lamentably poor. However, this is not because data does not exist – the print runs of fifteenth-century books currently number more than 250 editions – but because the data has remained so unavailingly scattered throughout a vast literature dedicated to other questions. Consequently, even well-informed specialists have been able to call forth only a few familiar examples, such as the 37 fairly uniform print runs publicized in 1472 by Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz at Rome,6 the seventeen print runs (including a spurious Breviarium) canonized in Konrad Haebler’s essential Handbuch der Inkunabelkunde, 7 or the 33 print runs recorded in the Diario of the Florentine press at San Jacopo di Ripoli (1476-1484). In 1998, however, the first truly extensive catalogue of fifteenth-century print runs, moving beyond the usual suspects, was compiled by Uwe Neddermeyer. Unfortunately, his table of “bekannte Auflagenhöhen” (known print runs) for the fifteenth century actually includes an undifferentiated mix of about 130 true print runs as well asseveral dozen inconclusive, speculative, or spurious entries. Therefore, because Neddermeyer’s list is not accompanied by the original documentation, one has to perform considerable research simply to verify which fraction of his data is truly useful. In contrast, each of the 250+ print runs listed in the present CERL-based census has been included on the basis of contemporary documentation. It is hoped that in the near future we will be able to provide transcriptions of these primary sources and citations of secondary literature for virtually all of the census entries."

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Printing Presses are Established in 282 Cities December 1500

 The 'Nuremberg Chronicle,' written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel and published in 1493, is represented by c. 1250 surviving copies, more than any other incunabulum.  (View Larger)

By this date printing presses were established in 282 cities.

"These are situated in some 20 countries in terms of present-day boundaries. In descending order of the number of editions printed in each, these are: Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, England, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro, Balearic Islands, Hungary, and Sicily."

"The 18 languages that incunabula are printed in, in descending order, are: Latin, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Church Slavonic, Portuguese, Swedish, Breton, Danish, Frisian, and Sardinian."

"Only about one edition in ten (i.e. just over 3000) has any illustrations, woodcuts or metalcuts. The 'commonest' incunabulum is Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle ("Liber Chronicarum") of 1493, with c. 1250 surviving copies (which is also the most heavily illustrated). Very many incunabula are unique, but on average about 18 copies survive of each. This makes the Gutenberg Bible, at 48 or 49 known copies, a rather common (though extremely valuable) edition" (Wikipedia article on incunabulum, accessed 12-01-2008).

The average print run of a 15th century printed book has been estimated by some methods of calculation as between 400-500 copies, with as many as 1000 copies, or more, of some books printed. By one method it was estimated that printers issued up to 35,000 different printed works of all kinds, including pamphlets and broadsides as well as books, with a total printed output somewhere around 15 to 20 million copies. Presumably no copies of certain publications—especially ephemera—survived.

♦ In January 2008 the Incunabula Short Title Database maintained by the British Library recorded 29,777 editions printed from moveable type, but not from woodblocks or engraved plates, before 1501. These included  "some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century." The number of true incunabula recorded in the database was  27,460— thought to be very close to complete coverage of the number of extant incunabula, which was estimated at 28,000.

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The First Medical Bibliography and the First Medical History after Celsus 1506

Portrait of Symphorien Champier. (View Larger)

French physician and writer Symphorien Champier published in Lyon De medicine claris scriptoribus in quinque partibus tractatus, as part of his Libelli duo. Champier's biographical study of famous medical writers included a brief listing of their writings which is considered the first published medical bibliography, after Galen's bibliography of his own writings, De libris propriis liber, which was written in the second century CE, but not printed until 1525. Champier's work has also been called the first history of medicine written after De medicina by the first century CE Roman writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 10.

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Filed under: Bibliography, Medicine

The First Legal Bibliography 1522

Italian jurist Giovanni Nevizzano issued Inventarium librorum in utorque iure hactenus impressorum in Lyon. This small work of 38 pages was the first bibliography specifically restricted to works on the law. "It was also intended to aid lawyers in obtaining these books from the bookseller" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 11).

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The First Surviving Publisher's Catalogue in Book Form 1542

 Robert Estienne, 16th Century Parisian scholar and printer, issued the first book-form publisher's catalog of which any copies survive in 1542.

Printer and publisher Robert Estienne issued from Paris Libri in officina Rob. Stephani partim nati, parti restituti & excusi. This was the first publisher's catalogue issued in book form, of which any copies survived.

"Estienne's publications are listed in alphabetical order, some under their authors, others under their titles; prices are added, but no dates given. The Paris printers, such as Estienne, Colines, Wechel, Chaudière, and Janot, pioneered this form of publisher's lists, and, between 1542 and 1550 issued more than a dozen of them, each surviving in only or or two copies" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 13).

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The First Universal Bibliography Since the Invention of Printing 1545 – 1555

 In 1545, Swiss zoologist and naturalist Conrad Gessner publishes the first 'universal bibliography,' cataloging about 12,000 titles in an attempt to control the 'labyrinth' of books and information which had arrisen since the invention of printing.  (View Larger)

At the age of 29, apparently after only three years of concentrated work, Swiss physician, bibliographer, naturalist and alpinist Conrad Gessner (Gesner) issued the first volume of his Bibliotheca universalis, sive catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus, in tribus linguis, Latin, Graeca, & Hebraica: extantium & non extantium veterum & recentiorum. . . (1545) at the press of Christopher Froschauer in Zurich. Three years later Gessner issued an a subject index to the work, Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XXI, in 1548-49. Froschauer published Gessner's Appendix: Bibliothecae supplementing the work in 1555.  Coincidentally, two years before the Bibliotheca universalis, Andreas Vesalius had issued De humani corporis fabrica (1543), another massive work of scholarship and science, also at the age of 29.

The first "universal" bibliography published since the invention of printing, Gessner's Bibliotheca universalis was an international bibliography of authors who wrote in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, alphabetically arranged by their first names in accordance with medieval usage. Short biographical data preceded the lists of works, with indications of printing places and dates, printers and editors, where applicable. Gessner listed about 12,000 titles in the Bibliotheca universalis, expanded to about 15,000 in his Appendix.

Escaping the Labyrinth

"The technique of book production had changed radically as a result of print, but problems of information had not been simplified. This moved publishers and scholars to develop tools equal to the new situation. But such tools did not prove completely adequate to the task of helping the reader faced with the problem of selection, a problem which had now become more complicated. The predicament suggested to Gesner an encompassing labyrinth made up of a multitude of books. He confessed the profound sense of freedom he experienced when he finished his massive work in 1545: 'In truth I rejoice and thank God because I have finally gotten out of the labyrinth in which I was trapped for almost three years' " (Balsamo, Bibliography: History of a Tradition [1990] 32).

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development  (1984) No. 14.

♦ Ironically Gessner, a physician, did not complete the intended medical section of his Bibliotheca universalis (liber xxi) and it was never published.

Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 15-18.


Technically, in this project Gessner was preceded by Muhammad ib Ishaq (Abu al Faraj) called Ibn Abi Al-Nadim who in 988 CE published the Fihrist, an index of the books of all nations which were extant in the Arabic language and script. Chronologically Al-Nadim's work,discussed in this database, was the earliest attempt at a universal bibliography, but it did not appear in a printed edition until 1871-72, and had no influence on the development of bibliography in Europe.

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The First General Subject Index 1548 – 1549

Conrad Gessner (Gesner) issued from Zurich Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalium libri XXI. Pandectarum was the first general subject index, which Gessner intended as a key to his Bibliotheca Universalis (1545).

"Gesner's bibliographical system with its division of knowledge into various categories represents an enlarged version of the medieval system, adapted to his own times" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 16).

Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) no. XVII.

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The First National Bibliography 1548

While in religious exile in Germany John Bale, English churchman, historian, and controversialist, published Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum hoc est, Angliae, Cambriae, ac Scotiae Summarium... ("A Summary of the Famous Writers of Great Britain, that is, of England, Wales and Scotland"). This was the first national bibliography, the first bibliography of British authors, and the first British literary biographical work.

"This chronological catalogue of British authors and their works was partly founded on the Collectanea and Commentarii of John Leland. Bale was an indefatigable collector and worker, and personally examined many of the valuable libraries of the Augustinian and Carmelite houses before their dissolution. His work contains much information that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost. His autograph note-book is preserved in the Selden Collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It contains the materials collected for his two published catalogues arranged alphabetically, without enlargement on them nor the personal remarks which colour the completed work. He includes the sources for his information. He noted:

'I have bene also at Norwyche, our second citye of name, and there all the library monuments are turned to the use of their grossers, candelmakers, sopesellers, and other worldly occupyers... As much have I saved there and in certen other places in Northfolke and Southfolke concerning the authors names and titles of their workes, as I could, and as much wold I have done through out the whole realm, yf I had been able to have borne the charges, as I am not' " (Wikipedia article on John Bale, accessed 01-04-2009).

Probably intended to outwit restrictions on the importation of foreign books into England, the imprint of Bale's book reads "Ipswich: John Overton" even though the book was printed in Wesel, Germany, by Derick van der Straten.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 15.

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1550 – 1600

The First Bio-Bibliography 1562

Physician, naturalist, and bibliographer, Conrad Gessner (Gesner) issued his Prologomena in Galenum, in tres partes divisa in volume one of Cl [audius] Galeni Pergameni [Opera] Omnia, quae extant, in Latinum sermonem convers published in Basel by Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius. 

Gessner's work on the many and complicated writings of the second century CE physician, Galen of Pergamon, was the first bio-bibliography, and Gessner's most developed bibliography, covering Greek editions, Latin editions, lost works, writers on Galen, and a classified bibliography of Galen's writings. The bio-bibliography occupies 37 unnumbered leaves, following the title to volume 1, and Gesner's two unnumbered leaves of dedication, dated February 1562. (α†4-6,β†6, γ†6, A†-C†6, D†4).

Besterman, Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography 2nd ed (1940) 19-20, no. XXIX.

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The First Catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair 1564

Georg Willer, a bookseller in Augsburg, issued the first catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair. This was the first comprehensive book catalogue issued in Germany. The quarto pamphlet of 10 leaves listed 256 books under the title of Novorum Librorum quos Nundinae Atumnales, Francoforti Anno 1564 celebratae, Venales Exhibuerent.

"The catalogues of the Frankfurt Book Fair, initiated by the Augsburg bookseller George Willer in 1564, represent the first international bibliographies of a periodic character, attempting to list every six months all new publications issued in Europe, and they can be considered the prototype of today's Books in Print. The books are arranged by subject; for the first time, place, publisher, and date are always mentioned" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 24). 

Breslauer and Folter noted that in 1984 there was no copy of the first edition of Willer's catalogue in the United States.

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Possibly the First Printed Catalogue of Any Library 1572

The catalogue of the private library of the Augsburg physician, Jeremias Martius (c. 1535-1585,) may be the first printed catalogue of any library.

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The First Printed Catalogue of a Portion of a Public Library 1575

Hieronymous Wolf, humanist, and librarian to Johann Jakob Fugger, published Catalogus Graecorum librorum manu scriptorum Augustanae bibliothecae. Wolf's slim pamphlet of only 6 leaves listed 126 Greek manuscripts presented by Fugger to the City Library of Augsburg, Fugger's native city. It may be considered the first printed catalogue of a portion of a public library.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 25.

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Filed under: Bibliography, Libraries

The First French National Bibliography 1584

French scholar and bibliographer François Grudé de la Croix du Maine published in Paris Premier Volume de la Bibliothèque du Sieur de la Croix-Du-Maine. Qui est un catalogue général de toutes sortes d'Autherus, qui on escrit en François depuis cinq cents ans & plus.

This was the first French national bibliography.

"The authors, numbering three thousand, as the title states, are arranged in the aphabetical order of their first names, but a list of their surnames is given in the preliminaries. Their short biographies are followed by the lists of their works and bibliographical data, as far as known to the author. Vol. II, a subject index, and vol. III, Latin works by French authors never appeared as Grudé was assassinated [as a Protestant sympathizer in 1592.

"The work contains an auto-bibliography of several hundred works on French history of which none has survived, earning Grudé in some quarters the title of impostor" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 29).

Grudé also included a proposal for a Royal National Library with a number classification system similar to the modern decimal classification system. On p. 511 of his book there is a woodcut which may be the earliest printed representation of a bookcase.

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The First Systematic Medical Bibliography 1590

Physician and bibliographer Pascal Lecoq (Paschalis Gallus) published in Basel at the press of Konrad Waldkirch Bibliotheca medica. Sive catalogus illorum, qui ex professor artem medicam in hunc usque annum scriptis illustrarunt.

This was the first systematic medical bibliography with an annotated list of 1224 authors who wrote in Latin, and lists of French, German, and Italian writers, and other material.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 32.

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The First Medical Subject Bibliography 1591

Physician and bibliographer Israel Spach published in Frankfurt Nomenclator scriptorum medicorum. Hoc est: elenchus eorum qui artem medicam suis scriptis illustrarunt, secundum locos communes ipsius medicinae.

This was the first attempt at a medical subject bibliography, arranged under very broad subject headings with indexes of authors and subjects.

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The First Published Catalogue of any Institutional Library 1595

Having been founded in 1587, Leiden University Library issued the first printed catalogue of its holdings: Nomenclator autorum omnium, quorum libri vel manuscripti, vel typis expressi exstant in Bibliotheca Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (List of all Authors whose Books, Whether Manuscript or Printed, are Available in Leiden University Library).

This was the first published catalogue of any institutional library.

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Filed under: Bibliography, Libraries

The First "Books in Print" 1595

Bookseller and bibliographer Andrew Maunsell published The First Part [the Seconde Parte] of the Catalogue of English printed Bookes.

Maunsell produced the first trade bibliography of English books, giving author, translator where applicable, a title full enough to ensure definite identification, format, and printer or bookseller and date. It listed those books printed in the preceding fifty to sixty years and which were still available from publishers and booksellers. The first part, consisting of 123 pages, listed theology--excluding anti-Reformation literature. The much shorter second part, consisting of 27 pages, listed "the Sciences Mathematicall, as Arithmetick, Geometrie, Astronomie, Astrologie, Musick, and the Arte of VVarre, and Nauigation; and also of Phisick and Surgerie."

In his Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (2nd ed 1940) Theodore Besterman characterized Maunsell's work as the one in which a "a real technique of book-description is made use of for the first time" (p. 29). The Catalogue is also an alphabetical subject bibliography, with the larger subjects sub-divided and in each section works arranged alphabetically by author's surname—one of the earliest uses of the surname for indexing.

In his dedication to "Worshipfull the Master, Wardens, and Assistants of the Companie of Stationers and to all other Printers and Booke-sellers in generall" Maunsell wrote of learned men that

"have written Latine Catalogues, [Conrad] Gesner, Simler, and our countrman John Bale. They make their Alphabet by the Christen name, I by the Sir name; They mingle Diuinitie, Law Phiscke, &c. together, I set Diuinitie by itselfe; They set downe Printed and not Printed, I onely Printed, and none but such as I have seene. . . Concerning the Books which are without Authors names called Anonymi, I have placed them either upon the Title they bee entiuled by, or else upon the matter they entreate of, and sometimes upon both, for the easier finding of them."

Maunsell then explained his cross-indexing system, and how it should be used throughout the work.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 36.

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Model for Subject Bibliographies 1598

Physician Israel Spach published Nomenclator scriptorum philosophicorum atque philologicorum in Strassburg.

Covering the works of over 4,000 authors arranged under 400 subject headings, including esoteric subjects like gladiatorial combat, glory, and sobriety, with an emphasis on contemporary writers, this was the most significant subject bibliography of the sixteenth century. It became a model for subsequent subject bibliographies.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 39.

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1600 – 1650

The First Bibliography Published in the New World 1606

Franciscan Fray Juan Bautista published A Jesu Christo S.N. ofrece este Sermonario en lengua mexicana in Mexico, En casa de Diego Lopez Davalos. This was the second collection of sermons published Nahuatl (Aztec) prefaced with a two-page list of previously published works by Bautista. The listing of books was the first bibliography published in the Western Hemisphere.

"On signature **iii (recto and verso) is a list of 'las obras que hasta agora ha impresso el auctor' ('the works that until now the author has had published'). The list is not in chronological order nor is it alphabetical by title; nonetheless it is a bibliography and supplies us with information now known only because of its inclusion here. Of the 17 items listed, several have failed to survive in any known copy, including the second part of this sermonario: at the time of publication of part one 'de la sequnda parte esta ya impresso gran pedaço' ('of the second part a large piece is already printed')" (Szewczyk & Buffington, 39 Books and Broadsides Printed In America Before the Bay Psalm Book [1989] no. 19).

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Coining the Term Incunabula 1639

Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, dean of Münster cathedral and bibliophile, issued a pamphlet at Cologne to mark the bicentennary of the invention of printing by movable type in Europe, defending the priority of Johann Gutenberg.

Mallinckrodt's pamphlet was entitled De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art.") The pamphlet included the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first cradle of printing," or more loosely, "the infancy of printing." This was the origin of the term incunabula, still used to describe books and broadsheets printed before 1500, the arbitrary cut-off date which Mallinckrodt selected. Today the term incunabula (singular: incunabulum) is typically applied to imprints before 1501.

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1650 – 1700

The First Book on Librarianship in English 1650

Scottish minister and writer, John Dury, Keeper of the Royal Library from the death of Charles I until the Restoration, wrote letters on library and educational reform to his friend, the German-British polymath and educational reformer Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib published them in London as The Reformed Librarie Keeper in 1650. This was, among other things, the first English book on “library economy.”

"One of the ways in which both Dury and Hartlib wished to promote educational reform and further knowledge was by exploiting the facilities of public libraries in London, Oxford, and Cambridge more efficiently. Dury expressed the hope that the work of the librarian might be as ‘a factor and trader for helpes to learning, a treasurer to keep them and a dispenser to apply them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused’ (Turnbull, p.257). The Reformed Librarie-Keeper printed various proposals for the organization and use of libraries, which Dury had originally advanced in 1646. It was published together with Dury’s plans for a reformed school in 1650. In that year, Dury was appointed keeper of the library of St James’s Palace (formerly the King’s Library), which was in a state of disorder. He installed new bookcases and urged that the trustees for the selling of the late king’s goods should draw up an inventory of the books and medals, both measures being intended to make the library usable to the public. A few years later, Dury and Henry Langley unsuccessfully proposed Hartlib for the post of Bodley’s Librarian.  

"As storehouses of learning, in which great strides had already been made to establish accurate classifications, libraries had the potential to be ideal embodiments of the Ark. But the poorly-funded libraries of interregnum England were too chaotic in organization and too inaccessible for ordinary readers to be able to fulfil the role in which Dury and Hartlib had cast them" (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, "Harlib Circle," http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/catalog.php?num=67, accessed 01-30-2012).

"In Dury's first letter we learn that the library keeper's only responsibility was to safeguard the collection. To do this, a man (note: not a woman) did not need to be particularly well educated. The pay was low, commensurate with the skill-level required for the job. Dury describes the service provided by "factors and traders," educated men who profited by traveling throughout Europe searching for books suitable for various collections. Dury faults that system because he believed that the "factors and traders" were more interested in profit-making than in learning. (He then kindly defends these men by pointing out that, after all, they have to make a living.) His idea was to enhance the job of the library-keeper to include the role of the trader. In order to do this, the position of library-keeper would have to provide enough pay to attract educated men. If the library wanted men who were broadly educated and interested in the advancement of learning, Dury suggested the pay scale, which then ranged between 50 and 100 Pounds a year, be raised to 200 Pounds. He recommended that potential employees be tested in order to prove they are familiar enough with the various disciplines of the day to accurately maintain the library catalog.  

"Dury felt that having trained library keepers was essential if libraries were to be made open to the public. The library-keeper's job would be extended to include recommending and annually defending additions to the collection before the faculty of the University. The library-keeper was to correspond with experts in every science throughout Europe (expenses to be paid by the University). The library keeper was also to be the reference person regarding the collection, in order to assist scholars. In addition he was to continue the role of safeguarding the collection, which, in a public library, meant overseeing collection use and maintaining the library catalog.  

"Dury notes that the catalog would need to be created first, however. He suggested that the catalog be arranged by subject matter, then divided by language. The catalog he had in mind would also contain a pointer to the physical position of the book within the library. That system would be designed well enough to allow for the growth of the collection. Moreover, an annual list of additions to the collection would be printed. The entire catalog would be printed and circulated to other libraries in Europe every three years (or more often if the library grows faster than expected). He also proposed that the University keep books that the library has acquired, by gifts or purchase, even if the faculty couldn't use them, as; "there is seldom any book that does not contain something useful." He suggested keeping them in a separate collection and creating a list that was indexed by subject and arranged alphabetically by author.

"Dury's second letter offers an argument to be used in defending the cost of establishing his proposed library before the British Parliament, which he thought should supply the necessary funding. He bases his argument on Christian moral grounds, reminding us that in his day the separation of church and state was not a popular idea. Dury saw the library as a place that would nourish the spirits of men. He criticizes private libraries as serving those that "pride themselves in the possession of that which others have not," men who "covetously obstruct the fountains of life and comfort." He complains that this "dilates the light of knowledge and the love of the grace and goodness in the hearts of all men." He argues that library should be "communicating all good things freely to others." He goes on to argue that the university library, by proving useful to scholars in other nations, would encourage them to adopt similar policies for their own libraries, thus bringing honor to England. Finally, he warns that if the library is administered without relation to Christ's teachings, the endeavor is likely to lead to strife, confusion, and pride"(http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~chip/projects/timeline/1651robins.html, accessed 01-30-2012).

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The Earliest Bibliography of Bibliographies 1664

French Jesuit geographer, historian, and bibliographer Philippe Labbé issued Bibliotheca bibliothecarum curis secundis auctior accedit Bibliotheca Nummaria from Paris. This was the earliest bibliography of bibliographies.

"It is basically an alphabetical list, arranged by authors' first names, followed by eight intricate subject indices, among them one of publishers' and booksellers' catalogues. Appended is a very useful numismatic bibliography" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 62).

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The First Anthology on Libraries and Library Science 1666

Joachim Johann Mader published De bibliothecis atque archivis virorum clarissimorum libelli et commentationes. Cum praefatione  de scriptis et bibliothecis antediluvianis. This was the first anthology of texts on libraries, archives and "library science".

"The work is prefaced by his account of antediluvian libraries—those of Adam, Noah, etc., and then follow several monographs from such authors as Justus Lipsius, Franz Schott, Fulvio Orsino, Michael Neander, and pieces on the Vatican and Escorial libraries"  (Catalogus Catalogorum [Predominantly Post-1900]. Part III of the Private Library of Hans P. Kraus. Catalogue 190, H. P. Kraus [company,] no. 538).

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The First Bibliography of Rare Books 1676

Philologist and bibliographer Johann Hallervord published Bibliotheca curiosa in qua plurimi rarissimi atque paucis cogniti scriptores in Königsberg and Frankfurt. Bibliotheca curiosa was the first bibliography of rare books issued with the book collector in mind. Hallervord (1644-1676) mentioned more than 2800 authors, and included information on anonymous and pseudonymous works. As the son of a bookseller, and probably a scion of the Hallervord family of publishers in Stettin, Hallervord had access to important  public and private libraries in Königsberg and in the Baltic regions, on which he was able to base his research.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 75.

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Newton's Principia Mathematica 1687

Isaac Newton published Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica in London through the efforts and expense of astronomer Edmond Halley.

We probably know as much about the printing history of Newton's Principia mathematica as of any book of the seventeenth century.  The definitive scholarship on the writing and printing of the Principia appears in I. B. Cohen's Introduction to Newton's "Principia" (1971), and in Koyré‚ and Cohen's variorum edition of the Principia (1972), which also contains William Todd's definitive bibliography of the first three editions.  Other useful research on this work was conducted by A. N. L. Munby nearly forty years ago.  Munby's and Todd's observations may be summarized here. The original printer's manuscript in the hand of Newton's amanuensis, Humphrey Newton, still exists, as do various copies of the first edition with Isaac Newton's autograph corrections.  The expenses of publication of the first edition were borne by Edmond Halley, as neither Newton nor the Royal Society had sufficient funds, and booksellers, who in those days often acted as publishers, typically refused to risk their own money on esoteric scientific books.  Halley also edited the work and saw it through the press, reporting his progress to Newton in a series of letters which are preserved at Cambridge. 

Having paid for the edition himself, Halley sent out presentation copies at Newton's direction and also sent Newton twenty copies for his personal use.  Halley decided to market the book by placing copies on consignment with various booksellers, and he sent Newton forty copies, some bound, some in sheets, which he asked Newton to "place in the hands of one or more of your ablest booksellers to dispose of them." Munby observed that many of the bindings of the two-line imprint issue were similar, suggesting that Halley may have had many of the copies bound at one shop.

Munby researched the significance of the two states of the title page of the Principia, concluding that the more commonly found state, with the title page uncancelled and the so-called two-line imprint, reflects Halley's initial sales strategy of placing the work on consignment with many booksellers ("apud plures Bibliopolas").  The state with the three-line imprint, including the name of the bookseller, Samuel Smith, reflects Halley's decision to turn over a significant portion of the edition to Smith, probably for foreign distribution.  The bookseller Heinrich Zeitlinger, of Henry Sotheran Ltd., first made the useful observation that many of the copies with the three-line "Smith" imprint were exported to the Continent.  Smith was known to be very active in the import and export of books, and Munby stated that he knew of only two "Smith" copies in contemporary English bindings.  The contemporary binding on the Norman copy is clearly French.

From his bibliographical analysis of the first edition Todd concluded that the edition was divided between two compositors, one setting the first two books, the other setting the third.  "The first compositor, however, was allowed too few sheets and too many foliations, a circumstance which necessitated his signing a supplementary gathering *** and paging it 377-383, 400."  Todd identified typographical variants which seem to be randomly distributed throughout the edition and are thus not indicative of any priority.

Todd also described the distribution of watermarks in the Principia: "The text paper exhibits a water-mark of a fleur-de-lis within a coat of arms (Heawood 626) only in preliminaries and certain sections in the earlier portion of the books, indicating perhaps that the signatures so distinguished are of later, revised settings printed off at the same time.  All copies have this water-mark in P-2K; some have it also in A, F-G, M-O, 2M-2N."  The distribution of watermarks appears to have nothing to do with the distribution of the variants listed above.

In estimating the size of the first edition Munby acknowledged that the work went out of print quickly and was already difficult to obtain in December 1691, when Nicholas Fatio de Duillier discussed a new edition in a letter to Christiaan Huygens.  Extrapolating from the partial census figures available in 1952, Munby conjectured that at least 150 copies of the work were then extant, concluding from this and from the book's relatively common appearances in the sale rooms that "the whole edition cannot have comprised less than three hundred copies, and the figure may well have been a hundred more than this."  The plentiful sales records in the forty years since Munby's account would certainly corroborate the higher estimate. Copies with the three-line imprint are much rarer than those with the two-line, suggesting that the so-called "Smith" copies may only have comprised  between seventeen and thirty-three percent of the edition. 

Newton's personal copy of the first edition of the Principia, with Newton's autograph corrections for the second edition, is preserved at the Wrenn Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1586. Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia, ch. IV.  Munby, "The two titlepages of the distribution of the first edition of Newton's Principia," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 10 (October 1952).  Todd, "A bibliography of the Principia.  Part I: The three substantive editions," in Koyré‚ & Cohen, Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica II,  851-853.

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The First Attempt to Collect and Organize the Literature of Early Printing 1688

Cornelis a Beughem published at Amsterdam, Incunabula typographiae s. catalogus librorum scriptorumque proximis ab inventione typographiae annis ad annum Christi MD inclusive in quavis lingua editorum.

This was the first attempt to comprehend and organize the collected literature of early printing, and the first use of of the term incunabula in the title of a book on the history of early printing. Beughem cited approximately 3000 titles.  A bookseller and city counselor at Emmerich, in the Duchy of Cleves under the rule of the Electors of Brandenburg, and author of several bibliographies, Beughem has been called the foremost bibliographer of the 17th century

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The First Independently Published Bibliography of Mathematics 1688

Bookseller and city counceller in Emmerich, Cornelis a Beughem issued Bibliotheca mathematica et artificosa novissima. . . conspectus primus. This was the first independently published and comprehensive bibliography of mathematics, limited to books published from 1551 onward. Pages 465-526 contained a bibliography of atlases.

Bibliotheca mathematica was one of a series of bibliographies Beughem issued through the Amsterdam firm Janssonius-Waesberghe, listing books published throughout Europe in the relevant subject area during the second half the seventeenth century in any language, whether first or revised editions. Beughem's bibliographies were distinguished from earlier bibliographies by their arrangement by author, and by their limited chronological coverage to the present and the immediate past. Bibliographia mathematica followed bibliographies by Beughem of law and politics (1680) and medicine and physics (1681). 

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 84.

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The First Book Catalogue Published in America 1693

The first book catalogue published in North America was the auction catalogue of the library of the non-conformist minister and natural philosopher Rev. Samuel Lee (1625?-91) issued in Boston by bookseller Duncan Cambell (d. 1702). It is known from a single surviving copy preserved in the Boston Public Library:

The library of the late Reverend and learned Mr. Samuel Lee. Containing a choice variety of books upon all subjects; particularly, commentaries on the Bible; bodies of divinity. The works as well of the ancient, as of the modern divines; treatises on the mathematicks, in all parts; history, antiquities; natural philosophy [,] physick, and chymistry; with grammar and school-books. With many more choice books not mentioned in this catalogue. Exposed at the most easy rates, to sale, by Duncan Cambell, bookseller at the dock-head over against the conduit.

"Bookseller's catalogue: 1200 short author entries, in Latin and English, arranged (not entirely consistently) by subject, within subject by language (either Latin or English), and within language by format. The subject headings are divinity (by far the largest); physical books (medicine and science); philosophy, cosmography & geography; mathematical, astrological and astronomical books; history, school authors; juris prudentia, miscellanie, and three miscellaneous lots of consecutively numbered entries"(Winans, A Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in America 1693-1800 [1981] no. 1).

ESTC System No. 006467597; ESTC Citation No. W19259.

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The First Country-Wide Printed Union Catalogue of Manuscripts 1697

In 1697, the year of the death of English astronomer and scholar Edward BernardCatalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti cum indice alphabeticum was issued from Oxford at the Sheldonian Theatre in two folio volumes. Listing around 30,000 manuscripts, this was the first printed attempt at a union catalogue of manuscripts for a country—England, including Ireland, the conquest of which had been completed by the British in 1691.  Centuries earlier in the Middle Ages union catalogues of manuscripts had been compiled in England. About 1320 Oxford Franciscans had compiled, on the basis of on-site surveys, the Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum ueterum — a manuscript union catalogue of some 1400 manuscript books in England, Scotland and Wales, and around 1350 the Benedictine monk Henry of Kirkestede, prior of the royal abbey of St. Edmund at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk—traditionally known as Boston Burienis, compiled a union catalogue of manuscripts in English libraries entitled Catalogus de libris autenticis et aposcrifis

Bernard had worked on the catalogue for years when in 1692

"a movement started in Oxford to follow up the catalogue of printed books in Bodley with a catalogue of the manuscripts there and in college libraries. Dr. Edwards, Principal of Jesus, approached the curators of the Clarendon Press, who accepted the proposal. The scheme was enlarged to include the collections in Cambridge and in cathedral libraries and finally in private libraries. Cambridge kept aloof; only four colleges sent their catalogues, and the University Library and the remaining colleges were represented only by a reprint of the lists made by Thomas James in 1600. Bernard was in ill health and died on 12 January, 1697, while the book was still in the press" (Simpson, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [1970] 189, see also 190-94).

Though the printed catalogue identified Edward Bernard as the only author, it was actually a cooperative venture compiled by several scholars. Arthur Charlette, Master of University College, Oxford, seems to have been in charge of gathering information for the catalogue. However, the most significant contributor other than Bernard was probably the Harleian librarian, palaeographer and scholar of Old English Humpfrey Wanley. Wanley researched holdings of collectors in England whose libraries needed to be included, and was the author of four catalogues of holdings within the union catalogue: (1) the Free School at Coventry, (2) Basil Fielding, 4th Earl of Denbigh (3) St. Mary's Church, Warwick, and (4) John Ayres. Wanley also compiled the index to the entire work, wrote the Preface and corrected some of the proofs. References to Wanley's work on the catalogue appear in his letters. See Letters of Humfrey Wanley, Palaeographer, Anglo-Saxonist, Librarian, 1672-1726, Edited by P. L. Heyworth (1989). 

The catalogue is notable for containing the holdings of numerous significant private collectors as well as institutional libraries. Among the better-remembered collectors whose manuscripts are recorded are Samuel Pepys, John EveynWilliam Laud, Thomas Bodley, John Leland, Roger Dodsworth, Richard James, Robert Huntington, and Antony Wood. The crucial holdings of Sir Robert Cotton were not included in Bernard's catalogue because just one year earlier Thomas Smith's Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Cottonianae had been issued in identical format by the same printer. My copy of Bernard's catalogue was bound at the time with Smith's catalogue of the Cottonian library at the back of its second volume. It would appear that the two works were intended to supplement one another. 

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A Universal Bibliography but Only for "A and B" 1699

Christoph Hendreich published in Berlin only the first volume (A-B) of Pandectae Brandeburgicae Continentes I. Bibliothecam. . . Auctorum inpressorum [!] & Manuscr. partem. . . nomina plurimorum, Anonymorum, Pseudonymorum & c. explicata. . . II. Indicem materiarum praecipuarum.

Named for the Great Elector of Brandenburg whom Hendreich served as librarian, this was was an attempt to produce a universal author bibliography of books and manuscripts. The first volume covering letters A and B listed 50,000 works by 15,000 authors, reflective of the significant growth of information by the end of the seventeenth century. The author, who died in 1702, did not live to complete any further volumes.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 92.

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1700 – 1750

The First Book Auction Conducted in Paris for Which a Catalogue was Printed July – December 1706

The sale by auction of the Bigot family library was conducted by booksellers Jean Boudot, Charles Osmont and Gabriel Martin over the remarkably long duration of five months. Prior to this auction several auction catalogues for private libraries were printed in Paris but the libraries were sold privately before auctions could occur. The Bigot sale was in five parts comprising 450 manuscripts and over 15,000 printed books.

Bookseller, publisher and writer Prosper Marchand organized and catalogued the sale for Martin and Osmont. One of the ways in which the sale was notable was in its introduction of the classification scheme which divided information into five great divisions that Marchand borrowed from the seventeenth century astonomer, scientific intermediator, and librarian, Ismaël Boulliau (Bullialdus).  Gabriel Martin promoted this scheme, which originated in the seventeenth century, and may have first been applied in the catalogue of the library of Jacques Auguste de Thou, the Catalogus Bibliothecae Thuanae (1679). The scheme categorized information into the following subject areas: theology, jurisprudence, sciences and arts (initially called philosophy in this catalogue), belles-lettres (humane letters), and history. Book auctions in France would follow this scheme throughout the 18th century, and in the early 19th century Jacques Charles Brunet elaborated on this basic scheme in his Manuel du Libraire et de l'amateur de livres (1810). See Berkvens-Stevelink, Prosper Marchand: la vie et oeuvre (1987) 11-22.

The published auction catalogue was entitled Bibliotheca Bigotiana; seu, Catalogus librorum, quos (dum viverent) summâ curâ & industriâ, ingentique sumptu congressêre vir clarissimi DD. uterque Joannes, Nicolaus, & Lud. Emericus Bigotii, domini de Sommesnil & de Cleuville. . . . 

The Library was begun by Jean Bigot in the early 17th century, and continued by his son, Louis-Emery. It eventually passed to Robert Bigot, sieur de Monville, and was sold at his death in 1706. The library included that of Jean-Jacques de Mesmes, for whom Gabriel Naudé had written Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque in 1627. 

At the auction the abbé de Louvois purchased many books for the Bibliothèque du Roi. "This was Gabriel Martin's first catalogue, and according to Bléchet, Jean-Pierre Nicéron was an editor" (North, Printed Catalogues of French Book Auctions and Sales by Private Treaty 1643-1830 in the Library of the Grolier Club [2004] no. 12).

The Bigot manuscripts were purchased for the Bibliothèque du roi. Over 150 years later they were catalogued by Léopold Delisle as Bibliotheca Bigotiana Manuscripta. Catalogue des manuscrits rassemblés aux XVIIe siecle par les Bigot, mis en vente au mois de juillet 1706, aujourdhui conservé aux Bibliothèque nationale (1877).

Albert, Recherches sur les principes fondamentaux de la classification bibliographique. . . . (1847) 17-19.

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The First Bibliography of Americana 1713

White Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough, England, published in London Bibliothecae Americanae Primordia. An Attempt Towards Laying the Foundation of an American Library, in Several Books, Papers, and Writings, Humbly given to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. . . . Published in an edition of 250 copies, this was the library of the first collector of historical documents on the continent of North America. It was also the first bibliography of Americana, carefully listing in chronological order books, charts, maps, and documents with a detailed alphabetical index.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 93.

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The First Periodical Published in English on Rare Books & Manuscripts 1738

London rare book dealer and publisher Thomas Osborne issued The British Librarian: Exhibiting a Compenious Review or Abstract of our most Scarce, Useful and Valuable Books in all Sciences as well in Manuscript as in Print.

The work, of which only six issues appeared from January to June 1737 (issued in a collected volume in 1738), was the first periodical published in English on rare books and manuscripts, and it may be the first periodical on these topics in any language, as the antiquarian book trade was beginning to become organized around this time, and the earliest recorded full-fledged rare book catalogue— as distinct from an auction catalogue— is also dated 1738.

The anonymous author of the periodical, William Oldys, included descriptions of unique manuscripts, of examples of early printing such as several works printed by William Caxton, and of other works which were considered rare and collectable at the time. He sometimes included details of bindings, and of private collections. While Oldys' descriptions lean toward the verbose, and there is a certain lack of analysis, the periodical provides valuable insight into how rare books were appreciated and marketed in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is especially helpful since, as Oldys remarks, booksellers' catalogues and library catalogues of this period were primarily listings, and almost never annotated.

William Oldys devoted his life to antiquarian and bibliographic pursuits, compiling valuable notes on Langbaine's Dramatick Poets (1691), writing an important "Life" of Sir Walter Raleigh (published in the 1736 edition of Raleigh's History of the World), and amassing a library of historical and political works. In 1731 Oldys sold his library to Edward Harley (1689-1741), second Earl of Oxford probably the greatest English collector of printed books and manuscripts of his time. From 1738 to 1741 Oldys served as the Earl's librarian, but had to give up the post upon his patron's death. In 1742 The Earl of Oxford's immense library of printed books was purchased by bookseller Thomas Osborne, publisher of The British Librarian and one of England's first rare book dealers. Osborne hired Oldys and Samuel Johnson to prepare a descriptive catalogue of the Harleian collection prior to its sale; the resulting Catalogus bibliothecae Harleianae was issued in four volumes plus a supplementary fifth volume of books from Osborne's stock, between 1743 and 1745. Oldys and Samuel Johnson also worked together on The Harleian Miscellany, an annotated reprint of selected tracts and pamphlets from the Harleian library edited by Oldys and Johnson and published by Osborne.

After the death of Harley ", . . Oldys worked for the booksellers. His habits were irregular, and in 1751 his debts drove him to the Fleet prison. After two years' imprisonment he was released through the kindness of friends who paid his debts, and in April 1755 he was appointed Norfolk Herald Extraordinary and then Norroy King of Arms by the Duke of Norfolk" (Wikipedia article on William Oldys, which derives material from the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica).

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The First Continent-Wide Union Catalogue of Manuscripts 1739

In 1739 French scholar and Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon published Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum Manuscriptorum nova in Paris. A catalogue of all the manuscript collections in France and Italy with which Montfaucon was familiar, plus small sections on manuscripts in libraries in Germany, Netherlands and England, this 1669-page work in 2 folio volumes was the first attempt at a continent-wide catalogue of manuscripts. Its emphasis was on medieval and Renaissance texts.

Montfaucon began with a list of all the libraries, institutional and private, for which he published holdings. These included the well-known collections and those of medieval monasteries such as Bobbio, Corbie and Fulda, but also including lesser-known monastic libraries. Then he published a 250-page index of authors and codices.  The work then listed the manuscript contents of libraries by country beginning with Italy and the Vatican Library. The work ended with another 160-page index of authors and "rerum" (things). The comprehensive indices make it possible to locate manuscript texts by author and subject. As such it remains the most useful tool for checking the distribution of manuscript texts in European libraries, and their survival in institutions up to the first third of the eighteenth century.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 175, note.

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1750 – 1800

The First Significant Catalogue Raisonne in Western Art History 1751

In 1751 Catalogue raisonné de toutes les pieces qui forment l'oeuvre de Rembrandt by Edmé-François Gersaint, P.-C.-A. Helle, and Jean-Baptiste Glomy was published in Paris.

This catalogue of Rembrandt's prints was the "first catalogue raisonné in Western art history" (Sylvia Hochfield, "Rembrandt: Myth, Legend, Truth", ARTnews 7/01/06 accessed 09-29-2011). Marchand-mercier Gersaint, immortalized by L'Enseigne de Gersaint (Gersaint's Shop Sign) painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau, was an art dealer, the leading auctioneer in Paris of art objects and natural history specimens, and a scholar and connoisseur. He compiled his catalogue from the collection of Dutch painter and writer Arnold Houbraken, of Amsterdam, which had previously been the property of Jan Six, an intimate firend of Rembrandt and the subject of more than one portrait by the artist.

After Gersaint's death in 1750, Gersaint's widow turned over the manuscript of the unfinished catalogue to Helle and Glomy who augmented this compilation by examination of a number of collections in France, and published the catalogue in duodecimo format one year later. An English translation of the catalogue appeared in London in 1752 as A Catalogue and Description of the Etchings of Rembrandt Van-Rhyn, with some Account of his Life. To which is added, A List of the best Pieces of this Master. 

A supplement to Gersaint's catalogue by printmaker Pieter Yver, based on the collection of M. van Leyden, which had been culled from those of Houbraken, Halling, Maas, Moewater and De Burgy, and which was the largest known collection of Rembrandt at the time, was published in Amsterdam in 1756.  Austrian scholar and artist Adam Bartsch issued a new, revised edition of the catalogue in Vienna, 1797.  In 1797 Daniel Daulby, celebrated in his own lifetime as perhaps the greatest British collector of Rembrandt etchings, issued from Liverpool a new English edition entitled A Descriptive catalogue of the works of Rembrandt ... compiled from original etchings. In 1824 Le Chevalier de Claussin published a revised and expanded edition of the Gersaint catalogue, and in 1828 he published a supplement to that work.

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A Typographic Masterpiece, & the First Book Printed Partially on Wove Paper May 5, 1757

The first book, part of which was printed on wove paper (velin) invented by English papermaker James Whatman, was the edition of Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica et Aeneis printed in Birmingham, England by writing master, typographer and printer John Baskerville. The edition was advertised for sale in the London Press on May 5, 1757. Because Whatman could supply only enough wove paper for part of the edition,

"the first 28 sheets (A-2E) were printed on an unwatermarked wove paper, the remainder (2F-3H, Π-b) on an unwatermarked laid paper. At some time after the change from wove to laid paper a number of sheets and individual leaves were cancelled, those in the wove sections being identifiable through the cancellantia being printed on laid paper. Some of these cancels are found in nearly all copies of the book, some in only a few" (Gaskell, John Baskerville: A Bibliography [1959] no. 1).

The wove paper Whatman produced for this edition was a preliminary form:

"Apropos of the claim . . . that Baskerville's quarto Virgil of 1757 is printed on the first known specimen of western wove paper, it can be said without hesitation that the characteristics of this paper are unique. It is quite unlike the more successful wove papers that followed in having unmistakable wiremarks and flaws" (Balston, The Whatmans and Wove (Velin) Paper [1998] xxxv). 

Baskerville's Virgil of 1757 was his first publication, a project which he began in 1754, after he had made a fortune manufacturing japanned goods. Some authorities consider it Baskervile's finest work. The edition became famous for its typography, and overall design. 

"In this Virgil, his first book, the 'amateur' Baskerville shows an assurance one would have expected from a highly experienced master . . . His use of his own, freshly created type, with its balance between the subtlety of the earlier printers' designs and the harsh new French types, is exemplary. . . The skill seen here is especially remarkable, for such simplicity, even minimalism, was revolutionary. It was a defining moment in bookmaking, ridding it of the irrelevant, flowery decoration . . . The repercussions were to be felt not only in Britain, but in continental Europe, and even in America." (Bartram, Five Hundred Years of Book Design, 70-71).

Though book historians draw attention to the first use of wove paper in the first Baskerville edition of Virgil, there is no evidence that Baskerville was especially interested in this innovation in paper. Most of his later book were printed on the traditional laid paper.  Besides the innovative typography and book design involved, Baskerville's first edition of Virgil was also known for the "glazed" surface of the paper. The exact method by which Baskerville glazed or hot-pressed his book-paper was a trade secret that Baskerville never revealed. As a result, extensive research by historians of printing and paper has been devoted to possible techniques involved; see Balston, op. cit (1998) 27-28, 217-224.

Eventually after the first edition of his 1757 4to Virgil was sold out, Baskerville published a second edition, produced in facsimile to the first. The precise date of this second edition, called by some a "forgery," is unknown, but it has been estimated to be around 1770. Among the ways it can be distinguished from the first edition is that is printed entirely on laid rather than wove paper. Determining the original printing from the early facsimile edition also requires attention to subtle bibliographical details cited in Gaskell's bibliography referenced above.

Pardoe, John Baskerville of Birmingham, Letter-Founder & Printer (1975).

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Candide, ou l'Optimism 1759

In 1759 French philosophe François-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the pen name Voltaire, pseudonymously published the satirical novella Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit de l‟Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph secretly in Geneva, Switzerland, first at the press of printer and bookseller Gabriel Cramer. Probably within days editions were also published in Paris, Amsterdam, London and Brussels.

Immediately after its secretive publication, the book was widely banned because it contained religious blasphemy, political sedition and intellectual hostility hidden under a thin veil of naïveté. Attempts at censorship undoubtedly backfired, and promoted sales. Twenty different editions of the work dated 1759 have been identified. Of those, four with 299 pages, are considered the earliest. It is estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 copies of the work were sold during its first year, making it a resounding bestseller.

"The bibliographical history of this book has been exasperatingly complex and confused, and, until recently, virtually insoluble. The cumulative analyses of Ira Wade, Giles Barber, and Stephen Weissman, however, finally succeeded in resolving the matter conclusively. The 1759 Cramer edition containing 299-pages, with the points detailed below, has been given priority: the misprint 'que ce ce fut' on p. 103, line 4 (corrected in later editions to 'que ce fut'); the incorrect adjective 'precisement' on p. 125, line 4 (corrected in later editions to 'precipitamment'); with Voltaire‟s revisions on p. 31, where an unnecessary paragraph break was eliminated, and p. 41, where several short sentences about the Lisbon earthquake were rewritten. Finally, as in all of the few known copies of the Geneva printing, Chapter XXV (signature L) does not contain the paragraph critical of contemporary German poets, which Voltaire decided to drop while the book was being printed. Ten copies of the first issue are known, of which seven were bound without the final leaves N7, a blank, and N8, instructions to the binder concerning the cancellation of two pairs of leaves (B4 and B9 and D6 and D7)" (James J. Jaffe, list prepared for the New York Antiquarian Book Fair April 11, 2011, no. 124). 

The true first state is very rare, though it is likely that a few more than ten copies exist.

Barber 299G. Bengesco 14 34. Morize 59a. Wade 1. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) No. 204. For the influence of Candide in the history of economics see Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (2008) XIX-XXII.

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The First Book Printed Entirely on Wove Paper October 6, 1759 – 1760

The first book printed entirely on James Whatman's wove paper, which had been invented by Whatman circa 1756, and first issued in Baskerville's quarto Virgil published in 1757, was English Shakespearean critic Edward Capell's Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry. . . . This work was beautifully printed in London by Dryden Leach and completed, according to his colophon, on October 6, 1759.  It was issued by publishers J. and R. Tonson, with a title page dated 1760. By 1759 Whatman's wove paper was substantially improved over that used in the Baskerville Virgil.

Capell's book is notable in bibliography for including the first quasi-facsimile transcriptions of title pages of printed texts referenced.

The work was also the first modern edition of many of the early literary pieces it republished.

Balston, The Whatmans and Wove (Velin) Paper (1998) xxxiv, 85-86.

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The Beginning of "Modern" Rare Book Cataloguing 1763 – 1769

Between 1763 and 1769 antiquarian bookseller Guillaume François de Bure (Debure) published Bibliographie instructive; ou traité de la connoissance des livres rares et singuliers. 

Contentant un Catalogue raisonné del la plus grande partie de ces Livres précieux, qui ont paru successivement dans la République des Lettres, depuis l'Invention de l'Imprimerie, jusques à nos jours; avec des Notes sur la différences & la rareté actuelle, & son dégré plus ou moins considérable: la maniere de distinguer les Editions originale, d'avec les contrefaites, avec un Description Typographique particuliere du composé de ces rare Volumes, ou moyen de laquell il sera aisé de reconnoître facilement les Exemplaires, ou mutilés en partie, ou absolument imparfaits, qui s'en recontrent journellement dans le Commerce, & de les distinguer surrement de ceux qui seront exactement completes dans toutes leurs parties. Disposé par order de Matieres & des facultés, suivant de systême Bibliographique généralement adopté; avec un Table générale des Auteurs, & un systême complete de Bibliographie choisie.

This main work appeared in 7 volumes. Volumes 8 and 9, published in 1769, consisted of Supplement à la Bibliographie instructive, our Catalogue des Livres  du Cabinet de feu M. Louis Jean Gaignat. This was the auction catalogue of Gaignat's collection written and published by de Bure.  An index to the 9 volumes was published as 10th volume in 1782. It is rarely found with the set.

De Bure organized his reference work and the Gaignat auction catalogue according to the basic five category theme originally promoted by Gabriel Martin in the pioneering Bigot sale in 1706

Roughly one hundred years after De Bure's work was published Brunet II, 552-53 wrote of this work: 

"une production tout à fait neuve et assez remarkable à l'époque où elle parut: aujourd'hui même elle peut encore être consultée utilement pour plsuieurs articles qui n'ont pas été décrits autre part avec autant de détails que là. Ce catalogue donne d'ailleurs une idée exact du goût qui dominait alors parmi des amateurs de livres rare et précieux."

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) No. 107.

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First Catalogue of the British Museum Library 1787

The British Museum published the first catalogue of its library: Librorum impressorum qui in Museo Britannico adservantur catalogus.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

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Bibliographical Guide to Antiquarian Bookselling and Collecting, With Pioneering Exposition on Rarity 1790 – 1802

In 1790 antiquarian bookseller and publisher André-Charles Caillot published in 3 volumes Dictionnaire Bibliographique, historique et critique des livres rares,

précieux, singulier, curieux, estimés et recherchés qui n'ont aucun prix fix, tant des auteurs connus que de ceux qui ne le sont pas, soit manuscrits, avant & depuis l'invention de l'Imprimerie; soit imprimés, et qui ont paru successivement de nos jours, en François, Grec, Latin, Italien, Espagnol, Anglis, & c. Avec leur valeur. Réduite à une just appréciation, suivant les prix auxquels ils ont été portés dans les ventes publiques, depuis la fin du XVIIe. Siecle jusqu'à présent. Auxquels on a ajouté, des observations & des Notes pour faciliter la connoissance exact & certaine des Editions originales, & les Remarques pour les distinguer les Editions contrefaits. Suivi d'n Essai de Bibliographie, où il est traité de la Connoissance & de l'Amour des Livres, de leurs divers degrés de rareté, & c. &c. Ouvrage utile et nécessaire A tous Littérateurs, Bibliographes, Bibliophiles, & à tous ceux qui veulent exercer, avec quelques connoissances, la Librairie ancienne et moderne.

In the introduction to their work the authors explain how they were influenced by the Bibliographie instructive; ou traité de la connoissance des livres rares et singuliers issued by antiquarian bookseller Guillaume de Bure in 9 volumes from 1763 to 1769. They also provided a 10-page listing of the catalogues of about 100 auction sales of rare books that took place mainly in Paris from 1708 onward, together with the printed catalogues of a few private libraries, including the Catalogus Bibliothecae Thuanae (1679), from which they compiled their work. 

Perhaps the most notable feature of Duclos and Caillot's work was the Essai de bibliographie, ou De la connissance & de l'amour des Livres, de leurs divers degrés de rareté, de la maniere de les classer, & de l'ordre de leurs facultés published on pp. 484-524 of volume 3.  This is one of the earliest discussions of the qualities of rarity in books, discussing the difference between absolute and relative rarity. By absolute rarity the authors meant books which were published in very small numbers, suppressed, or censored. By relative rarity they meant books which are sought after, collected or in demand even though they may be more or less common. In a footnote on p. 492 the authors referred to increased numbers of printers, lost morality, and increased production of scandalous, libellous or obscene literature as a result of the French Revolution.  In the Essai de bibliographie the authors also presented their refinement and expansion of the five basic subject categories under which information was organized in France since the beginning of the eighteenth century

In 1802 antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer Jacques Charles Brunet published a fourth and supplementary volume to this work. In the preface to that volume Brunet stated that the authors of the work, which was published by Caillot without attribution of authorship, were the abbé R. Duclos and the bookseller-publisher André-Charles Caillot.

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Proposal for a National Bibliography of France 1793 – 1794

French Catholic priest and revolutionary leader Henri Grégoire (Abbé Grégoire) published Instruction Publique. Rapport sur la bibliographie, delivered at the Convention nationale, seance du 22 Germinal, l'a 2 de la République. I have two different typeset versions of this pamphlet in my library, both of which consist of 16pp.  That with the colophon: DE L'IMPRIMERIE NATIONALE on the last leaf would appear to be first.

Grégoire believed that a French national bibliography would furnish material for :

1) a new history of France

2) a dictionary of pseudonymous and anonymous literature

3) a new geneological table of human knowledge

4) paleography of the French language, "which will be from now on the language of liberty."

By exchanging duplicates of rare and very expensive volumes, including specifically incunabula printed on vellum, the Bibliothèque nationale could be completed. (p. 11)

Abbé Grégoire hoped that the French government would sponsor this project, which it did not.  Had it done so, this would have been the first government-sponsored national bibliography.

Grégoire also condemned the recent destruction of libraries during the Revolutionary violence, and celebrated the arrival in Paris of a copy of Titus Livius, Historiae Romanae decades, edited by Joannes Andrea Bussi, bishop of Aleria. Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1470.  ISTC No.: il00238000. To Grégoire the copy was notable not only because of its rarity but because during a seige a bullet broke through its covers and margins without damaging the text (Grégoire p. 11).

An English translation of Grégoire's work was published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin Bache in 1794: National Convention. Report on the means of compleating and distributing the National Library Made in the name of the Committee of Public Instruction, the 22d germinal, second year of the Republic. (April 11, 1794.) 

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The First Comprehensive Bibliography of Technology 1795

Meteorologist and instrument manufacturer Gottfried Erich Rosenthal published Litterature der Technologie das ist: Verzeichniss der Bücher, Schriften und Abhandlungen, welche von den Künsten, den Manufackturen und Fabriken, der Handlung, der Handwerkern und sonstigen Nahrungszweigen, als auch von denen zum wissenschaflichen Betriebe derselben erforderlichen Kenntnissen aus dem Naturreich, der Mathematik, Physik und Chemie handeln.

Rosenthals' work was the first comprehensive bibliography of technology, containing about 20,000 references in European languages and Latin, but seemingly nothing in English. It shows the build-up of techical literature by the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.  It is particularly useful for the numerous references to early journal articles on specialized subjects.

This work was also issued as the final part of Jacobssons technologisches Wörterbuch oder alphabetische Erklärung aller nützlichen mechanischen Künste, Manufacturen, Fabriken und Handwerker (1781-95).

Petzhold p. 727.

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Celestial Mechanics 1799 – 1827

French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace published Paris Traité de méchanique céleste in 5 volumes with several supplements. This work was "a treatise on celestial mechanics in the tradition of Newton’s Principia. Here Laplace applied his mathematical theories of probability to celestial bodies and concluded that the apparent changes in the motion of planets and their satellites are changes of long periods, and that the solar system is in all probability very stable. He gave methods for calculating the movements of translation and rotation of heavenly bodies and for resolving problems of tides, from which he deduced the mass of the moon” (Dibner, Heralds of Science (1980) no. 14). Laplace’s system of celestial mechanics (a term he coined) marked an advance over that of Newton, who had posited the necessity of a Deity in the universe to correct planetary irregularities; Laplace on the other hand, when asked by Napoleon why his system contained no mention of the Creator, replied “I had no need of such a hypothesis.”

The bibliographical makeup of Mécanique céleste is among the most complex of science classics; see Horblit and the Norman library catalogue for collations and paginations. Two issues of Vols. I-II exist, one with the imprint of Crapelet and Duprat alone and the French Republican date “An VII”; and one dated “1799” with the additional imprint reading “Berlin: chez F. T. de la Garde, Libraire,” printed for European distribution. The third volume contains a single separately paginated supplement (“Supplément au Traité de mécanique céleste . . . présenté au Bureau des Longitudes, le 17 août 1808”); the fourth volume has two separately paginated supplements (“Supplément au dixième livre du Traité de mécanique céleste. Sur l’action capillaire” and “Supplément à la théorie de l’action capillaire”). The fifth volume’s supplement,  (“Supplément au 5e volume du Traité de mécanique céleste . . .”) appeared in 1827. It is not unusual for sets to be lacking one or more of the supplements. Vol. V, comprising a series of addenda to the first four volumes, appeared twenty years after Vol. IV; according to Laplace’s “Avertissement” to this volume, each of its five books was issued separately in the month indicated on its part-title.

Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science no. 63. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1277. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 252.

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1800 – 1850

The First Catalogue of the Library of Congress April 1802 – October 1803

The first catalogue of the Library of Congress was a ten-page pamphlet:

Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress.

This listed the original collection according to size: folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos, with estimated values for each, followed by nine maps and charts. 

In October 1803 the first supplement appeared:

Supplemental Catalogue of Books, Maps, Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress.

This 7-page pamphlet listed 180 volumes added since April 1802.

Sabin 15560 & 15561.

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The First Practical Manual on Antiquarian Bookselling 1804 – 1805

Printer and bookseller Martin-Sylvestre Boulard wrote, printed, and published Traité élementaire de Bibliographie, contenant la manière de faire les Inventaires, les Prisées, les Ventes Publiques et de classer les Catalogues. Les bases d'une bonne Bibliothèque et la manière d'apprécier les livres rares et précieux. Ouvrage utile à tous les bibliographes et particulièrement aux Bibliothècaires et aux Libraires qui commencent in Paris in An XIII of the French revolutionary calendar (1804-05).

This was the first practical manual for antiquarian booksellers.

Janssen, "The Oldest Practical Manual for the Antiquarian Bookseller," Bulletin du Bibliophile (1997) 367-74.

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The First Thematic Index of a Composer's Work, Based on Mozart's Own Index 1805

Composer and music publisher Johann Anton André published in Offenbach Thematisches Verzeichniss sämmtlicher Kompositionen von W. A. Mozart.

This was:

"the first thematic index of a composer's works (and probably the first book [on music] produced by lithographic process). André, a composer and, as music publisher, successor to his equally famous father, Johann, had in 1800 acquired Mozart's manuscripts, including his [Mozart's own] 'Verzeichniss aller meiner Werke,' on which this index is based" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 116).

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"The Best and Last of the General Rare Book Bibliographies" 1810 – 1865

In 1810 French antiquarian bookseller Jacques Charles Brunet issued in 3 volumes Manuel du libraire et de l'amateur de livres,

contenant

1.* Un Nouveau dictionnaire bibliographique, Dans lequel sont indiqués les Livres les plus précieux et les Ouvrages les plus utiles, tant anciens que moderns, avec des notes sur les différentes éditions qui ont été faites, et des remarques pour en reconnaitres les contrefaçons; on y a joint des détails nécessaires pour collationner les Livres anciens et les principaux Ouvrages à Estampes; la concordance des prix auxquels les éditions les plus rares ont été portées dans les ventes publiques faites depuis quarante ans, et l'évaluation approximative des Livres anciens qui se recontrent fréquement dans le commerce de la Librairie;

2.* Une table en forme de catalogue raisonné, Où sont classés méthodiquement tous les Ouvrages indiqués dans le Dictionnaire, et de plus, un grand nombre d'Ouvrages utiles, mais d'un prix ordinaire, qui n'ont past dû être placés an rang des Livres précieux

Brunet continued to revise and expand this encyclopedic guide during the rest of his life, completing the fifth edition in six volumes published from 1860-1865. Three supplementary volumes by booksellers Pierre Deschamps and Gustave Brunet were published from 1870 to 1880.

This encyclopedic reference for antiquarian booksellers and collectors contained annotations concerning the scholarly and commercial value of rare books that in some cases remain unsurpassed in the early 21st century. More significantly it provided bibliographical, scholarly, and price information in one convenient, authoritative reference that was, and often remains, invaluable for antiquarian booksellers, collectors, bibliographers, and librarians.

One of the many ways in which Brunet's work was useful and influential was in his expansion of the then-traditional classification scheme for information used in France since the beginning of the 18th century.  This classification scheme, which divided information into five great divisions, originated in the seventeenth century, and was promoted by the first great book auctioneer in Paris, Gabriel Martin, who first employed it in the Bigot sale in 1706. The scheme categorized information into the following subject areas: theology, jurisprudence, sciences and arts (initially called philosophy), belles-lettres (humane letters), and history. In Brunet's time this basic scheme was still used in French library cataloguing schemes, limiting the utility of subject cataloguing. In the third volume of his Manuel Brunet published Ordre Des princpales Divisions de la Table méthodique des Ouvrages cités dans le nouveau Dictionnaire Bibliographique.  This divided the traditional five subject categories into numerous sub-categories and divisions within those sub-categories.  This he followed by listings of significant books in each of the categories and sub-categories in the classification scheme.

Breslauer & Folter,  Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) No. 118.

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The First Extensive Catalogue of the Library of Congress November 1815

George Watterson, Librarian of Congress, published Catalogue of the Library of the United States. To Which is Annexed a Copious Index, Alphabeticaly Arranged. This work of 170 pages and 32 pages of index, was printed for Congress by Jonathan Elliot and issued from Washington. It represented the catalogue of the library of Thomas Jefferson, the foundation of the Library of Congress.

"In it each entry was numbered, not serially, but with the number corresponding with Jefferson's shelf-mark. This number was also inserted in the bookplate, purchased from William Elliot in October 1815, and pasted into each volume. The manuscript catalogue written by Jefferson and submitted to Congress for the purposes of the sale (through Samuel Harrison Smith) in 1814, seems to have been the 'fair copy of the Catalogue of my library' which he had made in 1812. This was later taken away by George Watterson and has now disappeared . . . [Another] catalogue was originally written by Jefferson in 1783, and is so dated by him on the fly-leaf; it was added to and supplemented continuously until the time of the negotiations for the sale in 1814' - Sowerby.

"The present catalogue differs dramatically in arrangement from Jefferson's original system of classification. Jefferson had organized his library according to a system derived from Book 2 of Francis Bacon's ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. Beginning with Bacon's three categories of knowledge (memory, reason, and imagination), Jefferson devised forty-four classes or 'chapters.' Within chapters, the books were arranged sometimes analytically, sometimes chronologically, or both, and were subjected to further classification by size. While this method served Jefferson well and offered illuminating intellectual bridges between diverse fields, Watterson recognized the difficulty the average patron might have in accessing the books for which he might be searching. To remedy this problem, in the present catalogue Watterson arranged the catalogue alphabetically within each chapter by first word of the title without being prejudiced towards definite and indefinite articles. Both Watterson and Jefferson realized the imperfections of this new system, but once in place it proved too large a task to rectify it" (William Reese Company, online description, accessed from ILAB website 07-21-2009).

In 1820 Congress published Supplement to the Catalogue of the Library of Congress. This 28-page pamphlet listed approximately 700 titles acquired since the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's library, with a focus on travels and voyages, the sciences, and European history. Sabin 15566.

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The First "Leaf Book" 1827

In 1827 English bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin published the fourth and last of his editions of his An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics in London. By this time Dibdin had expanded his work from its original 8vo edition (Gloucester, 1802) which consisted of only 63 pages, to a two-volume work of nearly 1200 pages. The work was expected to be a commercial success with 2000 copies issued on regular paper and 250 issued on large paper.

An innovative feature of the book was that all copies of both versions had pasted to p. 166 of volume 1 a proof leaf, printed on one side only, for William Pickering's very small format (32mo) Diamond Classics edition of the Greek New Testament (1828), making this the first "leaf book."

de Hamel & Silver, Disbound and Dispersed: The Leaf Book Considered (2005) p. 107, Checklist *0.5.

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The First Illustrated Antiquarian Bookseller's Catalogue 1829

In 1829 English antiquarian bookseller John Cochran of London issued A Catalogue of Manuscripts, in Different Languages, on Theology; English and Foreign History; Heraldry; Philosophy, Poetry; Romances; the Fine Arts (Including Calligraphy and some Splendid Persian Drawings;) Sports; Alchemy, Astrology, Divination; &c. &c. of Various Dates, from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, Many of them upon Vellum, and Adorned with Splendid Illuminations. To Which is Added a Small Collection of Manuscripts in the Oriental Languages; with an Appendix Containing a Few Printed Books, Some of them with Manuscript Notes and Autographs of Eminent Persons. This catalogue, written by John Holmes who was later assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, listed 650 items, each with annotated descriptions, some quite extensive. Presented in a cloth binding with printed paper label on the spine, this antiquarian bookseller's catalogue was the first to include illustrations of items offered for sale— a folding engraved frontispiece and five additional lithographed plates. The lithographs are all dated May 1829.

A.N.L. Munby, Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures 1750-1850 (1972) 123 mentions Holmes and Cochran's catalogue in the context of a discussion of collecting by Bertram, the Fourth Earl of Ashburnham.

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The Earliest Known Printed Dust Jacket (Now Lost) 1832

The earliest known printed detachable paper covering for a book is for The Keepsake . . . 1833 published by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman in London, 1832. This was printed on front and back, the back cover containing an advertisement. It was designed to enclose the book completely, like wrapping paper.  Such wrappers were probably intended to be discarded by the user. The unique copy of the original with the jacket belonged to antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer John Carter, who reported on it in Publisher's Weekly in 1934, and Bibliographical Notes & Queries in 1935  The original was lost in 1952 "on the way to the Bodleian," as reported by Carter in Books and Book-Collectors (1956). Fortunately it had been photographed.

Tanselle, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (2011)  No. 32.1 (p. 112) illustrating the jacket from Carter's photograph as plate 1.

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The Greatest Private Collector of Manuscripts in the Nineteenth Century 1837 – 1871

From his private press at his estate at Middle Hill, Broadway, Worcestershire, England, Sir Thomas Phillipps issued Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca d. Thomae Phillips, Bt.

According to A.N.L. Munby, this catalogue of Phillipps's manuscript collection, published in fascicules, or parts, over more than thirty years, was issued in only 50 copies, of which only three surviving copies may be considered complete. The fascicules were printed by a variety of printers, only some of whom worked at Phillipps's estate, and Phillipps bound up copies from both corrected and uncorrected sheets, resulting in copies that are exceptional in their bibliographical complexity. The catalogue includes 23,837 entries, which, for various reasons outlined by Munby, describe a considerably larger collection that may have comprised about 60,000 manuscripts. In 1968 Munby issued, in an edition of 500 copies, a facsimile of a complete copy of the Phillips catalogue which belonged at the time to rare book dealer Lew D. Feldman: The Phillipps Manuscripts. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum . . . with an introduction by A.N.L. Munby. (London: Holland Press).

"Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created. . . . A.N.L. Munby notes that '[h]e spent perhaps between two hundred thousand and a quarter of a million pounds[,] altogether four or five thousand pounds a year, while accessions came in at the rate of forty or fifty a week.' His success as a collector owed something to the dispersal of the monastic libraries following the French Revolution and the relative cheapness of a large amount of vellum material, in particular English legal documents, many of which owe their survival to Phillipps. He was an assiduous cataloguer who established the Middle Hill Press (named after his country seat at Broadway, Worcestershire) in 1822 not only to record his book holdings but also to publish his findings in English topography and geneology."

"During his lifetime Phillipps attempted to turn over his collection to the British nation and corresponded with the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Disraeli in order that it should be acquired for the British Library. Negotiations proved unsuccessful and ultimately the dispersal of his collection took over 100 years. Phillipps's will stipulated that his books should remain intact at Thirlestaine House, that no bookseller or stranger should rearrange them and that no Roman Catholic should be permitted to view them. In 1885 the Court of Chancery declared this too restrictive and thus made possible the sale of the library which Phillipps’s grandson Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick supervised for the next fifty years. Significant portions of the European material were sold to the national collections on the continent including the Royal Library, Berlin, the Royal Library of Belgium and the Provincial Archives in Utrecht as well as the sale of outstanding individual items to the J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry E. Huntington libraries. By 1946 what was known as the 'residue' was sold to London booksellers Phillip and Lionel Robinson for £100,000, though this part of the collection was uncatalogued and unexamined. The Robinsons endeavored to sell these books through their own published catalogues and a number of Sothebys sales. The final portion of the collection was sold to New York bookseller H.P. Kraus in 1977 who issued a sale catalogue the same year: the last to bear the title Bibliotheca Phillippica. A five-volume history of the collection and its dispersal, Phillipps Studies, by A.N.L. Munby was published between 1951 and 1960" (Wikipedia article on Sir Thomas Phillipps, accessed 11-25-2008).

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Panizzi's 91 Rules for Standardizing the Cataloguing of Books 1841

In 1841 Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum (now the British Library), published 91 Rules for Compilation of the Catalogue. 

These rules represented the first attempt to standardize cataloguing of printed books. They appeared in the Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum, Volume 1, pp. v-ix. published in 1841. Remarkably only this single volume, covering the letter A, was published under Panizzi's direction. The full catalogue did not begin to appear until 1881.  Panizzi undoubtedly intended his rules for usage within the British Museum cataloguing department, but he must also have intended them to circulate to librarians at other institutions through copies of the printed catalogue.  Whether they were adopted at other institutions I do not know. 

That no further volumes of the printed catalogue appeared in print until 40 years later was in no small part due to Panizzi's own objections to the huge cost of printing versus what he perceived as relatively small utility, and rapid obsolescence of printed catalogues, requiring frequent supplements. Having only a manuscript catalogue meant, of course, that the catalogue could only be consulted by users of the reading room.  It also meant uneven legibility depending upon the quality of handwriting of whoever entered the data. It also meant that making a duplicate copy of a large printed catalogue would be very costly and might incorporate scribal errors. Having a printed catalogue would, of course be more legible, and having more than one copy available would allow more than one user to search the same portions at a time. Having the printed catalogue available at other research libraries would allow users in other cities and countries to know the holdings of the British Museum.  Clearly this would stimulate scholarship.  But to Panizzi and other librarians accustomed to working with manuscript catalogues these aspects did not seem convincing at the time.  In his Memoirs of Libraries, Vol. II (1859) Edward Edwards devoted a chapter (pp. 850-868) of his section on library economy to the question of whether to print or not to print library catalogues because this was a topic currently in active discussion. Edwards clearly believed that the act of preparing a manuscript catalogue for the press would improve cataloguing, and that printed catalogues were superior to manuscript.  But the wheels of progress seem to have turned slowly in the catalogue department of the British Museum and in other national libraries, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France where the printed author catalogue did not begin to appear until 1897.

Various of Panizzi's rules reflect social attitudes of the day. For example:

"V. Works of Jewish Rabbis, as well as works of Oriental writers in general, to be entered under their first name."

Concerning the rules and the catalogue Panizzi wrote in his preface to the first volume:

"The rules on which this Catalogue is based were sanctioned by the Trustees on the 13th of July, 1839; and, with the exception of such modifications as have been found necessary in order to accelerate the progress of the work, they have been strictly adhered to. Some additional rules, the want of which was not foreseen at the commencement, are printed in italics.

"The application of the rules was left by the Trustees to the discretion of the Editor, subject to the condition that a Catalogue of the printed books in the library up to the close of the year 1838 be completed within the year 1844. With a view to the fulfillment of this undertaking it was deemed indispensable that the Catalogue should should be put to press as soon as any portion of the manuscript could be prepared; consequently the early volumes must present omissions and inaccuracies, which it is hoped, will diminish in number as the work proceeds.

"In giving to the world the first volume of a Catalogue, which promises to be of an unprecedented extent, the Editor thinks that it would be premature to name each gentleman in his department to whose zeal and talents he is indebted for much that will add to its usefulness. He looks forward to a continuation of the same assistance; and he, therefore, reserves till after the conlusion of the work the particular expression of his obligations.

"British Museum, July 15th, 1841

"A. Panizzi"

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The First Annotated Bibliography of the History of Economics 1845

In 1845 Scottish economist John Ramsay McCulloch published The Literature of Political Economy. A Classified Catalogue of Select Publications in the Different Departments of That Science with Historical, Critical, and Biographical Notices. Professor of political economy at University College London, McCulloch wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data. The Literature of Political Economy, published in London, was the first annotated and classified bibliography of classics in the historical literature of economics. Some of the annotations extend for more than a page and include extensive quotations. 

Each section begins with a general introduction, followed by a list of the principal works relating to that aspect of political economy, with notes on the individual works. There is a comprehensive author, title and subject index.

McCulloch was a noted book collector of books on a wide range of subjects besides economics. He published privately a listing of his library as  A Catalogue of Books, the Property of the Author of the Commercial Dictionary (London, 1856). McCulloch was also one of the earliest clients of the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch, and they remained close friends. In his Contributions towards a Dictionary of British Book-Collectors, fascicule VI, Quaritch and historian of economics James Bonar published reminiscences of McCulloch, a photograph, and two facsimiles of letters from McCulloch to Quaritch. After McCulloch's death in 1864 Quaritch sold McCulloch's library to McCulloch's friend, the banker and politician Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone for £5000. Bonar states that a significant portion of the books were destroyed in a fire at Overstone's house soon afterward. Lord Overstone's daughter bequeathed the surviving portion of McCulloch's library to the University of Reading.

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First Installments of the First Government-Sponsored National Union Catalogue of Manuscripts 1846 – 1849

In 1849 the first volume of Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements publié sous les auspices du Ministre d’instruction publique was published in Paris by the Imprimérie nationale. The 904-page quarto volume, with 2 folding lithographed plates, was the first installment of the first government-sponsored national union catalogue of manuscripts. The series eventually reached its fifty-ninth volume in 1975.

The first volume was undertaken under the leadership of the mathematician, paleographer and book thief, Guglielmo Libri. To this volume Libri made several major contributions. Besides his catalogue of the Seminary at Autun, first published separately in 1846, Libri wrote the catalogues of the city library and the medical school library at Montpellier, and of the library at Albi. Because Libri resigned from the commission before the catalogues received their final editing his work was revised for publication by Félix Ravaisson-Mollien.

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The First Separately Published Bibliography on the History of Science 1847

In 1847 mathematician, logician and pioneer collector of the history of mathematics, Augustus de Morgan published Arithmetical Books from the Invention of Printing to the Present Time, being Brief Notices of a Large Number of Works Drawn up from Actual Inspection.

De Morgan's work was the first separately published bibliography on the history of science excluding economics; McCulloch's annotated bibliography of the history of economics preceded it in 1845. The bulk of de Morgan's book consisted of an extensively annotated list of treatises on arithmetic from 1491 to 1846, arranged in chronological order; de Morgan claimed that he had personally examined every book. Most of the books described were from de Morgan’s own library. De Morgan stated that he was able to acquire his library at relatively low cost because of the obscurity of the subjects involved. A few of the books he described came from the libraries of collector friends, and a few from the library of the British Museum. There is an index of 1,580 entries.  In The History and Bibliography of Science in England (1968) A. N. L. Munby stated that “only in the physical descriptions of books cited is De Morgan’s great work disappointing.”

De Morgan was an eloquent exponent of the value of collecting the history of science. He wrote on p. ii his prefatory letter to Arithmetical Books:

“The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation. Like a telescopic star, its obscurity may render it unavailable for most purposes; but it serves, in hands which know how to use it, to determine the places of more important bodies.”

After de Morgan's death in 1871 his library of about 4500 books, pamphlets, manuscripts and autograph letters was purchased by British banker and politician Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone and donated by him to the University of London, becoming the first special collection at the Unversity of London library. Even though de Morgan’s library was not kept together when it was transferred, his books were separately identified in the printed catalogue of the Library published in 1876. Thus it is possible to study one of the pioneering collections of books formed in England not just on mathematics, but on a wide range of the history of physical sciences. In 2012 the Senate House Library of the University of London showed examples from de Morgan's library on its website: http://www.ull.ac.uk/specialcollections/demorganexploration.shtml

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1850 – 1875

Early Proposal for a National Union Catalogue 1852

Charles C. Jewett, librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, published On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries and Their Publication by Means of Separate Stereotyped Titles With Rules and Examples. In this work Jewett described a plan for a national union catalogue of public libraries.

"His [Jewett's] intention was to secure general uniformity of bibliographic records through a system of "stereotyping" each title. This plan would have made it possible for libraries to print annual editions of their catalogs, incorporating the titles acquired 'during the previous year in each new edition, and for the Smithsonian to print a general union catalog which would have included' both its own holdings and those of all the public libraries. The uniformity Jewett sought was to be achieved not just through stereotyping but also through use of a single set of general cataloging rules which would be used by all the libraries. In the same year Jewett published a report titled On the Construction of Catalogues of Libraries which, among other things, set forth the first American cataloging rules for establishing headings for author entries. The report contained thirty-nine rules which were based on those of Panizzi. In fact Jewett acknowledged outright that he used some of Panizzi's rules verbatim. And Jewett's stated goal of serving the needs of users also reflected Panizzi s ideas. Though his project never came to final fruition, years later his goal of compiling a union catalog was met in the United States when the National Union Catalog began publication in 1953 and in Germany as early as 1899 when the Prussian Instructions was compiled under Jewett's influence" (J R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

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Keyword in Context Indexing 1856

In 1856 bibliographer Andrea Crestadoro, an acquaintance of Anthony Panizzi, exasperated with delays in production of the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books, published anonymously The Art of Making Catalogues of Libraries, or a Method to Obtain a Most Perfect Complete and Satisfactory Printed Catalogue of the British Museum Library by a Reader Therein.

Crestadoro's booklet served as basis for a catalogue code. "In it he advocated the idea of the 'inventorial' catalog which would have detailed entries arranged in order of accession. The library patron was to be provided access to the entries through an alphabetical index of names and subjects. The Public Library of Manchester, England adopted this approach for its catalog and hired Crestadoro to implement it there in 1864. Like Panizzi, Crestadoro intended to have his catalog serve the needs of catalog users, but the rules of his code were not based on an empirical investigation of those needs" (J. R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored [2007] 29).

At the end of his pamphlet Crestadoro advocated production of a universal catalogue of all publications.

Crestadoro implemented his ideas for Keyword in Context Indexing (KWIC) in the Catalogue of the Manchester Free Library: Reference Department  (1864). 

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The Beginning of Modern Bibliographical Analysis April 1870

Librarian and bibliographer of Cambridge University Henry Bradshaw issued A Classified Index of the Fifteenth Century Books in the Collection of the Late M. J. de Meyer. This 28-page pamphlet published in London represented the beginning of modern bibliographical analysis.

“In April 1870 Henry Bradshaw, librarian of Cambridge University, published a little pamphlet entitled A Classified Index of the Fifteenth Century Books in the Collection of the Late M. J. de Meyer, Which Were Sold at Ghent in November 1869. Despite the unpromising title, it deserves to be considered a landmark in intellectual history—indeed, as far as bibliographical scholarship is concerned, one of the greatest of landmarks—for it contains a passage of major significance  emphasizing the importance of systematically examining the physical evidence in printed books. Bradshaw insisted that arranging early books according the locations and presses where they were printed was the only method whereby knowledge of early printing would be advanced, since it provides a basis for dating or identifying the printers of books that do not readily proclaim their origins:

'we desire that the types and habits of each printer should be made a special subject of study, and those points brought forward which show changes of advance from year to year, or, where practicable, from month to month. When this is done, we have to say of any dateless or falsely dated book that it contains such and such characteristics, and we therefore place it at such a point of time, the time we name being merely another expression for the characteristics we notice in the book. In fact each press must be looked upon as a genus, and each book as a species, and our business is to trace the more or less close connexion of the different members of the family according to the characters which they present to our observation. The study of palaeotypography has been hitherto mainly such a dilettante matter, that people have shrunk from going into such details, though when once studied as a branch of natural history, it is as fruitful in interesting results as most subjects' (Bradshaw 15-16).

"This passage gains its landmark status by being the first published rationale of bibliographical methodology, explicitly envisioning a whole field of endeavor, from the person who was more responsible than any other for setting in motion what Stanley Morison called the ‘bibliographical revolution’” (Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction [2009] 6-7).

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The First Catalogue of a Library on Computing and its History 1872

Charles Babbage’s scientific library was sold at auction in 1872. The auction catalogue, containing over two thousand items on topics such as mathematical tables, cryptography, and calculating machines, and including many rare volumes, may be the first catalogue of a library on computing and its history.

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Calling for a Central Bibliographical Bureau Which Would Also Store Images July 25 – November 29, 1872

American antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer Henry Stevens published an auction catalogue of books, manuscripts, maps, and charts verbosely titled as follows:

Bibliotheca geographica & historica or a catalogue of a nine days sale of rare & valuable ancient and modern books maps charts manuscripts autograph letters et cetera illustrative of historical geography & geographical history general and local. . . collected used and described. With an introduction on the progress of geography and notes annotatiunculae [sic] on sundry subjects together with an essay upon the Stevens system of photobibliography. Part I. To be dispersed by auction . . . [in] London the 19th to 29th November 1872.

In his essay introductory to the catalogue entitled Photobibliography. A Word on Catalogues and How to Make Them Stevens calls for "A Central Bibliographical Bureau" which would produce standard bibliographical descriptions of items that could be used by other cataloguers and bibliographers.  Analogous to what later became national union catalogues of books, Stevens imagined that this could "be made self-supporting or even remunerative, like the Post Office."  He also called for a standardized system of recording reduced size images called "photograms" of books according to "one uniform scale." This would reduce "all the titles, maps, woodcuts, or whatever is desired to copy" to fit the images onto standardized filing cards on which bibliographical details could be written by hand, to spare the bibliographer the time and effort of transcribing title pages.  Negatives would be stored compactly, and prints made for reproduction in printed catalogues, etc. As examples Stevens had an albumen print of a title page pasted in as the frontispiece of the auction catalogue, plus a small circular photograph of "Ptolemy's World by Mercator" pasted onto the title page.   Stevens noted the he also made available a few copies of the auction catalogue on thicker paper with about 400 pasted-on "photograms."

Stevens later expanded on this idea in a paper entitled "Photobibliography, or a Central Bibliographical Clearing-House" presented to the 1877 Conference of Librarians held in London (see "Transactions and Proceedings of the Conference", pp. 70-81).

In 1878 Stevens published privately a 16mo pamphlet of 49pp. entitled, Photo-Bibliography; or, a Word on Printed Card Catalogues of old, rare, beautiful, and costly books, and how to make them on a Co-operative System; and Two Words on the Establishment of a Central Bibliographical Bureau, or Clearing-house, for Librarians.  Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880) III, 401.

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The First Comprehensive Bibliography of the History of Printing 1873 – 1886

After announcing the project in 1873 printer Charles William Henry Wyman and bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Edward C. Bigmore began publishing in January 1876 A Bibliography of Printing with Notes and Illustrations in monthly issues of Wyman's Printing Times and Lithographer magazine, completing serial publication in 1885. Perhaps it was not coincidental that publication of this work coincided with the planning and occurence of the massive 1877 Caxton Celebration, for which Wyman served on a sub-committee. Beginning in 1880 Bigmore and Wyman's work was published in book form by London antiquarian bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch in an edition limited to 250 copies, with the third and final volume issued in 1886. Describing roughly 10,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals, this was the first detailed, annotated bibliography of the history of printing, and one of the earliest comprehensive annotated bibliographies of any technical subject.  It was completed with the assistance of printer, historian of printing, bibliographer and book collector William Blades, of printer and of American printing historian Theodore Low De Vinne, whose historical treatise, The Invention of Printing. A Collection of Facts and Opinions was first published in 1876, and others. In particular Blades, the greatest English scholar printer of his time, turned over to the authors his comprehensive notes for a bibliography of the subject which Blades had long planned, but instead chose to have incorporated into Bigmore and Wyman's project.

Regarding the scope of the project the authors wrote in the prospectus (p. 5):

"The Compliers have limited the signification of the word 'Printing,' by rejecting photographic printing, calico printing, telegraphic printing, &c., as irrelevant processes which are not ulitised for literary purposes. In fact, the works cited are those treating of typographic, lithographic, copperplate printing, &c., with the cognate arts of type-founding, stereotyping, electrotyping, and wood-engraving. The subjects of Paper and Bookbinding are not included, although it would have been an interesting task to deal with them, as would also have been the case with Copyright and Laws regulating the Press; but though they bear very closely on the subject, they seem to belong rather to the results and outcome of printing than to printing itself."

When it came to printing the book form edition of the bibliography ironically Wyman did a questionable job. He had the text set in hard-to-read solid 8-point type with the lengthy notes set in even smaller, more difficult to read 6-point type. He used typical acidic wood-pulp paper then available, with the result that most copies of the original edition have become brittle with age. Furthermore the original edition lacked an index.  Twentieth century facsimile reprints of this very useful work remedied the paper problem by printing on acid-free paper. The best facsimile edition was issued in 2001 and Oak Knoll Press. It reproduced the text in enlarged and more legible form with a new introduction by printer Henry Morris and a new index.

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1875 – 1900

The Last Library Cataloguing Code Written by One Person 1876

Charles Ammi Cutter, librarian at the Boston Athenaeum published Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue, the last library cataloguing code written by one person.

"In his prefatory note, Cutter claimed to be the first investigator of the 'first principles of cataloguing' and the first to 'set forth the rules in a systematic way.' One of the principles he expostulated was that 'the convenience of the user should be preferred to the ease of the cataloguer.' Cutter urged catalogers to do such things as select the customary use of the names of subjects and the best known form of the author's name so that this goal might be fulfilled. The code's introduction lists objectives and means to bring about this convenience. These objectives and means have been studied for years by students of cataloging code history. Exactly how the 'convenience of the user' would be determined Cutter did not specify; he himself, it would seem, relied upon his own experience rather than any systematic study of user needs or behavior. No one else did such a study during these years either: such things as survey research and transaction log analysis were twentieth century phenomena" (J. R. Hufford, The Pragmatic Basis of Catalog Codes: Has the User Been Ignored? [2007] 29]

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The First American Bibliography on the History of Printing 1877

In 1877 American printing press inventor and manufacturer Richard March Hoe published The Literature of Printing. A Catalogue of the Library Illustrative of the History and Art of Typography Chalcography and Lithography.  A New Yorker, Hoe had this catalogue privately printed on handmade paper at the Chiswick Press in London in a small, but unspecified number of copies.  Its only illustration was a frontispiece showing one of Hoe's high speed presses. According to the Catalogue of the Wlliam Blades Library (1899) this catalogue was compiled by bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Edward C. Bigmore, co-author of the Bigmore and Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880-1886).  

That Hoe, an American at the center of the American printing industry, chose to have the catalogue of his private library on the history and technique of printing published in London in 1877 rather than by a fine printer in America leads me to believe that he was motivated by the Caxton Quadricentennial Celebration, and its catalogue, which occurred in London in that year. Hoe's name appears on the list of the General Committee for the celebration printed on p. xvii of the celebration catalogue.  Because of this, I think we might reasonably speculate that Hoe wanted to show some of his fellow printing history enthusiasts in England the treasures that he had gathered in America on the history of the subjects.  Whatever Hoe's motivation, his catalogue was the first American bibliography on the history of printing and typography.

My copy of Hoe's catalogue has Hoe's signed inscription to the American minister, journalist and politician Rev. Samuel J. Barrows, who had worked for Richard Hoe as a very young man.  

Hoe died in 1886. In January 1887, ten years after Hoe's catalogue was published, his library was dispersed at auction in New York by Bangs & Co. The first 1433 lots consisted of Hoe's library on the history of printing; the remainder of the roughly 2000 lots included miscellaneous subjects.

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The Caxton Quadricentennial Celebration: Probably the Largest Exhibition on the History of Printing Ever Held June 30 – September 1, 1877

In the summer of 1877, four hundred years after printer William Caxton published The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first book printed in England, the Caxton Celebration opened in the western International Exhibition Galleries on the Queen's road side of the Horticultural Society's Gardens at South Kensington in London. The exhibition was organized by its Chairman, typefounder and politician Sir Charles Reed, by printer William Clowes, by mathematician and physicist from a family of major printers, William Spottiswoode, by printer, biographer and bibliographer of Caxton and rare book collector, William Blades, and various committees. Two hundred or more people participated in some way as patrons or members of committees, representing a "who's who" of the printing industry in England and Europe at the time, along with leading scientists, scholars, librarians and collectors. A few Americans such as Richard M. Hoe were also involved in committees. The exhibition was open for two months, from June 30 to September 1, 1877.

In their issue of July 1, 1877 The Illustrated London News published a collection of images related to the exhibition called "Caxtoniana."   The same newspaper in their issue of July 7 (p. 18) published an article on the opening of exhibition and on p. 17 a large image captioned, "Mr. Gladstone at the Caxton Memorial Exhibition, South Kensington, on Saturday Last." The image showed Prime Minister Gladstone watching printing done on a "Gutenberg-style" hand-press. The Illustrated London News described the opening ceremony of the exhibition as follows:

"The opening ceremony was brief and simple. The leading part was borne by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. He was met by Sir Charles Reed, chairman of the committee; Mr. W. Blades, the biographer of Caxton; and the other gentlemen we have named, with the Archbishop of York. A large assembly of ladies and gentlemen filled the rooms assigned for this ceremony, as well as the adjacent galleries. After a special dedicatory prayer offered by the Archbishop, Sir Charles Reed read a short statement of the occasion and the objects of the Exhibition. Mr. Hodson, secetary to the Printers' Pension Corporation, handed to Mr. Gladstone a copy of the Exhibition Catalogue. The right hon. gentleman then declared the Exhibition to be opened. This formal declaration was immediately hailed by a flourish of trumpets from the band of the Royal Horse Guards Blue. Mr. Gladstone was conducted through the exhibition, which he examined with attentive interest. Our Illustration shows him looking at the working of an old press. There was a luncheon provided by the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society's Gardens. The chair was occupied by Mr. Gladstone, at whose right hand sat his Majesty the Emperor of Brazil, but the Emperor left the table before the toasts were proposed. His Majesty's health was, of course, duly honoured next to that of our Queen and Royal family. In his principal speech, giving the memory of William Caxton for the chief toast, Mr. Gladstone commented upon the invention of printing, with his usual copiousness of thought and knowledge, and expressed his admiration of the results now attained. The other speakers were the Bishop of Bath and Wells; Dr. Joseph Parker; Mr. Hall, of the Oxford University Press; M. Chaix, of Paris; Herr Fröbel, of Stuttgart; Sir C. Reed, and Mr. G. Spottiswoode. Subscriptions and donations to the Printers' Pension Corporation fund were announced, amounting to £2000, besides which there will be the receipts from the Exhibition." 

As a record of the exhibition, a catalogue was edited by George Bullen (1816-94) Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum, entitled Caxton Celebration, 1877. Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Antiquities, Curiosities, and Appliances Connected with the Art of Printing. In its final form this 472 page book listed, sometimes with descriptive bibliographical notes, a total of 4734 items exhibited, making this probably the largest exhibition of rare books, prints, and printing equipment ever held. It encompassed works from the Gutenberg Bible and the Mainz Psalter up to 1877, including about 190 Caxtons, classics illustrating the spread of printing, landmarks of book illustration, examples of music printing, books on papermaking, notable achievements in color printing, examples of historic, unusual or new technologies in printing, as well as printing presses and typesetting and typefounding equipment. 

Notably, the catalogue contained no images. Presumably it was a sufficient challenge just to publish a non-illustrated bibliographical record of such an enormous exhibition, crediting the numerous lenders to the show. Collecting about and around this exhibition over 100 years later, in 2011 and 2012, allowed me to reconstruct some of the unusually complicated history of the publication of this exhibition catalogue. By June 2012 I identified 8 editions or states:

(1) During the early days of the exhibition a small number of preliminary "Rough Proof" copies of the catalogue were available. This I have not seen.

(2) A bit later during the exhibition a "Preliminary Issue" with 404pp. and 10 leaves of advertisements was issued in pale blue printed wrappers for sale at 1s. This version, which was called "Preliminary Issue" on both its printed wrapper and title page, listed 4633 entries. In it Class C was entitled "The Comparative Development of the Art of Printing in England and Foreign Countries Illustrated by Specimens of the Holy Scriptures and Liturgies." The number of entries in Class C ended at 1351, leaving a gap of 100 items between the next entry in the catalogue, No. 1451 beginning "Class D. Specimens Noticeable for Rarity or for Beauty and Excellence of Typography." This indicates that the cataloguing of Class C was incomplete at the time the Preliminary Issue was printed.

(3) Later during the exhibition a version with 456pp and 11 leaves of advertisements was issued. My copy of this is bound in original brown cloth, edges untrimmed. It lists 4734 entries. In this version pp. xiv-xviii were reset to allow the addition of several names to various committees. Also the entire Class C. was substantially rewritten and expanded, which required resetting numerous pages. In this version Class C. is headed "The History of Printing Illustrated by the Printed Bible, 1450-1877, By Henry Stevens." A new gathering  M*was inserted, between gatherings M and N, its pages numbered 176a to 176q, bringing the Bibles catalogued up to No. 1450, and the Liturgies numbered 1450a-1450θ. Since  Henry Stevens's introduction to Class C is dated July 25, 1877 we may presume that this version came out either very late in July or during August. 

(4) Virtually at the end of the exhibition a "Revised Edition" of the catalogue was issued in tan printed wrappers, containing 472 pages and 11 leaves of advertisements at the back. The designation "Revised Edition" appeared only on the upper printed wrapper, and not the title page. This was priced 2s. 6d. My copy of this version bears the inscription of George William Reid, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, who, according to Bullen's Introduction (p. xi), catalogued the various woodcuts, copper-plates and other engravings in Class G. of the exhibition. Reid's inscription is dated September 1877.  Without the printed wrappers the different versions can be determined by the number of pages. It is evident that many or all gatherings were reprinted for this edition in which the entries were renumbered in one series with continuous pagination.

(5) After the exhibition 157 hand-numbered large-paper copies of the revised edition with 472pp. were available on "superfine toned hand-made paper," edges untrimmed in a special original brown cloth binding for 1 guinea, and

(6) 12 hand-numbered copies were available on extra large thick hand-made paper at the cost of 5 guineas, likewise in an original brown cloth binding, edges untrimmed.  No copies of  (5) or (6) that I have seen had wrappers or ads.

(7)  After the exhibition some of the copies of the catalogue printed on regular paper were bound in cloth for sale. I have a copy bound in original green cloth, edges trimmed, without ads.

(8) I also have a copy bound in original red cloth, edges trimmed, stamped "PRESENTATION COPY" on the upper cover with an inscription to British Museum Librarian, G. W. Porter, from J. S. Hodson, Honorary Secretary of the Executive Committee dated November 17, 1877. This copy contains 2 leaves of ads at the back. In his introduction to the catalogue George Bullen credits Hodson, who was Secretary of the "Printers' Pension, Almshouse and Orphan Asylum Corporation," for "having originated this celebration," the proceeds of which went to support the Printers charities that Hodson managed.

The most extensive section in the exhibition, and also the most extensively annotated portion of the catalogue, was "Class C. The History of Printing Illustrated by the Printed Bible, 1450-1877" by the American bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Henry Stevens who lived in London.  Stevens ran into conflicts with the organizers of the exhibition, who were concerned that Stevens's extensive exhibition and detailed cataloguing was unduly prominent in the exhibition. They may also have been irritated that some of Stevens's cataloguing was not finished until the middle of show. At the end of his introduction to Class C Stevens indicated that he would publish a revised edition of his portion of the catalogue after the show. This he duly published as an unillustrated 151 page book in 1878 under the following verbose title:

The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition MDCCCLXXVII or a bibliographical description of nearly one thousand representative Bibles in various languages chronologically arranged from the first Bible printed by Gutenberg in 1450-1456 to the last Bible printed at the Oxford University Press the 30th June 1877. With an Introduction on the History of Printing as Illustrated by the printed Bible from 1450 to 1877 in which is told for the first time the true history and mystery of the Coverdale Bible of 1535 Together with bibliographical notes and collations of many rare Bibles in various languages and divers versions printed during the last four centuries.  

This book Stevens issued both as an octavo trade edition on ordinary paper and clothbound, and on large paper printed on Whatman hand-made paper. Large paper copies were advertised for 15s in a half-roan binding or in red morocco extra by Bedford for £4.4s.  My copy of the large paper edition is in an original green cloth binding matching the binding of the trade edition, and comes from the library of Henry Frowde of Oxford University Press, who became Publisher of the press in 1880.  In his book Stevens explained that his efforts were the culmination of 30 years of work on Bible bibliography. For the exhibition he borrowed Bibles from sources including the British Museum, the Bodleian, Queen Victoria, Earl Spencer, the Earl of Leicester, Francis Fry, the Signet Library and its librarian, David Laing of Edinburgh and Henry J. Atkinson of Gunnersbury House in Middlesex.

In association with Henry Stevens, Henry Frowde of Oxford University Press undertook the publication of a pocket-sized Bible that would demonstrate advances in printing technology since its introduction in England by Caxton. The small bible was printed and bound by Oxford University Press in an edition of 100 numbered copies in only twelve hours on the opening day of the exhibition, June 30, 1877.  Copy no. 1 was presented to Gladstone when he opened the show.  In  March 1878 Stevens published a small 30-page book entitled The History of the Caxton Memorial Bible printed and bound in twelve consecutive hours on June 30, 1877.  In this book Stevens told the story of this remarkable achievement in which copies of the 1052-page 16mo volume were printed from standing type, on paper specially made for the edition by Oxford University Press only a few days before printing. The printed sheets were artificially dried and hand-bound in turkey morocco by 101 binders assigned to the task.  Stevens calculated that had type composition been necessary it would have taken "2000 compositors and 200 readers to set up and properly read the Bible in these same twelve hours."  Stevens seems to have had copies of his 16mo history bound in different styles since the copy in my library is bound in a more elaborate leather binding than that reproduced by the Internet Archive.

The remarkable exhibition of rare books on the history of printing and typography described in the exhibition catalogue for the Caxton Celebration was loaned in its entirety by William Blades, who also catalogued all the Caxtons and other early English printed books in the exhibition. In addition Blades wrote a separate  32-page pamphlet entitled A Guide to the Objects of Chief Interest in the Loan Collection of the Caxton Celebration, Queen's Gate, South Kensington that was distributed during the exhibition. Blades was also a collector of medals relating to the history of printing and hoped to have a medal struck commemorating the 1877 celebration. For the purpose he issued a prospectus with a reproduction of the proposed design; however, there were insufficient subscribers, and the medal is known only from the prospectus, the design from which was reproduced by Henry Morris in his introduction to the 2001 facsimile reprint of Bigmore & Wyman.

The superb exhibition of type specimens in the show was curated by writer, typefounder, historian of type foundries, and son of Sir Charles Reed, Talbot Baines Reed

♦ Perhaps the most unusual Caxton Celebration item I collected is an 8-page 4to pamphlet entitled Caxton Celebration June 1877. A Biographical Notice of William Caxton The First English Printer Reprinted from the "Leisure Hour" for May, 1877 in Phonetic Spelling with a Specimen page of Caxton's Type and Woodcuts. This pamphlet, with an introduction by Isaac Pitman dated May 29, 1877, was issued by Fred. Pitman in London and offered for sale at the price of one penny, presumably at the Caxton Celebration exhibition. In his lengthy introduction Issac Pitman referred to the Elementary Education Act of 1870, requiring education of children in England and Wales, and took the opportunity to promote phonetic spelling as a way of simplifying British education and improving national literacy. In a footnote he wrote: "The Educational Blue Book for 1875-6 gives the following statistics:- 2,221,745 children were presented for examination. Of this number, 19,349 (or less than one per cent.) reached Standard VI :- and 53,587 (3 1/2 per cent, including the previous number) reached Standard V, which a pupil must pass before he is permited to leave school under 13 years of age."

Other publications issued in connection with the exhibition were a new edition of William Blades's The Biography and Typography of William Caxton England's First Printer (1877; first published 1861), William Caxton, the First English Printer. A Biography by printer Charles Knight (1877). This was a new edition of a work previously issued.  Also published in 1877 was a 47-page pamphlet entitled, Who Was William Caxton? by "R[owland] H [ill] B[lades]", brother of William Blades. This was intended to fill a need for an inexpensive, relatively brief account of Caxton.

The most elaborate publication associated with the exhibition was a facsimile of Caxton's The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. A Facsimile Reproduction of the First Book Printed in England by William Caxton in 1477.  This facsimile, printed in two-color photolithography, included an introduction by William Blades printed by letterpress. The volume was offered for sale by the London publisher Elliot Stock at the price of one guinea bound in a heavy coated paper binding over boards, and blindstamped very effectively to resemble a blind-stamped calf binding of the 15th century.

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing I (1880-84) 124-26. Twyman, Early Lithographed Books (1990) 258.

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Index Medicus Begins 1879

Under the direction of John Shaw Billings, the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (to be redesignated in 1956 the National Library of Medicine) began publication of the Index Medicus—  an effort to index all of medical periodical literature.

Index Medicus finally ceased publication in print in 2004.

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A Landmark in Efforts to Organize Information and Make it Searchable 1880

John Shaw Billings began publication of the The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s OfficeThis became a landmark in the history of efforts to organize information and to make it searchable, and a primary general reference for the history of medicine and science. The fifith and final series was issued in 1961. The finished set of printed books contained "over 4.5 million. . . references to over 3.7 million bibliographic items.  2.5 million items are primarily journal articles; 250,000 items are monographs (books, pamphlets, and reports); approximately 300,000 items are dissertations (theses); and 16,000 are journal titles. Series 1 and Series 2 include portraits as separate citations but Series 3, 4, and 5 indicate portraits in descriptive notes for monographs and dissertations."

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The First Complete Catalogue of the British Museum Following Panizzi's Rules 1881 – 1905

The Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum was published in 393 parts from 1881-1900, followed by a Supplement in 44 parts published from 1900-05. Various other supplements were later published.

This was the first iteration of the complete British Museum catalogue implementing Antonio Panizzi's 91 Rules, promulgated in 1841, for standardizing the cataloguing of printed books. 

"The General Catalogue is, by common consent, a research tool of undisputed importance for historians of European civilisation from the invention of printing to the present day. Its utility and the universal esteem in which it is held derive from two principal factors: the richness of the collections it seeks to describe, and the principles underying the methods of that description. Unlike most library catalogues which provide access to collections via the main entry-points of author title, the General Catalogue has, from the beginning, sought rather to incoprorate the best traditions of German analytic cataloguing into the general framework of an author catalogue. The logic of its structure is derived from thesaural rather than lexical principles. Generations of scholars have testified to the benefits for research which its rich contextual organisation make possible. The juxtaposition of related materials, frequently arranged in a chronological rather than merely alphabetic sequence (in recognition of the scholar's needs), is a feature designed to encourage a systematic and exploratory respone from the user. Thus, the search for a specific item (especially if that item was published anonymously) can yield a rich and perhaps unsuspected harvest of related items, and opportunities for discovery are further multiplied by the elaborate system of cross-references between authors and headings. The format of the catalogue was itself devised to encourage the user to explore sequences of entries rather than to focus upon the individual entry. It is as though Panizzi conceived of books as members of a vast related community and obligingly sought to demonstrate their relationship within the constraints of a library catalogue. For certain kinds of anonymous publication, Panizzi's rules were designed to allow a subject approach, based on the wording of the title page. But within such headings the sequences are where possible based on historical principles. Such familiar collective headings as:- ENGLAND, FRANCE, AMERICA; LONDON, ROME, PARIS; BIBLE, LITURGIES; GEORGE III, LOUIS XIV, PIUS IX, PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS- represent the imposition of an historically understood order upon a considerable body of heterogeneous publications. For the user in search of a specific anonymous title the catalogue's disposition to arrange items in an historical context (derived from a significant element within the title) can be frustrating if only the first few words of the title are known, or if the cataloguing principles for choice of heading are imprefectly understood. But the alternative, now widely regarded as standard, procedure of entering anonymous titles under first word, while facilitating access to individual works (the title-index to ENGLAND is undoubtedly invaluable) distributes irrecoverably related items frequently crucial to the user's requirements. It is clear that for the collections of a major research library multiple access is desirable, but for a machine-readble catalogue such as ESTC the search possibilitied provided by the computer fortunately make these problems less acute" (Alston & Jannetta, Bibliography, Machine-Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC [1978] 20).

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An Analog Search Engine to Organize All the World's Knowledge 1895

In 1895 Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist Paul Otlet and Belgian professor of international law and legislator Henri La Fontaine founded the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels. In this organization they began the creation of a system of 3 x 5 index cards cataloguing facts that became known as the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU). By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries. Eventually it reached 16 million cards.  The goal was to organize all the knowledge of the world.

To organize the cards Otlet and La Fontaine developed the Universal Decimal Classification based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, but using auxiliary signs to indicate various special aspects of a subject and relationships between subjects. "It thus contains a significant faceted or analytico-synthetic element, and is used especially in specialist libraries. UDC has been modified and extended through the years to cope with the increasing output in all disciplines of human knowledge, and is still under continuous review to take account of new developments" (Wikipedia article on Universal Decimal Classification, accessed 03-13-2012).

"In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Alex Wright has referred to the service as an 'analog search engine'. By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.

"Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards" (Wikipedia article on Paul Otlet, accessed 03-02-2009).

Following World War I, in 1920 the organization, then called the Mundaneum, opened in the left wing of the palace of the Cinquantenaire de Bruxelles called the Palais Mondial-Mundaneum.

In 1931 the Institut International de Bibliographie was renamed the Institut International de Documentation, IID.  World War II and the deaths of La Fontaine in 1943 and Otlet in 1944 slowed the project. Although many of the cards were stored, some of them in the Brussels subway, volunteers kept the dream alive. In 1998, Belgium’s French community government revived the Mundaneum’s memory, bringing most of the archives to a beautiful Art Deco building in the city of Mons.

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1900 – 1910

The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature 1901

Bookseller and bibliographer Halsey William Wilson of Minneapolis published the first issue of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

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A New Standard for Descriptive Bibliography in the History of Science 1906

Chemist, historian of chemistry, and bibliographer John Ferguson published Bibliotheca Chemica. A Catalogue of the Alchemical, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Books in the Collection of the Late James Young of Kelly and Duris.  The work was finely printed on handmade paper by James Maclehose of Glasgow in an edition of unknown size, in full buckram or quarter morocco bindings, and presented "With the Compliments of the Trustees and Family of the Late Dr. James Young of Kelly."

One of the earliest technical chemists, Young's discovery of the distillation of paraffin from coal and oil-shales made him the founder of the Scottish shale oil industry. In about 1850 Young set out to collect the classic original works in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and pharmacy, eventually aided in this pursuit by Ferguson. Along with Augustus de Morgan and Latimer Clark, Young was one of the earliest collectors of the history of science.

The Young collection numbered about 1400 separate items, many of which were already of the greatest rarity by the end of the nineteenth century. Ferguson's 2-volume catalogue of more than a thousand densely printed quarto pages, with bibliographical details of each work, biographical notices of each writer, and exhaustive lists of references in chronological order, set a new standard in scope and accuracy for the descriptive bibliography of the history of science. Sir William Osler considered Ferguson's catalogue the model of descriptive scientific bibliography, writing in his inimitable style:

"though an absorbing and profitable study, the results of bibliography are too often recorded in tomes of intolerable dullness. The merit that appeals to me [in Ferguson's Bibliotheca Chemica] is the combination of biography with bibliography. Beside the book is a picture of the man sketched by a sympathetic hand "

The Young collection is preserved in the Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

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The First Library of Rare Science Books Formed by an American 1908

Historian of Mathematics David Eugene Smith published Rara arithmetica: A Catalogue of the Arithmetics Written Before the Year MDC! with a Description of Those in the Library of George Arthur Plimpton of New York. This two-volume work, issued by Plimpton's textbook publishing company, Ginn & Company, described and illustrated Plimpton's library of early mathematical books and medieval manuscripts before 1601.  Two versions of the catalogue were published:

  1. A deluxe numbered edition limited to 151 copies printed on handmade paper and bound in full vellum, elaborately gilt, in two volumes, with the plates printed in color on Japan vellum, enclosed in a slipcase
  2. A trade edition of indeterminate number, printed on regular paper and bound in one volume in cloth-backed boards. 

Plimpton’s mathematical library, preserved at Columbia University Library, is the first specialized private collection of antiquarian scientific books formed by an American for which we have an annotated bibliographical catalogue.  Smith also discussed some of Plimpton’s early manuscripts in his History of Mathematics (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1923–25), and issued a pamphlet addendum to his catalogue of Plimpton’s library in 1939 (Rara arithmetica: Addenda to “Rara arithmetica" [Boston: Ginn & Co.]).

Plimpton did not comment on his library in any of Smith’s works, all, or nearly all of which were published by Plimpton's Ginn & Company. The only place where I find published remarks by Plimpton on his mathematical library is in “The History of Elementary Mathematics in the Plimpton Library", Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici Bologna 3–10 Settembre 1928, VI (1932) 433–42.

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The Wheeler Gift Catalogue of the History of Electricity and Telegraphy 1909

In 1909 William D. Weaver published Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodicals in the Library of the American Institute of Engineers.With Introduction, Descriptive and Critical Notes by Brother Potamian. This 2-volume work, which remains the most comprehensive historical bibliography on the subjects, described primarily the library of Latimer Clark, a British electrical engineer and inventor working in London who, in partnership with Sir Charles Tilson Bright, was responsible for laying many of the first submarine telegraphic cables. While pursuing a remarkably successful and creative scientific and entrepeneurial career, Clark also found time to build one of the most complete collections ever formed of early books and manuscripts on the history of electricity and magnetism, including virtually every known publication in English on these subjects prior to 1886.

In collecting the history of electricity and telegraphy Clark followed in the path of Francis Ronalds, another telegraphy pioneer who assembled a somewhat smaller library on the subjects, the catalogue of which appeared in 1880. Nearly coincident with the publication of the catalogue of the Ronalds Library, in 1881 Francesco Rossetti and Giovanni Cantoni issued Bibliografia Italiana di Elettricità e Magnetismo, on the occasion of an international fair on electricity held in Paris in 1881. This briefly annotated bibliography presented the history of the Italian literature on the subject.

In 1901 Clark's library was purchased by the American engineer, Schulyer Skaats Wheeler, and donated by him to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]) in New York. The extensively annotated and illustrated catalogue of the collection of 5,966 items, edited by William Weaver and annotated by Brother Potamian, was financed by Andrew Carnegie. Though the title page of the catalogue takes no notice of it, a high percentage of the items in Clark's library, particularly the final 2000 items, concern telegraphy.

Problematic Management of the Latimer Clark Library in the Twentieth Century:

"In 1913 the Engineering Societies Library was established in New York City, a joint venture of the AIEE, the ASME (Mechanical Engineers), and the AIME (Mining Engineers), funded by a $1.5 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. The AIEE’s main contribution to the Library was the Wheeler Gift Collection. For many years the collection was accessible according to the terms above, but in the 1990s the ESL decided that it could no longer maintain its Manhattan premises and closed the library there.

"By that time the Wheeler Gift Collection had been merged with other works at the library, and had suffered from neglect over the years, much of the material being kept in poor physical conditions. A 1985 survey of the collection showed about 9% (532 items) were missing, and it seems unlikely that the situation improved in the following ten years, prior to the dispersion of the collection.

"Constrained by the terms of the Gift to keep the collection in New York City, the ESL boxed up whatever could be definitely identified as part of the original Wheeler Gift and in 1995 sent 205 cartons of books and papers to the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The rest of the collection, including items in the 1909 catalog that were part of the Wheeler Gift but did not have identifying labels, went to Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, MO"(http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/LatimerClark.htm, accessed 07-31-2009).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) No. 211.

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1910 – 1920

"Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House June 11, 1911 – 1913

In 1911 Karl Wilhelm Bührer and Adolf Saager published Die Organisierung der geistigen Arbeit durch die Brücke (The Organization of Intellectual Work through the Bridge) from Ansbach, Germany. This book described the aims of Die Brücke, Internationales Institut zur Organisierung der geistigen Arbeit (The Bridge, International Institute for the Organization of Intellectual Work), an institution founded in Munich on 11 June 1911 with the financial support of chemist Wilhelm Ostwald who donated his Nobel Prize money for the purpose.  In 1910 Ostwald had discussed problems of information management with Paul Otlet, co-founder of the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels. After only two years of existence The Bridge ended in 1913. It published numerous pamphlets, and perhaps the chief legacy of the project was the international standard for paper sizes (A4 etc.)

Concerning The Bridge Thomas Hapke wrote:

" 'Die Brücke is planned as a central station, where any question which may be raised with respect to any field of intellectual work whatever finds either direct answer or else indirect, in the sense that the inquirer is advised as to the place where he can obtain sufficient information' (Ostwald, 1913, p. 6, English original).

"The Bridge was supposed to be the information office for the information offices, a 'bridge' between the 'islands' where all other institutions—associations, societies, libraries, museums, companies, and individuals— 'were working for culture and civilization' (Die Brücke, 1910–1911). The organization of intellectual work was intended to occur 'automatically' through the general introduction of standardized means of communication— the monographic principle, standardized formats, and uniform indexing (Registraturvermerke) for all publications. The following facilities were planned: a collection of addresses, a Brückenarchiv as a 'comprehensive, illustrated world encyclopedia on sheets of standardized formats,' which should contain a world dictionary and a world museum catalog; a rückenmuseum; and a head office and Hochschule (college) for organization. 'Close cooperation' with the Institut Internationale de Bibliographie in Brussels was also planned."

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1920 – 1930

The Literature and Culture of Suicide 1927

In 1927 journalist and suicide researcher Hans Rost published one of the more unusual specialized bibliographies: Bibliographie des Selbstmords mit textlichen Einführungen zu Jedem Kapitel.  This bibliography on the literature of suicide considered the subject from many points of view including philosophical, medical, psychological, religious, literary, and artistic, as well as topics like family suicide, mass suicide and euthanasia, from the 15th to 20th centuries. The bibliography listed about 4000 works in thematic chapters, to each of which Rost wrote an introduction. The book included 54 illustrations, which may have represented the first published collection of historical images on suicide. 

Rost's library of suicide literature was acquired by the city library of Augsburg in 1928.  Since 1988 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suizidprävention (DGS)(German Association for Suicide Prevention) has presented the Hans Rost Prize for outstanding scientific achievements in suicidology and for outstanding practical solutions toward the prevention of suicide.

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1940 – 1950

The Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition of Printing: Precursor to "Printing and the Mind of Man" May 6 – May 16, 1940

An Exhibition of Printing at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge was planned for May 6 to June 23, 1940, taking the year 1940 as the quincentenary of Gutenberg's invention of printing as had been done in 1840 for the quatercentenary, in 1740 for the tricentennial, and in 1640 for the bicentennial. Exhibitions of this kind normally require years of advance planning, but from the brief account in Nicolas Barker's Stanley Morison (1972) it appears that the prospectus for this exhibition was sent out only at the beginning of March, 1940:

"At the beginning of March a prospectus was circulated to librarians, members of the Bibliographical Scoiety, the Roxburghe Club, and others.

"Though more than half Europe is at present too tragically absorbed in the future of its civilisation to be able to pay much thought to its past, the five-hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg's invention none the less demands to be recognized. The conditions which make it impractical to hold a worthy exhibition in London are happily absent in Cambridge; and plans for stage here a modest tribute to Gutenberg's memory have developed into a resolution to make good the general deficiency with a major exhibition.

"The theme of the exhibition was then set out; a full representation of every aspect of human thought and action served by Gutenberg's invention; 'wherever civilization has called upon the craft of printing from movable type to promote its ends, there is subject matter for this exhibition'.

"The response for the request for loans was conspicuously prompt and generous. Nearly 100 lenders produced over 600 exhibits. . . " (Barker, op. cit., 376-77).

According to Brooke Crutchley, "The Gutenberg Exhbition at Cambridge, 1940," Matrix 12 (1992) 77-82:

"The decision to celebrate the quincentenary of Gutenberg's invention by holding an exhibition in Cambridge in 1940 was largely an act of defiance. The outbreak of war in September 1939 and the swift conquest of Poland were followed by an uneasy quiet in western Europe while armies lined up against each other in preparation for the battle that was to come. Meanwhile the Fitzwilliam Museum had sent its principal treasures to Wales for safe keeping, the windows of King's College chapel were boarded up, civilisation seemed to have been put on ice. An exhibition to show the contribution that printing had made over five hundred years, and would continue to make when the madness was over, might be seen as a challenge to the forces of destruction." 

As a guide and record of the exhibition, an unillustrated catalogue describing 641 items was published by Cambridge University Press and offered for sale for one shilling. On the cover was an emblem symbolizing Gutenberg's type designed by wood engraver Reynolds Stone.

The Foreward to the catalogue read as follows:

"There is no moral to this exhibition. It aims at portraying, as objectively as possible, the uses to which printing from movable type has been put since Gutenberg and his associates invented it five hundred years ago; the spread of knowledge more quickly and accurately than was possible before, the storing of human experience, the providing of entertainment, the simplication of the increasingly complicated business of living. Those books, papers, and other printing have been chosen (so far as the difficulties of the times would permit) which made most effective use of the medium of type; in other words, those which, composed and multiplied, most strongly influenced people and events. Others have been chosen for their illustration of events and trends of particular importance or interest; others again for their intrinsic curiosity as examples of the exploitation of print. All are shewn so far as possible in the original editions in which they were first presented to the world.

"The exhibition has been designed therefore to illustrate the development of man's use of movable type as a tool; its spread from Mainz through the countries of the world, through all the fields of knowledge, through the whole range of man's activities. Running through the story another theme presents itself and draws occasional comment--the development of the actual form of printing. The technical display deals with the old and modern methods fo type-founding and composition, and briefly illustrates the development of type design. That part of the exhibition is education; for the rest, though there is much to learn from it, it does not set out to teach. It is simply an illustration to that proud but unattributed saying: With my twenty-six soldiers of lead I have conquered the world."

Persons involved with organizing the exhibition and writing catalogue entries included writer on typography Beatrice Warde, antiquarian bookseller and writer Percy Muir, typographer John Dreyfus, writer and antiquarian bookseller John Carter, economist and book collector John Maynard Keynes, and scientist, sinologist and historian of science Joseph Needham. According to Sebastian Carter, "Printing & the Mind of Man," Matrix  20 (2000) 172-180, typographer Stanley Morison, typographic advisor to Cambridge University Press, was involved in the planning, but the bulk of the organization of the exhbiition was done by the Assistant University Printer, Brooke Crutchley, helped by John Dreyfus. The largest private lender to the exhibition was stockbroker (later intelligence agent), book collector and writer, Ian Fleming, who had pioneered in collecting influential books, or those which, in the words of Sebastian Carter, had "started something."

Among several innovative aspects of the exhibition was a display of books published in the year 1859, including, among others, Darwin On the Origin of Species, Mill On Liberty, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

The catalogue did not appear until June 1940, after the exhibition had been closed on May 16, only 10 days after it had opened, because of war. It was reprinted in the following month. In my copy of the second printing the following statement appeared:

"As this catalogue was about to go to press, a sudden change in the war situation made it appear advisable to close the Exhibition when it had been open only ten days. The catalogue was printed off, nevertheless, so that copies might be sent to all who had helped and others be available for sale. The demand proved greater than had been expected, and this reprint was in hand in which a few errors and oversights have been made good."

When I originally wrote this entry for From Cave Paintings to the Internet on October 25, 2011, I had never previously seen a copy of the 1940 exhibition catalogue, in spite of my roughly 50 years experience in the world of books. Until reading the catalogue I was unaware how much this forgotten exhibition held early in World War II had influenced the 1963 exhibition, Printing and the Mind of Man. The overlap in choices between the 1940 and 1963 catalogues is significant, especially as Carter & Muir were heavily involved in both exhibitions held 23 years apart, and some of the same lenders, especially Ian Fleming, contributed notable items to both exhibitions. It would be useful some day to compare the selections of the two exhibitions carefully.  Before doing that I would observe that the organizers of the 1940 exhibition must have been well aware of the significance of Hitler's writings leading up to World War II, as they included the  February 24, 1920 Munich Auszug aus dem Programm der national-sozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei as item 620 in their exhibition, and Hitler's Mein Kampf as item number 623.

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The Library of Congress Catalogue 1942 – 1953

The Library of Congress published in 167 volumes reproductions of its printed card catalogue as A Catalog of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards, issued to July 31, 1942. (Ann Arbor: Edwards Bros., 1942-46).

In 1948 LC published a 42 volume supplement  and in 1953 a 23 volume supplement.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 163.

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The Hinman Collator 1945 – 1949

Shakespear scholar Charlton Hinman developed the Hinman Collator, a mechanical device for the visual comparison of different copies of the same printed text. By 1978, when the last machine was manufactured, around fifty-nine had been acquired by libraries, academic departments, research institutes, government agencies, and a handful of pharmaceutical companies. Though built for the study of printed texts and used primarily for the creation of critical editions of literary authors, the Hinman Collator was also employed in other projects where the close comparison of apparently identical images is required: from the study of illustrations to the examination of watermarks to the detection of forged banknotes. 

"Hinman's invention greatly increased not only the speed at which texts could be compared but also the effectiveness of such comparisons, and it made collation on a large scale possible for the first time. The most famous use of the machine was by its inventor and resulted in his Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) and the Norton facsimile of the First Folio (1968). Hinman estimated that without the aid of his machine, the research for these projects would have taken over forty years. Without the collator, as he himself recognized, his study would have been a "practical impossibility", as would have the work of the many scholars who compiled dozens of bibliographies, produced hundreds of volumes of critical editions, and undertook countless bibliographical and textual investigations on his machine over the next five decades.

"The purpose of the machine for which he was seeking a patent was straightforward and grew directly from the needs of his research. During the Renaissance, the period of his specialty, books were proofread and corrected continually during the printing process, and early uncorrected sheets were commonly bound up with corrected ones from later in the print run. Thus the printed matter in the last book sold could, and usually did, differ substantially from that of the first, as it also could and quite often did from nearly every other copy in the printing. These variations are precisely the details the collator was developed to help detect. The operation of the device Hinman would eventually build was also straightforward. The operator sets up one book turned to a particular page on a platform on one side of the machine and another copy from the same printing turned to the same page on a platform on the other. He or she then views these items, which are superimposed via a set of mirrors, through a pair of binocular optics. After making adjustments to bring the two objects into registration, the operator activates a system of lights that alternately illuminates each page. If the pages are identical, they more or less appear as one; if they are not identical, the points of difference are called to the operator's eye by appearing to dance or wiggle about" (Smith, " 'The Eternal Verities Verified': Charlton Hinman and The Roots of Mechanical Collation," Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 53 [2000] includes images of the machines). 

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1950 – 1960

Compiling a Bibliography by Electric Punched Card Tabulating 1950

The Library of Congress announced plans to compile the Union List of Serials using electric punched card tabulating.

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Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information 1951

Louis N. Ridenour, Ralph R. Shaw, and Albert G. Hill published a thin volume entitled Bibliography in an Age of Science. This book included three lectures delivered at the University of Illinois the previous year. Though it was preceded by journal articles and technical reports, this may be the first separately published book to address the problems of applying new technologies to the searching and storage of printed information in libraries.

Shaw's article included illustrations on pp. 60-61 of the Rapid Selector prototype which was in operation at this time. This machine, which applied the ideas of Emanuel Goldberg and the Memex idea of Vannevar Bush, stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2,000 foot reel of film. The prototype could search through the data at the rate of 78,000 "codes per minute." "Improvement of this searching speed to 120,000 codes per minute is now in sight."

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Early Library Information Retrieval System 1954

Harley Tillet built the perhaps the first operating library information retrieval system on a general purpose computer (IBM 701) at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, later called China Lake.

"Searching started with a file of about 15,000 bibliographic records, indexed only by the Uniterms, and search output was limited to report accession numbers. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that the IBM 701, a scientific calculator, did not have any built-in character representation" (Bourne).

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The Most Voluminous Printed Catalogue of a Single Library 1959 – 1972

The British Museum (now the British Library) published its General Catalogue of Printed Books. Photolithographic Edition to 1955 in 263 folio volumes from 1959 to 1966. These volumes reproduced the catalogue cards of 4,350,000 items.

In 1971 and 1972 the BM issued a Ten-Year Supplement, 1956-1970 in 23 volumes. This set of nearly 300 folio volumes was the "most voluminous" printed catalogue of a single library ever published in print.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

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1960 – 1970

The Printing and the Mind of Man Exhibition July 16 – July 27, 1963

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition took place in London at the British Museum and at Earls Court Exhibition Centre during a period of only two weeks, from July 16 to July 27, 1963.

The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue, with an emblem and tailpiece designed and engraved by Reynolds Stone, read: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963. The catalogue described and illustrated with 32 black & white plates, and a color plate reproducing a page from the Mainz Psalter, more than 656 examples of printing and printing technology documenting the influence of print on the development of Western civilization. This exhibition occurred at Earls Court.  The catalogue also described, and illustrated with 16 black & white plates, an exhibition of 163 examples of Fine Printing mounted at the British Museum from July to September 1963.  At the end of their Acknowledgements on p. 9 of the catalogue the Supervisory Committee for the exhibition– librarian Frank Francis, typographer and historian of typography Stanley Morison and writer and antiquarian bookseller John Carter– stated:

"We pay tribute to the organizers of the Gutenberg Quincentenary Exhibition of Printing, assembled at Cambridge in 1940 (and prematurely disassembled because of the risks from enemy bombing). It was our original inspiration for several sections of our display, and its invigorating catalogue has been our constant friend."

Comparison of the 641 items described in the catalogue of 1940 with those described in the catalogue of 1963 show a great deal of overlap, especially as Percy Muir and John Carter, who had been prime movers in the exhibition in 1940, were extensively involved with the exhibition of 1963. The 1963 exhibition and its catalogue were, of course, significant expansions and improvements over the early wartime effort.

The 1963 catalogue was  followed in 1967 by a further-expanded larger format cloth-bound edition edition with a dramatic double-page engraved title by Reynolds Stone, significantly more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by antiquarian booksellers and bibliographers John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by book historian and writer Nicolas Barker, antiquarian bookseller H.A. Feisenberger, bibliographer Howard Nixon and historian of printing S.H. Steinberg.

This exhibition, and especially the 1967 book based on it, was, and remains, immensely influential on both institutional and private collectors of landmark books that influenced the development of Western Civilization.   

Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and roughly twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may also record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. The only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues were to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator. The exhibition and catalogues included references to the invention of radio, telephone and films, but not to television. 

Sebastian Carter, "Printing & the Mind of Man," Matrix 20 (2000) 172-180.

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Probably the First Book Typeset by Computer October 6, 1963

For the 26th Annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute, held in Chicago from October 6-11, 1963, Hans Peter Luhn of IBM, then president of the American Documentation Institute, issued Automation and Scientific Communication. Short Papers Contributed to the Theme Sessions. . . . On the verso of the title page of this quarto volume a statement reads:

"This 128 page book has been printed from type set automatically with the aid of electronic information processing equipment. It is believed that this is the first volume of technical articles ever produced in this manner."  

Further down the page it states,

"Oklahoma Publishing Co. performed keypunching from manuscripts, processing on an IBM 1620, automatic type-setting on Linotype and printing of reproduction proofs (Bill Wlliams, Chairman, Research Committee)."

A special printed slip pasted onto the front pastedown endpaper of a cloth-bound copy in my collection reads:

"FIRST BOOK OF TECHNICAL ARTICLES TYPE-SET BY COMPUTER:

"This is No. 75 of 100 copies of a special edition of this book, prepared as a memento as a token of recognition to those who were involved in its creation and who are here identified by their signatures:

[manually signed by] "H. P. Luhn, S.E. Furth, B Williams, Doris Craig, S. L. Reed Jr. J P Blandean, R M Maxwell, Haribert H Luhn, John Bustin (?). 

[manually] "Countersigned Chicago, Ill, October 6, 1963, R M Hayes, President, American Documentation Institute."

The work was issued in two parts. Part one, described above, was mailed to participants before the meeting. Ordinary copies were in printed wrappers. Part two was available at the meeting which took place from October 6 to 11.  After its title page and table of contents part two was paginated continuously with part one (pp. 129-382). The verso of the title page of part two stated, "International Business Machines Corp., Data Processing Division performed keypunching of bibliographic informatiion, processing on an IBM 1401 for creating table of contents and KWIC and author index to titles of the papers published; a bibliography and citation index to the titles of all referenced papers, a KWIC and author index thereto; and furnished reproduction proofs of this material (R. M. Maxwell, Manager)."

Luhn "planned and directed the efforts that led to the first volume of technical papers produced by fully automatic typesetting techniques. These efforts, moreover, were successfuly carried out within the remarkable dealine requirements of often not more than three weeks from receipt of author manuscript to inclusion in a printed and bound volume, typeset by computer.

"In addition, within the same brief time period, the bibliographic information for the approximately 600 'short papers' accepted was keypunched and processed on a computer to produce the table of contents, a KWIC index, an author index, a citation index to the bibliographical references in the papers, a KWIC index to the titles of these cited references, a bibliography of the cited papers, and an author index to the citations" (Schultz [ed] H. P. Luhn: Pioneer of Information Science. Selected Works [1968] 29).

When I wrote this entry on June 23, 2012 I did not know of any earlier printed book on any subject typeset by computer.

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The MARC Cataloguing Standard 1965 – 1968

Programmer and systems analyst Henriette Avram completed the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project, creating the foundation for the national and international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

The MARC standards consist of the MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. . . . Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs.

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OCLC is Founded July 5, 1967

Only July 5, 1967  three university presidents, three university vice- presidents, and four university library directors from the Ohio College Association met at Ohio State University in Columbus to found the non-profit Ohio College Library Center (OCLC)

"The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour to build a ‘cooperative, computerized network in which most, if not all, Ohio libraries would participate.’ Fred’s idea was to merge the newest information storage and retrieval system, the computer, with the oldest, the library. His vision was that this new computerized library would be active rather than passive, that people would no longer go to the library, but that the library would go to the people. Back in 1967, this was a rather revolutionary idea.

"The first step in this vision would be to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database. The network and database would streamline operations and control rising costs. It also would bring libraries together to work cooperatively to keep track of the world’s information for the benefit of researchers and scholars" (http://www.oclc.org/about/history/beginning.htm, accessed 03-07-2012).

After the bibliographical database expanded far beyond the state of Ohio it was renamed Online Computer Library Center, retaining the same initials.

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Probably the Largest Printed Bibliography, Complete in 754 Folio Volumes 1968 – 1981

Mansell, in London, began publication of The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by other American Libraries. One of the largest sets of printed volumes ever published, and most probably the largest printed bibliography, it was completed in 1981 in 754 folio volumes, containing a total of over 12,000,000 entries on 528,000 pages, and occupying approximately 130 feet of shelf space. It was produced manually by photocopying library catalogue cards.

NUC was superceded around 1995 by bibliographical databases such as OCLC WorldCat on the Internet.

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1970 – 1980

Medline is Operational October 1971

Medline (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online), a literature database of life sciences and biomedical information, was operational at the National Library of Medicine. It was initially a database production of the printed Index Medicus.

By 2008 Medline  ontained "more than 18 million" records from approximately 5,000 selected publications covering biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present.

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The English Short Title Catalogue June 1976

At a London conference jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Library planning began for the "Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue." The aim of the original project was to create a machine-readable union catalogue of books, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1701 to 1800.

"An ESTC team was established at the British Library in 1977, under the direction of Robin Alston, and began work on the Library's extensive holdings of in-scope material. By 1978, when Robin Alston and Mervyn Jannetta published Bibliography, Machine-Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC, there were already more than fifty contributors to the file including Göttingen State & University Library (Germany). In 1978, Henry Snyder was appointed to direct the ESTC project in North America. An American cataloguing team was established in 1979, and the North American Imprints Project (NAIP) began at the American Antiquarian Society in 1980. The International Committee of the ESTC (IESTC) was established in 1980, with a membership drawn from the UK and the USA, chaired by the British Library. The ESTC file was soon available online, from 1980 via the British Library BLAISE system and from 1981 in the US Research Libraries Group RLIN system. The file was published on microfiche in 1983, and the first CD-ROM edition appeared in 1996.

"In 1987, with the agreement of the Bibliographical Society and the Modern Language Association of America, the International Committee approved the extension of the database to cover the period from the beginning of printing in the British Isles (ca. 1472) to 1700. The file changed its name to the 'English Short Title Catalogue', thereby keeping its well-known acronym. The USA team began cataloguing pre-1701 material in 1989, joined in the mid-1990s by the British Library team, and the resulting records were made available in the RLIN file from 1994. These records were also included in the CD-ROM 2nd edition (1998) and 3rd edition (2003).

"In 1992, IESTC approved a further extension of the file to include serial publications. The USA team began work in 1994 on the cataloguing of serials within the scope of ESTC."

In October 1978 The British Library published Bibliography, Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC. A Summary History of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: Working Metthods, Cataloguing Rules, A Catalogue of the Works of Alexander Pope Printed between 1711 and 1800 in the British Library by R. C. Alston & M. J. Jannetta. My copy of this work is cloth-bound and limited to 20 copies with a printed list of the recipients bound iin.

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2000 – 2005

Origins of Cyberspace 2002

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issued as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. This was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on the history of these subjects.

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OCLC Serves More than 50,000 Libraries, Contains 56 Million Records 2004

In 2004 OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Dublin, Ohio, served more than 50,540 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 84 countries and territories around the world. OCLC WorldCat contained 56 million catalogue records, representing 894 million holdings.

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The Index-Catalogue Goes Online May 1, 2004

The Index-Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's Office, a 61 volume bibliographical resource for the history of medicine and science, which began publication in 1870 under the direction of John Shaw Billings, was made available online by the United States National Library of Medicine.

This was the culmination of a data conversion project which began in 1996. Its untility as an online resource was immensely enhanced since it became a single searchable database rather than a series of physical volumes and different indices published over decades.

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2005 – 2010

The Changing Nature of the Catalogue. . . . March 17, 2006

Reflecting the influence of the Internet on physical library access and usage, the Library of Congress published The Changing Nature of the Catalogue and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools by Karen Calhoun.

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A Critical Review at the Library of Congress April 3, 2006

Representing the Library of Congress Professional Guild, Thomas Mann published A Critical Review of Karen Calhoun's paper published on March 17. This review rebutted various assertions in the Calhoun report.

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OCLC Merges with RLG July 1, 2006

OCLC merged with RLG. Combined programs and services was expected to

"advance offerings and drive efficiencies for libraries, archives, museums and other research organizations worldwide."

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2011 – 2013

Improving the Research Potential of ESTC April 17, 2012

Mr Brian Geiger

Center for Bibliographical Studies & Research
University of California, Riverside
Highlander Hall, Building B, Room 114
Riverside, California 92507
USA

17 April 2012

Dear Mr Geiger

Improving the research potential of ESTC: consultation: A modest suggestion by William St Clair

I welcome the opportunity extended through SHARP L to offer suggestions for making ESTC more useful for researchers in the 21st century. Much of future research will, we can be confident, take the form of quantitative analysis, not necessarily just for checking of historical records, but for identifying trends, trying to recover the reading of the past, generating explanatory models and so on. The current suggestions for improving the interrogability of the present resource are to be welcomed.

However, I suggest, if we want to make the ESTC a research tool for the more ambitious questions, as is the stated aim, then in my view, the proposed changes will make only a limited contribution. Although in the English-speaking world, we have excellent catalogues and bibliographies, to my mind, the empirical factual basis on which those who attempt to address ambitious questions are reliant is seriously inadequate. Indeed, I suggest, the extent of the present inadequacy of data would not be tolerated by those familiar with the standards applicable and expected in the sciences and social sciences.

The biggest weakness for anyone attempting a history of books, or of the book industry, or of reading, is that 'titles' is a poor measure of book production. What we need, for a start, if we want to map the material extent of past production, are figures for print runs and sales, and also for price, as a good indicator of potential access, plus explanatory economic models for the various governing regimes [guild system, perpetual copyright, pirate and offshore, and so on]. We also need to develop formal ways of recognising and offsetting the inadequacies of the patchy archival record. Draft proposals for an ambitious project that would enable this kind of step change improvement in the data to be made have been prepared. If they are proceeded with, it will however take time before results become available and we see the benefits.

However, there is a notable weakness in the current situation that can be easily addressed and remedied, and that would be a helpful step in the right direction of making ESTC a more useful research tool. ESTC should, I suggest, consider the suggestion that I have made in print and in lectures on a number of occasions, most fully in my chapter in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 6.

ESTC is, in a way, a victim of its own success. For the ready availability of lists of titles has fostered an illusion of completeness and that has led to users attempting to use it for purposes for which it is inadequate. Indeed the consultation document that has been circulated helps to prolong the illusion. I quote: 'The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a union catalog and bibliography of everything printed between 1473 and 1800 in England and its former colonies or in the English language elsewhere.' In fact, as I understand the situation, ESTC is a union catalogue of titles of which at least one copy is known to have survived somewhere in the world?

That is not a debating point. It has long been known that the survival rate of books and print from the early centuries is badly incomplete. And this is not just a general common sense understanding. We have good evidence of the large scale of the losses. D. F. McKenzie’s observation that the size of the English printing industry, as measured by the physical capital (presses) and personnel employed (apprentices and printers) scarcely changed between the mid sixteenth and late seventeenth century can only be squared with the sharp rise in surviving titles over the same period by postulating either that a high proportion of the industry was maintained in unemployment or that more output occurred than has survived, or some combination. [In CHBB, iv,17]. Since, until the early eighteenth century, the English state attempted to control the texts that were permitted to circulate within its jurisdiction not only by an array of direct textual controls but also by limiting the capacity of the industry, measured not by titles but by numbers of printed sheets, it is highly unlikely that a huge proportion of industrial capacity was kept in idleness or in reserve.

And we know the titles of many of these lost printed books. It has been known, at least since 1875, that the Stationers’ Company register included only a proportion of titles of which copies survive. [E Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 volume 1]. The finding in my book The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 2006, 74-75, and 495-496, not challenged as far as I know, that large numbers of abridged ‘ballad versions’ of biblical stories were officially permitted until a sudden stop around 1600 depended upon my taking account of these lost, but registered, pieces of printed literature by scrutinising the registers myself. This result, and there are others, could not have emerged by interrogating ESTC nor would the current proposals to improve interrogability help. It is simply inadequate.

And it is not only in the early centuries of print that lists of titles known to survive are inadequate. For the eighteenth century, the survival rate of books known to have been produced, for example by being listed in advertisements, looks good for expensive books, patchy for some genres such as novels, and extremely poor for cheaper print. [Especially the two Dicey catalogues. Discussed in Reading Nation 340, and there appear to have been more cheap reprints of titles that entered the newly created public domain in the period after 1774 than are listed]. Soon after the 1800, the cut off date of ESTC, when we move to the age of stereotyping, 'titles' is such a poor indicator of production as to be of little value, and the survival rate for cheaper print known to have existed is even more poor.  ESTC cannot be held responsible if others misuse the information. But already it is used is to produce bogus statistics, even for titles, even for trends. Indeed, in some books and articles, the software that enables graphs, pie charts, bar charts and so on to be easily produced has given a spurious pseudo-scientific plausibility to results whose factual basis is simply not able to support them.  "There are no conceptual or methodological problems in my modest proposal for including lost books in ESTC. Provided the results can be aggregated with ESTC, they could be kept separate. The resources needed are largely clerical, potentially realisable by crowd sourcing. The potential improvement in the quality of research would, I suggest, be highly cost effective.

Yours sincerely
William St Clair

(source, accessed 04-23-2012).

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