A generation after Spitzel, J. F. Reimann (1668-1743), a theologian and the author of several very curious surveys of the history of learning, showed his full appreciation of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. His praise is significant because he was not accustomed to stint himself in condemning books that he did not like. In the Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam Litterariam, so wohl insgemein, als auch in die Historiam Litterariam derer Teutschen (Halle, 1708-1713), he writes: "Let this book of Labbé's be commended to you for diligent study above all others, for (disregarding the obscenities, which are scattered about in it like mouse dirt in pepper) it is one of the very best works in the field [of general bibliography]." He concludes his remarks on this field by recommending it a second time, when he mentions along with it the anonymous Bibliographia Historico-politico-philologica curiosa as a meritorious work.[81] After this, Labbé's book ceases to be mentioned because it was replaced by a new edition, to which we now turn.
In 1686 Antoine Teissier (1632-1715), a Frenchman who became historiographer at the court of Frederick I of Prussia, published a revised and enlarged edition of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and gave it a new title: Catalogus auctorum, qui librorum catalogos, indices, bibliothecas, virorum literatorum elogia, vitas, aut orationes funebres, scriptis consignarunt. This new title, which he signs "By Antoine Teissier (Ab Antonio Teisserio)," obscures the fact that the Catalogus is essentially a new edition of Labbé's bibliography. The title page gives credit to Labbé only for an appendix entitled Bibliotheca nummaria. Teissier could, to be sure, claim that his emphasis on eulogies, biographies, and funeral orations representing a category of biographical writings that Labbé had not included amounted to a sufficiently large alteration to justify a claim to authorship. We can at least say that he did not treat his predecessor generously. In a preface addressed to the reader he says that he has doubled the number of bibliographies cited and has added twelve hundred biographical works.[82] He has made the Catalogus both an index to biographies and a bibliography of bibliographies. He could scarcely have added the biographies if he had fully perceived the nature and usefulness of a bibliography of bibliographies.
Teissier was a diligent collector and a good organizer. Although he has corrected errors and has filled in gaps in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, he was not always as careful as he should have been. He added two new indexes: Index V (Catalogus, pp. 353-355), listing writers of biobibliographies of miscellaneous scope (i.e., works that were not restricted to men of a particular country or profession), and Index X (Catalogus, pp. 364-400), listing the men who were the subjects of biographies. These indexes show that Teissier was chiefly interested in biography. He transferred an index of last names that Labbé had given in the preliminary pages to the end of the Catalogus and made it Index XI. He showed bibliographical sense in perceiving and remedying the serious difficulties that the references to "Anonymus" in Labbé's indexes had caused. In order to run them down in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum one must read the entire book. Teissier assembled all anonymous works in a single place ("Auctores anonymi," pp. 319-332) and thus made it possible to identify a reference rather easily. He removed the brief account of fictitious libraries to a new place (Catalogus, p. 363) and added to it a short but very interesting list of sixteen seventeenth-century catalogues of private libraries.
Teissier did not learn from Labbé's experience that titles should be cited in the original languages. Consequently, the Catalogus offers the same mixture of Latin titles translated from the vernacular and vernacular titles as we found in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. Probably he could not have achieved any substantial improvement in this regard. He could not see many books that he cited and the sources from which he took the titles usually gave them in Latin translation. Like Labbé, he cited bibliographical sections of non-bibliographical works.[83] He made some mistakes and corrected some that Labbé had made.[84] His most serious fault is his failure to verify his references. In the seventeen pages devoted to authors whose first names begin with "H" (Catalogus, pp. 121-138) Teissier cited eight books with the remark "He is said to have written—(scripsisse dicitur)." This number is much larger than it should be. Since he usually neglects to cite his source (Labbé is more careful in this regard), search for the title may be difficult. He is often careless in details.[85]
Teissier did not improve his technique in the Auctuarium, a supplement published in 1705. This book of 388 pages contains many new bibliographies and substantial additions to the indexes.[86] He has turned up some new bibliographers of classical times that had escaped Labbé and were not included in his revision of 1686. For example, he cites Xenocrates as the writer of a list of geometricians and Varro as the writer of a list of poets. He has brought up to date the list of English bibliographers by adding Henry Holland, who is the H. H. of the Herwologia,[87] Richard Smith, whose library was the subject of an early catalogue; and William Winstanley, who wrote on English poets. He knows "Rossus Warwicensus" from John Pits's biobibliographical dictionary of English authors, but of course has not seen Thomas Hearne's edition, which came out a few years later.[88] He is as neglectful as he had been in the Catalogus about giving dates and places of publication and citing authorities for titles that he has not seen and works in manuscript.
Labbé's original plan survived without substantial change in Teissier's revision of 1686 and supplement of 1705. In the Auctuarium, the fourth index, "Writers on Various Subjects (De variis argumentis scriptores)," has grown enormously. If Teissier had given any attention to remaking the structure of the book, it might have suggested to him the idea of an alphabetical subject index. He has no longer adhered strictly to listing bibliographies in terms of men who specialized in various subjects but shifted somewhat in the direction of an emphasis on the subject. He could have introduced many practitioners of various arts and sciences into the first index, but his decision to put them into the fourth index shows a breaking down of the scheme that Labbé had invented. When he says (Auctuarium, p. 398) that the seventh index will supplement the list of library catalogues, which are in the eighth index, he is confessing to uncertainty about the scheme. Wavering of this sort is evidence that he did not fully understand the scheme or did not choose to adhere to it.
Although scholars no longer remember Antoine Teissier and his bibliographies, the Catalogus and the Auctuarium offer a uniquely useful summary of seventeenth-century scholarship. In them we find such bibliographies as a list of twenty-two medical bibliographers (Auctuarium, p. 288), fifteen writers (Catalogus, p. 349) on academies and universities (these authors are scarcely bibliographers, but contemporary practice did not separate them sharply from bibliographers), twenty compilers of catalogues of manuscripts (Catalogus, p. 352), twenty authors of lists of famous women (Catalogus, p. 352), and four bibliographers of dictionaries (Auctuarium, p. 298).[89] There is even a reference to a bibliographer of books of anagrams.[90]
The reception of Labbé's and Teissier's books shows that the world was not ready for a bibliography of bibliographies. We can see additional evidence to this effect in the announcement in 1680 of a bibliography of bibliographies that did not get into print. Cornelius a Beughem (fl. 1678-1710), a Dutch bookseller who compiled and published several bibliographies, borrowed the title Bibliotheca bibliothecarum from Labbé and the title Bibliothecariographia from Dudinck for books that never got into print. Presumably the Bibliothecariographia was a treatise on library science. In his subtitle Beughem makes clear what he intended to include in the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. It was to be An Account and Fuller Listing of all Books and Works that Have Appeared up till now under the Titles Bibliotheca (Bibliography), Catalogus, Index, Athenae, etc.[91] We can perhaps infer that he did not include bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works. His bibliographies of incunabula and of medical, juridical, and historical writings as well as his survey of articles in journals (a Poole's Index at the end of the seventeenth century!) show him to have been a most diligent worker.[92] We can only regret his failure to print his two books on bibliography and library science.
With Cornelius a Beughem's unfulfilled promise of a Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, Antoine Teissier's Catalogus and Auctuarium, and Charles Moëtte's lost manuscript bibliography of bibliographies that I shall mention in Chapter IV, the making of bibliographies of bibliographies came to a temporary end shortly after 1700. Scholars do not seem to have esteemed Teissier's books very highly then or later and Teissier himself concealed their nature by including a large number of biographies. The tentative efforts to write lists of books entitled Bibliotheca that might have developed into bibliographies of bibliographies are the subject of the next chapter, but it may be said in advance that they had no important result.
Explanations for the disappearance of bibliographies of bibliographies around 1700 are readily found. Even a casual reading of the subject indexes to Labbé or Teissier reveals few themes to attract eighteenth-century scholars, who were studying theological, political, economic, historical, literary, and scientific problems in new ways. The great encyclopedias, of which Moréri's Le Grand dictionnaire, first published at Lyons in 1674 and revised, enlarged, and supplemented down to 1759, is typical, gave scholars information that they might otherwise have sought in bibliographies. The changes in the intellectual climate around 1700 are too varied and numerous to discuss here. It is enough to note that they included the disappearance of bibliographies of bibliographies from the list of scholarly tools.
The listing of books that contain the word Bibliotheca in their titles is a special bibliographical development in the seventeenth century and continues into the eighteenth. It might have led by easy stages to making a bibliography of bibliographies, but it unfortunately attracted little notice and maintained a tenuous existence for only about a century. The word bibliotheca, which often appears in titles, has such more or less bibliographical meanings as bibliography, subject index, catalogue of a public or private library, and collection of materials dealing with a particular subject. Consequently, a list of books entitled bibliotheca has much in common with a list of reference works and, more particularly, a bibliography of bibliographies. Although there was no proper place for such a list in his Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, Philip Labbé included one under the heading Bibliotheca in an alphabet of authors.[93] This is an early example of a list of books chosen according to their titles.
Labbé limited himself strictly to works of a bibliographical nature. He did not, for example, include the collections of the church fathers that were very familiar to him, although they bore the title Bibliotheca. Many books that he cites are hard to identify: some titles seem to have been made up and others refer to books that were never printed. Labbé uses the term bibliotheca so loosely that we do not always know whether he is referring to a library and its catalogue (for example, Bibliotheca Augustana may mean the library or may be a short title for its catalogue) or a book (for example, Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis). In either case, he is thinking as a bibliographer, and we can easily conceive the enlargement of his list into a bibliography of bibliographies.
Labbé's classification of books entitled bibliotheca shows a remarkable understanding of their different kinds and calls attention to their remarkable variety. I cannot easily cite an equally instructive and suggestive review of bibliographies.[94] Labbé's classification is as follows: (1) Bibliothecae named for places (vel a locis dictae): Augustana,[95] Floriacensis,[96] Ingolstadiensis,[97] etc.: (2) bibliothecae named for persons (vel a personis): Borromaea,[98] Bodleiana,[99] Thuana,[100] etc.; (3) bibliothecae named for rulers (vel a principibus): Regia Gallica,[101] Caesarea,[102] Bavarica,[103] etc.; (4) bibliothecae named for religious orders (vel a Ordinibus Sacris): Augustiniana,[104] Carmelitica,[105] etc.; (5) bibliothecae named according to the subjects with which they deal (vel a materia quam tractant): Chymica,[106] Concionatoria,[107] Juridica,[108] etc.; (6) bibliothecae named according to their arrangement or like circumstances (vel a forma similibusve circumstantiis): Classica,[109] Selecta,[110] Universalis.[111]
The anonymous author of The Newly Opened Library (Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec), in which good information about libraries as well as convenient directions for acquiring, maintaining, and using them are put into the hands of students and inquiring friends. To which are added: the chief European libraries and what travelers ought to notice in visits to them (1702) hit upon the same idea of listing bibliothecae.[112] In this book a special section or appendix labelled "A List of Authors Who Have Written Books Entitled 'Bibliotheca' and Books about Libraries (Series Authorum qui Bibliothecas & de Bibliothecis scripserunt)" names books called bibliotheca, catalogues of libraries, and treatises on library science. The selection is obviously even more definitely bibliographical in character than Labbé's list had been. The compiler arranges the titles alphabetically according to the author's last names or, in the case of an anonymous work, according to an important word in the title. This arrangement and the choice of titles show that he had no knowledge of Labbé. Like Labbé, he includes none of the collections of texts that were entitled bibliotheca.
Our author begins with Valerius Andreas, Bibliotheca Belgica (1643), a biobibliographical dictionary of writers in the Low Countries. In the letter "A" he includes the Augustanae Bibliothecae Catalogus (1633), which he also enters under the name of the compiler, Elias Ehinger, librarian at Augsburg. He cites the Bibliothèque universelle, a critical journal edited by Jean Leclerc, because the title contains the word Bibliothèque. Such titles show that he was thinking in bibliographical terms, for Andreas's book and the Augsburg catalogue are bibliographies and Leclerc's journal was a review of current publications.
The titles in this list are interesting because some are rarely mentioned and others are difficult to track down. Examples are "Augusti sereniss. Ducis Brunsvicensis Bibliothecae Sciagraphia, Bibliothecae Catalogus. Wolfenb. 1650. in 4-to;"[113] "Henricii Furenii Bibliotheca Medica." Hafn. 1659. in 4-to;[114] "Hamburgensis Bibliothecae scripta memoria." Hamb. 1651. fol.;[115] and Bartol. "Moseri Thesaurus Bibliatricus seu Bibliotheca gemina Onomastica & Classica." Dilingii. fol.[116] The list includes a few autobibliographies, for example, those written by such librarians and bibliographers as Peter Lambeck (Lambecius) and Philip Labbé. The most surprising title that the compiler names is "Joan. Brunderii [sic] index librorum MS quae in Bibliothecis Belgicis extant."[117] This union catalogue of manuscripts owned in the Low Countries was made by the Belgian Dominican Johannes Bunderius or Bunderus (b. 1481 or 1482, d. 1557). Down to 1666 it is mentioned occasionally by men who had consulted it, but our author probably never saw it and no fragment of it is known to have survived the dispersal of Anton Sander's library. A reference to such a manuscript was by no means an idle display of erudition. Allusions in various seventeenth-century works show that men used this union catalogue. For example, the Spaniard Pedro de Alva y Astorga, the author of several very rare encyclopedic works, which were published at Madrid and Louvain, drew upon it, and the Italian Antonio Possevino quoted it in his Apparatus sacer.
This curious list in Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec shows some signs of carelessness. Its compiler has not seen all the books in it. For example, he assigns Petrus Bertius's catalogue of the university library at Leyden to 1591 instead of 1595 (this error is probably a slip of the pen) and mentions the famous ghosts announced by Jodocus a Dudinck. He credits the Philobiblon to both Richard de Bury and Richard Dunelmensis (De Bury's name as Bishop of Durham). With all its faults, this "Series" is nevertheless a respectable piece of work by a man who saw clearly the nature of a bibliography of bibliographies.
A generation later, in 1734, Johannes Gottfried Unger published a pamphlet entitled De libris bibliothecarum nomine notatis, a classified list of books entitled bibliotheca, and added critical and descriptive comments. Julius Petzholdt, who is often a severe judge, deals with it generously, when he says (p. 79) that it is worth a glance and can then be forgotten. Although he seems to be unaware of any predecessor, Unger's idea was not novel. His execution of the idea leaves much to be desired. Since his list contains few, if any, books that cannot be easily found elsewhere, his list has little value and his comments do not enrich it. His strict adherence to the task of collecting books entitled bibliotheca prevented him from seeing the possible greater usefulness of what he was doing.
After some general remarks on libraries and bibliographies and a definition of the task, Unger cites seven general works: Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum (he mentions here Teissier's Catalogus and Auctuarium, but he has not seen them); G. M. König, Bibliotheca vetus et nova; Latinus Latinius, Bibliotheca sacra et profana; Jean Leclerc, Bibliothèque universelle et historique (this is the Bibliothèque universelle and its continuation, the Bibliothèque historique); Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca universalis; Johannes Groeningius, Bibliotheca s[ive] codex operum variorum; and Louis Ellies DuPin, Bibliothèque universelle des historiens. "And these are the books entitled Universal Library or: Bibliography." His comments contain some information but do not on the whole show much familiarity with the books. For example, the remarks on König's late seventeenth-century biobibliographical dictionary are lifted from D. G. Morhof, Polyhistor. He points out that the subtitle of Latinius's Bibliotheca gives a good idea of its contents: "Observationes, correctiones et variae lectiones in sacros et profanos scriptores, ex marginalibus notis codicum ejusdem [Latini Latinii] a Dominco Marco editae." In other words, the book is a miscellany of emendations and critical comments rather than a bibliography. He describes Leclerc's journals by a long quotation from the preface to the first volume. They are, he thinks, a better example of this genre of books than Latinius's collectanea. He dismisses Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis with the remark that it "also deserves mention (praeterea notatu digna est)" and a reference to Morhof, Polyhistor. He does not describe the book by Johannes Groeningius.[118]
Unger's account of forty-one theological bibliographies and collections of texts entitled bibliotheca is not altogether bad. He often quotes the titles of chapters from these books or says that a book is a collection of texts and not a bibliography. Much of this information was even then available in well-organized reference works, and Unger's only contribution is the selecting of the books entitled bibliotheca. His account of legal bibliographies begins with Martin Lipenius, Bibliotheca juridica, "which was published at Frankfurt in 1607 as a folio and was enlarged by F. G. Struve in 1720." This is not a good start, for the first date is wrong (it should be 1679) and he would have found five more legal bibliographies entitled bibliotheca by opening Lipenius. In this category he cites nine more titles, counting three works by Caspar Thurmann as one book. This combination is not particularly objectionable. Thurmann had made a classified legal bibliography and finding no publisher, had printed portions as small bibliographies. Unger then proceeds to historical, medical, and philosophical categories, but we need follow him no further. He finally resigns himself to naming titles in a confused order. His disappointing performance has the merit of naming books called bibliotheca, but it does not suggest, as Labbé and the anonymous author of Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec had done, that they were primarily interesting as bibliographies.
The sixty folio pages (double columns) filled with entries beginning with the word bibliotheca in Michael a San José, Bibliographia critica (1740-1742) have the appearance of a list of books, but on closer examination many titles prove to be made up. In other words, San José offers what amounts to a general survey of bibliography. Since his book is almost unknown and the entries are often curious, a brief description will not be out of place. The articles are arranged alphabetically according to the adjective that follows the word bibliotheca. Thus, the list begins with J. F. Reimann, Bibliotheca acroamatica (Hannover, 1712), a condensation of Peter Lambeck's catalogue of manuscripts in the Imperial Library at Vienna. The next entry consists of two columns headed "Bibliotheca Adriani Baillet" and is a brief discussion of the Jugemens des savans (1685-1686) and a long summary of a prospectus of a philosophical dictionary that Baillet planned but never published. More entries follow in an alphabetical order according to proper names or adjectives derived from proper names or the subject matter. Laurentius de Cremona, Bibliotheca aethiopica is entered under "Aethiopica," and Albert Bartholin, Liber de scriptis Danorum under "Alberti." It is difficult to discover the plan of arrangement, and equally difficult to see the reasons for choosing the books. The presence of more than twenty entries entitled "Bibliotheca Biblica" is not surprising, but eleven botanical bibliographies and twelve pages summarizing the Linnean classification seem an unnecessarily generous allotment to that subject. A few pages later San José cites collective works—not bibliographies—that deal with Byzantine history and canon law, but he ordinarily limits himself to bibliographies and biobibliographies. He shows no sense of proportion in the choice of titles. Out of hundreds of regional biobibliographies he chooses one for Naumburg for mention. It can have meant very little to most readers of his book, and he might have omitted it. A "Bibliotheca occulta concionum P. Paulini a S. Joseph" (Rome, 1720) did not deserve three pages or a revision of Antonio León Pinelo, Epitome (an early bibliography of American subjects) five. San José is careless with names and titles. Martin Hancke, the writer of a Silesian biobibliography (p. 528), acquires an Oriental look, when he is called Han Kii. San José's strange medley may yield a curious bit of information now and again, but it need not detain us longer.
The last list of books entitled bibliotheca is the Dissertation sur les bibliothèques (1758) by J. D. Durey de Noinville (1683-1768).[119] He does not hold to the purpose announced in the heading "Alphabetical list of both works published under the title of bibliothèque and printed catalogues of collections in France and foreign countries."[120] He offers virtually a bibliography of bibliographies. His use of an asterisk to mark works containing an alphabetical index of authors shows some bibliographical sense, but the lack of a clear plan of selection and organization makes the book unusable. In a hodgepodge of seven hundred and fifty titles—I take the figure from Besterman—Durey de Noinville may list a book according to its author or its subject without any apparent reason for his choice of either method. His knowledge of available bibliographies is entirely inadequate. The accounts of reference books dealing with Belgium, church history and France are scanty,[121] the list of learned journals is almost worthless,[122] and the remarks about journals entitled Mercure exceed somewhat the scope of his enterprise.[123] In addition to these faults Durey de Noinville makes bad mistakes in details.[124] His virtually worthless compilation yields an occasional nugget, but such discoveries are rare.[125] His book is only interesting or important for showing how a bibliography of bibliographies might have grown out of a list of books entitled bibliotheca.
The efforts that we have surveyed in this chapter produced nothing of lasting value. The list written by the author of Die neu-eröffnete Bibliothec did not lead to either a bibliography of bibliographies or a guide to reference works. Durey de Noinville's disorderly book was not good enough to suggest making anything better. All these writers worked independently and made little or no use of their predecessors. We might see in this fact an omen of the course of bibliographies of bibliographies in the next century.
Comprehensive authoritative bibliographies of the most popular fields of scholarship are characteristic products of the eighteenth century.[126] They began to appear in the last years of the seventeenth century, when Giulio Bartolocci (1613-1687) published the Bibliotheca magna rabbinica (3 v.; 1675-1693) which Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati (d. after 1696) completed and provided with the supplementary Bibliotheca latino-hebraica (1694). There are many standard bibliographies to set beside it. Barthélemy d'Herbelot [de Molainville] compiled the Bibliothèque orientale in 1697, Johann Albert Fabricius published the first edition of the Bibliotheca latina in the same year and continued with such larger and more important works as the Bibliotheca mediae et infimae latinitatis (6 v.; 1734-1746) and his masterpiece, the Bibliotheca graeca (14 v.; 1705-1728). In 1693 Ellies Du Pin published the first volume of the long theological bibliography that only his death was to interrupt. Many of these works were revised and enlarged during the next century and a half. The Bibliothèque orientale was republished for the last time in 1781-1783. An edition of the even more successful Bibliotheca latina was begun in 1773 and remained incomplete. The new edition of the Bibliotheca graeca begun in 1790 was brought to an end, although the work was still incomplete, with an index published in 1838. Excellent bibliographies which are still worth consulting were written for every subject of particular interest to eighteenth-century scholars. J. C. Wolf published four thick volumes of a Bibliotheca hebraea in 1715-1733. William Cave, who had begun his bibliographical activities in the seventeenth century, Jacques LeLong, and (after the middle of the century) J. G. Walch satisfied the demands of theologians. Langlet du Fresnoy, Johann Burkhard Mencken, and B. G. Struve compiled exhaustive lists of historical materials and investigations. The many bibliographies by Johann Albert Fabricius reviewed such subjects as church history, missions, and classical, Christian, Jewish, and heathen antiquities. In brief, the eighteenth-century scholar had on his shelves excellent bibliographies of the subjects that he found most interesting. However, he did not have any good guide to them in the form of a bibliography of bibliographies.[127]
The only bibliography of bibliographies that can be dated in the eighteenth century has, as far as I know, disappeared entirely. It is a manuscript dated 1707 that was sold at Amsterdam in 1743. From the brief auctioneer's description we can infer that it resembled Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and was a continuation of that bibliographical tradition. I have been unable to learn anything about its author. The description is as follows:
Bibliotheca Alphabetica à Carolo Moëtte collecta cum Indice Auctorum, Parisiis 1707. NB. Opus hoc propriè est Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, MSS. ineditum.[128]
Each epoch in the history of bibliographies of bibliographies has an individuality of its own. In the hands of Conrad Gesner and his successors this variety of bibliography slowly established itself. In the next epoch the work of Philip Labbé attracted contemporary scholars to continue and improve it. Although Antoine Teissier was the only one to publish the revision of a predecessor's work, his procedure is characteristic of seventeenth-century scholarship. The eighteenth century neglected the bibliography of bibliographies and let the writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in this field sink into obscurity. In the nineteenth century, as we shall see, men undertook to compile bibliographies of bibliographies with an astonishing disregard of the difficulties of the task and a surprising neglect of previous efforts. Without an exception these men were librarians and should therefore have been fully aware of what they were doing and of what had been done. Their behavior is nothing less than amazing. I may anticipate the theme of the next chapter by saying that the characteristic aspect of the making of bibliographies of bibliographies in the twentieth century is cooperation.
When the great French bibliographer Gabriel Peignot (1767-1849) published his Répertoire bibliographique générale in 1812, he declared that he had hit upon an entirely new idea. Although he knew and cited such predecessors as Labbé and Teissier, he did not clearly see that he was undertaking the task that they had already completed. He did not use their books systematically, and he did not exhaust the information that they had collected.
Peignot shows his competence as a bibliographer in various ways. Like his predecessors (although he seems not to have intentionally imitated them), he includes bibliographies printed as parts of non-bibliographical works. For example, he quotes at the very beginning a bibliography of books about bees from a local agricultural journal. Within the various articles he arranges the titles chronologically and thus suggests the historical growth of knowledge and bibliography in a particular field. Although bibliographers before him had often added comments, Peignot is more systematic and generous than his predecessors. For example, his account of bibliographies of ana—a subject to which he had himself made an important contribution a few years before the publication of the Répertoire—even includes useful references to book reviews. Particularly interesting as a technical improvement in bibliographical method are his frequent references to the number of titles in the book that he is citing. Bibliographies published before the Répertoire rarely give this information. During the course of the history that we have surveyed, the standards of accuracy and completeness rose and Peignot attains a very high level in this regard. The index of authors in his Répertoire is both complete and accurate and so, also, are his citations of titles.
Peignot's Répertoire contains perhaps a thousand articles extending from "Abeilles (bees)" to "Zoologie." According to Theodore Besterman, it names two thousand bibliographies. Since Peignot is primarily interested in surveying eighteenth-century scholarship, he does not exhaust Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum and its continuations.
Peignot's decision to arrange his bibliography of bibliographies in an alphabet of many small subject headings has necessarily reduced the permanent value of his labors or, more correctly, has made it more difficult for us to benefit from them. The Répertoire suffers from the unavoidable difficulties that arise from the choice of headings.[129] A reader can never know whether a particular subject will appear as a separate entry or as a subdivision of a larger field. Will heresy stand alone or under theology? What will the term philosophy include? Peignot gives no cross-references to aid his reader. Nor is there an alphabetical subject index that would guide the reader to the bibliographies included in the larger headings. Such an alphabetical subject index would have been useful, but I grant at once that an alphabetical subject index to an alphabetical list of subjects seems a strange duplication. There is, to be sure, a brief classified subject index (pp. xv-xix).
A serious and inescapable handicap to the permanent usefulness of Peignot's alphabetical list of many small headings is the rapid obsolescence of technical terms. In some cases we can no longer know exactly what Peignot meant by a particular term and therefore cannot immediately turn to a desired entry. For example, "histoire littéraire" does not mean the history of literature or at least of literature in the sense of belles lettres. In Peignot's use "métaphysique" includes demonology or, as a modern bookseller would say, "occult" books. A specialist in the history of theological studies will know that Peignot's "théologie positive" refers to theology based on God's revelations to man, but two professors in a divinity school did not recognize the term. I am all the more sympathetic with them when I read in Neville Braybrooke's account of Christianity in England the comment on Mr. Billy Graham: "In his way he stood for 'positive theology'."—Cited from The Commonweal, LX (1954), 194. Here the term seems to mean "a convincing religion for the man in the street."
Peignot does not offer an index of subjects because he believes that his table of contents and his alphabetical arrangement make it unnecessary. This belief is not well-founded because he subdivides many long articles and gives no cross-references and no indication of subdivisions in the table of contents. The bibliography of an individual classical author appears in its alphabetical place in the article "Classiques" (pp. 155-244) and of a religious order in "Ordres monastiques" (pp. 432-437). Without a cross-reference from "Bible" (pp. 26-32) one will perhaps fail to find a list of polyglot Bibles under the heading "Polyglottes" (p. 447). It is not immediately obvious that Peignot has arranged his valuable list (pp. 40-75) of catalogues of public libraries alphabetically according to places. He would have added little to the size of his book by adding cross-references and he would have made it much easier to use.
Although Peignot feels the temptation that comes to every bibliographer to wander afield and include works of little pertinence to the task, he apologizes for yielding to it in a prefatory "Nota" to the useful article "Bibliothèques" (pp. 32-135). He includes here such works as Richard de Bury, Philobiblon (a book about collecting books); Claudius Clement, Musaei (a general treatise on library science that contains little bibliographical information); and Louis Jacob, Traicté des plus belles bibliothèques (an excellent account of European libraries in the early seventeenth century). In general, however, Peignot adheres very strictly to his intention of listing only bibliographies.
We must look with a critical eye at Peignot's classification. Since he has an article on the bibliography of bibliographies, he should not put Labbé, Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, in "Des livres en général" (p. 387). Boulard's treatise on bibliographical method stands on the border of what is admissible and should certainly not be placed with "Des livres rares," a list of catalogues of rare books (p. 396). Georg Draud, Bibliotheca classica, a classified compilation of titles listed in the semi-annual catalogues of the German booktrade, includes juridical works as a matter of course, but it is not correctly placed in "Droit" (p. 254). Anton Francesco Doni's La libraria is a catalogue of Italian books and is not, as Peignot lists it (p. 95), a catalogue of a private library.
Peignot has seen many of the books that he cites and in this regard surpasses his predecessors. He does not, however, report German authors' names and titles (even titles written in Latin) with satisfactory accuracy.[130] I am not disposed to judge him very harshly for this fault because the language was no doubt strange to him and the books were probably not available. A more serious fault is, it seems to me, his neglect of obviously important books that he either could have seen or should have known. I cannot understand how he overlooked such authorities on church history and theology as Louis Ellies Du Pin, Jacques LeLong, and J. G. Walch. He knows only two of the six eighteenth-century bibliographies of diplomatics that Namur commends (pp. xvii-xix), but all of them are, it must be acknowledged, German works and therefore probably not within his reach.
These comments on Peignot's faults can easily obscure our estimate of his merits. His succinct and abundant comments were no doubt useful when he wrote and are still valuable. His chronological arrangement of titles is a spur to historical meditations on the development of many fields of study. A modern scholar finds it hard to duplicate some information that Peignot has assembled. Where else can he easily find bibliographies of the collections of Latin poets,[131] dictionaries,[132] encyclopedias,[133] translators of the classics,[134] and accounts of royal and noble writers?[135] His review of bibliographies of incunabula lays a foundation for a history of such works,[136] and so also does his survey of bibliographies of medicine.[137] The most amusing list in Peignot's Répertoire is a collection of bibliographies of men who practised trades or were members of professions having little connection with literature.[138]
Peignot's abundant and informative critical notes deserve special praise. For example, he comments on catalogues of public libraries (pp. 40-75), and although we have longer lists of these catalogues, his comments have not been superseded. A modern cataloguer would probably have separated the catalogues of manuscripts from the catalogues of books. An even more important survey deals with catalogues of private libraries (pp. 75-135) arranged according to the owners' names. He tells the number of lots offered for sale, remarks on the presence or absence of indexes, and warns us when the catalogue was printed in a small edition. He praises the superb Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunavianae (p. 86), calls attention to varying editions of the Cambis catalogue (pp. 87-88), and commends the Imperiali catalogue (pp. 104-105). He points out the noteworthy collections of journals entitled Mercure and books on the theatre in the Pompadour catalogue (p. 119). He often notes the use of a novel system of classification. One could only wish that Peignot had devoted even more effort to this list. He would have enriched the comments and would have eliminated various works that are not properly included among catalogues of private libraries.[139]
In sum, then, Peignot's Répertoire represents a definite advance in the progress of bibliographies of bibliographies for its relative accuracy and its abundant comments. It is what he intended it to be: a survey of eighteenth-century bibliography rather than a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies.
Pie Namur, who wrote a very large bibliography of bibliographies a short generation after Peignot, regarded the Répertoire and two contemporary compilations by T. H. Horne and A. F. Delandine as his only predecessors. Although these compilations are brief selective lists of a sort not included in this essay, Namur's recognition of them makes it necessary to characterize them briefly.
The bibliographical portion (pp. 403-758) of Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862), An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography (1814) is mentioned here only because Pie Namur, the author of a bibliography of bibliographies next to be discussed, names it along with A. F. Delandine's "Bibliographie spéciale" and Peignot's Répertoire as a predecessor. Like other writers of handbooks of bibliography, Horne cites bibliographies without aiming at completeness. Horne's Part III, "A Notice of the Principal Works, Extant on Literary History in General, and on Bibliography in Particular," gives the information that it promises but contains no subject bibliographies and therefore cannot be called a general bibliography of bibliographies. It contains a brief account of "Dictionaries of Literary History" or works that we would call universal biobibliographies (pp. 403-408). The interesting survey of "Treatises, &c. on Literary History" (pp. 408-418) includes G. M. König, Bibliotheca vetus et nova (1678) and J. P. Niceron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres (43 v.; 1726-1745) that should have appeared in the preceding section and two histories of philosophy for which his plan had no place. "Writers on British Literary History" (pp. 419-431) and "Writers on Foreign Literary History" (pp. 431-447) are accounts of national biobibliographies, histories, and bibliographies of literature, and of specialized biobibliographical writings. One finds in them occasional titles of infrequent occurrence like Christopher Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Biography, or Lives of eminent men connected with the history of religion in England, from the commencement of the Reformation to the Revolution (6 v.; London, 1810) or Giovanni Agostini, Notizie istorico-scritiche intorno la vita e le opere degli scrittori Vineziani (2 v.; Venice, 1752). His rather full account of British works has some value but his incomplete foreign list is noteworthy chiefly for such curiosities as Matthias Bellus, Exercitatio de vetere litteratura Hunno-Scythica (pp. 433-434) or Giambattista Toderini, Della letteratura turchesa (p. 447). Horne devotes the following sections to writers on the materials used in writing and printing (pp. 448-450), writers on the origin of languages, letters, and writing (pp. 451-469), and writers on the history and the art of printing (pp. 469-513). A strictly bibliographical "Chapter IV. Books" (pp. 513-550) contains books on bibliomania, handbooks of bibliography, catalogues of rare books and incunabula, dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma, and lists of burned, suppressed, or censured books. The most valuable part of Horne's Introduction is the fifth chapter, on bibliographical systems and catalogues. The account of bibliographical systems (pp. 551-563) is not very important, but the review of British and foreign public and private library catalogues (pp. 564-733) has not been entirely superseded. Although far from complete, it contains information not easily found elsewhere. It resembles Peignot's similar review, on which Horne has drawn heavily. He concludes with a brief survey of publishers' catalogues (pp. 733-741), references (pp. 741-742) to two of Peignot's bibliographies that he believes to be adequate guides to subject bibliography, and addenda (pp. 743-758). Horne did not intend his Introduction to be a bibliography of bibliographies and we need say no more about it.
A "Bibliographie spéciale et chronologique des principaux ouvrages sur l'imprimerie et la bibliologie" by Antoine François Delandine (1756-1820) is printed in his Bibliothèque de Lyons (Paris, 1816). I have not seen Delandine's original list but have used a later and slightly enlarged version. In this, Etienne Psaume has, according to Namur, added a few books printed between 1812 and 1822 and the new title "Appendice de l'Essai sur la bibliologie" (1824). This, is an annotated chronological list of nearly three hundred and fifty books on the history of printing, catalogues of public and private libraries, and bibliographies of miscellaneous scope. This somewhat casual performance is useful at best for a few curious or informative notes. The bibliographies do not amount to many more than a hundred and do not offer either in number or variety a satisfactory survey of bibliography. A selection of good catalogues of private libraries (chiefly French) is the best feature of the "Appendice." The distressingly careless citations show that the compilers did not see some of the books. This list shows some originality and is worth reading, but it deserves no significant place in the history of bibliographies of bibliographies.
Almost a generation passed after the publication of Peignot's Répertoire before anyone tried again to write a bibliography of bibliographies. [Jean] Pie Namur (1804-1867), a librarian ("second bibliothécaire") at the University of Liége, gave a sample of such a work in his Manuel du bibliothécaire in 1834 and published his complete Bibliographie paléographico-diplomatico-bibliologique générale in 1838. Despite its many serious faults this forgotten book deserves some recognition. Namur emphatically disclaimed (I, p. xiv) any dependence on Peignot's Répertoire, which he called a "chaos" that yielded only a few titles. In writing his Manuel he had perceived that there were no adequate bibliographies of paleography, diplomatics, and "bibliologie" and he therefore set about compiling them. In the section of "bibliologie" he recognized only Peignot's Répertoire, Horne's Introduction, and Delandine's or Psaume's list as predecessors. Although he found them unsatisfactory, he would have left his collections unpublished but for the urging of friends, especially Baron de Reiffenberg, librarian of the Royal Library at Brussels (see I, p. xx). The announcement of his plan led L.-A. Constantin, who wrote a short handbook of library science a few years later, to send two hundred slips and to renounce the idea of making a bibliography of bibliographies (I, pp. xxi-xxii).
We can best appreciate the not inconsiderable merits of Namur's Bibliographie by squarely facing its faults. A comprehensive bibliographical account of paleography, diplomatics, the history of printing and the booktrade, bibliography, the history of libraries, and literary and critical journals is too large a task for one man or one book. I confine my comments to a discussion of the fourth section, which deals with bibliography.[140] Here as well as elsewhere Namur's choice of a classified arrangement involves great difficulties in arrangement. Namur's table of contents is inadequate and he provided no subject index. In assigning books to categories Namur fails sadly. He apologizes in a footnote (II, 5, n. 1) for a confused alphabetical list of 198 general bibliographies by saying that he has been unable to see the books and therefore cannot classify them. In this tangled heap lists of books recommended for various kinds of specialized libraries, trade catalogues, critical journals, Giovanni Cinelli (later Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli), Della biblioteca volante (a bibliography of ephemeral publications), G. F. DeBure's Musaeum typographicum (a list of rare books),[141] and general bibliographies lie side by side. Even if he had had to leave a few titles unidentified, he had sufficient bibliographical resources within easy reach to bring order into this confusion. But, he should not be judged on the basis of a list that he confessed himself unable to classify. The following section 3, which should have been numbered 2, is entitled "Bibliographie des livres rares, etc." (II, 12-14). This heading gives the reader no good idea of what to expect. Namur includes here lists of rare books, lists of ana, John Hartley's Catalogus universalis (which is described by its title), and J. B. B. van Praet's catalogues of books printed on vellum. The anomalous items are in all perhaps a dozen of the fifty-two titles in this section. If we disregard the interlopers, which could easily have been put elsewhere, this section is a not altogether unsatisfactory account of a very important variety of eighteenth-century bibliography. Almost all catalogues of rare books can be readily recognized by their titles and a critical account of them—an account which is greatly to be desired—might begin with Namur's list. In section 4, the bibliographies of anonyma and pseudonyma, Namur succeeds better than in section 3. These bibliographies are usually sufficiently identified by their titles and mistakes should not occur. Two black sheep have, however, found a way into the fold (II, 14, Nos. 272, 273). Books like these with the title Bibliotheca anonymiana are sale catalogues and not lists of anonymous writings. The title corresponds to the modern "Library of a Distinguished Collector" and Namur should have recognized it. This error shows the dangers that a bibliographer runs in classifying books without examining them.
Bibliographies of the individual languages and literatures are ordinarily easy to recognize, but Namur makes a few egregious mistakes in classifying them. One example is sufficient. He puts a book on Icelandic literature correctly in the same class with books on Danish and Swedish literature and then enters it once more among American bibliographies. He introduces a further complication by copying "Irlandiae" that a predecessor had misread for "Islandiae" in the title of a second book by the same author and puts it among British biobibliographies. Nor is this enough. He cites the author's name, Hálfdan Einarsson, as both "Hálfdanus Einar" and "Einari, H." and enters the first under "H" and the second under "E" in the index of authors.[142] One can grant that the proper form of entry for Icelandic names is difficult for foreigners, but a bibliographer must learn it or at least adopt a consistent rule of his own making. Although Namur knows directly or indirectly many bibliographies, he has failed to find obvious titles. A librarian at Liége who knows Anton Sander's Flemish biobibliography should also have known his local books of similar character for Bruges and Ghent.[143]
Enough of this! The picture is not all black. Namur's account of dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma[144] contains more titles printed before 1838 than any other bibliography. There are some duplications but few outright errors. His important list of books dealing with the history of libraries and including catalogues of institutional libraries[145] is the most useful one that I know. He has ranged so widely as to cite the library catalogues of the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia and (inaccurately) the Harvard College Library catalogue of 1790. Such titles rarely come to the knowledge of European bibliographers. The following section (II, 167-226, Nos. 721-2573) is an equally full review of catalogues of private libraries. As he says in a footnote at the beginning, he has made a special effort to attain completeness. I can cite no list of trade catalogues and publishers' catalogues comparable to Namur's (I, 171-193, Nos. 1283-1857). I cannot judge competently his list of printer's type facsimiles (I, 144-146, Nos. 673-768), but its extent and the variety of printers named is impressive. His list of national biobibliographical dictionaries (II, 106-122, Nos. 86-390) is far from complete, but I see in the Italian section (II, 108-110, Nos. 129-169) several unusual titles. The subject bibliographies seem less rich to me, but there are one hundred and sixteen bibliographies of medicine (II, 77-83, Nos. 1457-1573) and eight bibliographies of veterinary medicine (II, 84, Nos. 1574-1581). More examples of Namur's diligence would be wearisome and would add nothing to the picture. In spite of vexatious errors of all kinds Namur often names a title not easily found elsewhere.
A development characteristic of nineteenth-century bibliography consists in the publication of collectanea at more or less regular intervals in appropriate journals. These collectanea may be lists of recently published books and articles, books received, or brief critical accounts of current publications. Since they do not intend to be comprehensive, we need not examine at length those including bibliographies. A. G. S. Josephson mentions perhaps a score of such periodical bibliographies of bibliographies.[146] Perhaps the earliest and most influential publications of this sort were those in the Anzeiger für Literatur der Bibliothekswissenschaft (1840-1846), which was continued until 1886 by the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswissenschaft. The editor, Julius Petzholdt, used these lists of current bibliographical publications, bibliographies of particular subjects, and critical comments on antiquarian catalogues in the making of his Bibliotheca bibliographica, but those published after 1866, when the Bibliotheca appeared, are not very well-known. Various other journals devoted to bibliography, bibliophily, library science, criticism, and the interests of publishers and dealers printed similar collectanea. For example, a very full and carefully compiled list of current bibliographical publications may be found in the Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, which was founded in 1884. These numerous lists are convenient collections of useful materials, but I am not sure that the makers of bibliographies of bibliographies have, with the exception of Petzholdt, made full use of them. With the rise of annual bibliographies of bibliographies[147] that aim at comprehensiveness their importance has somewhat declined. I have mentioned these collectanea because they represent a new development and are to some extent the foundation of the book next to be discussed.
After the lapse of nearly three generations the Bibliotheca bibliographica (1866) by Julius Petzholdt (1812-1891) is still a standard bibliography of bibliographies. Its position will doubtless remain unchallenged. More recent works—notably Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies—contain more titles and naturally include those published after 1866, but Petzholdt's critical comments and careful collations are still indispensable. The Bibliotheca bibliographica deserves its reputation for its great merits. It also owes this reputation to some extent to Petzholdt's position as head of the famous library at Dresden with a long and honorable bibliographical tradition,[148] his editorship of a successful journal of library science, his standing as the author of professional handbooks, and, last but not least, his vigorous condemnation of other bibliographies. Petzholdt's self-assurance now and again arouses resistance, and leads one to judge him as severely as he judged others, but the Bibliotheca bibliographica will remain a landmark in bibliographical history.
Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is noteworthy for its extent, its careful organization, its detailed collations, and its useful critical comments. We must nevertheless admit some qualification of all these merits. In extent, Petzholdt falls short of his predecessor Pie Namur. Namur had in 1838 cited 10,236 titles. Many of these did not, to be sure, fall within the limits set by Petzholdt for his work. A generation later Petzholdt cited only an estimated 5500 titles (I take the figure from Besterman). He achieved this figure by excluding many old bibliographies (chiefly works of the seventeenth century), disregarding bibliographies published as journal articles, and including antiquarian catalogues and a few catalogues of private libraries. Although completeness is desirable, it is also unattainable. A comparison in terms of numbers is not very important.
In the matter of organization the Bibliotheca bibliographica has long been regarded as a model. Nevertheless one cannot defend Petzholdt's inclusion[149] of a detailed list of schemes for classifying books. He had collected a great deal of information about such schemes because they interested him as a librarian, but the subject is not pertinent to a bibliography of bibliographies. Petzholdt's relegation of the alphabetical index of authors to a clerk or, if he did have a clerk, to as inaccurate a clerk as he chose, was unfortunate. His decision to provide no alphabetical index of subjects makes the Bibliotheca bibliographica hard to use. His exclusion of articles in journals denies the purpose and spirit of bibliography. If bibliographical collections are to guide seekers after knowledge to information, then a bibliographer cannot justify the deliberate neglect of materials which do not happen to be in a particular physical condition. The best bibliography of the Tuamotus may be, let us say, in a journal article. The bibliographer who is aware of it and omits it merely because it is a journal article is guilty of a serious fault. We can pardon him for not finding it, but we cannot pardon him for rejecting it. We must not confuse the situation by making such an excuse as "avoiding the burden of inconsequential references." Petzholdt deliberately omitted journal articles and therefore does not serve the man who comes to his book as fully as he might have served him. Petzholdt's inclusion of books dealing with the invention, history, and practice of printing stretches the definition of his purpose, but custom is on his side and we shall not protest unduly. Lists of books issued by a famous publisher are of course within the scope of the Bibliotheca bibliographica.
A serious criticism of Petzholdt's plan concerns the inclusion of bibliographies, which (although pertinent) can be easily found and might have been dealt with briefly. The bibliography of individuals "Personale Literatur," (pp. 156-272) is a branch of bibliography and must therefore be included. Nevertheless, few bibliographies are more easily found than lists of an author's works. The great biobibliographical dictionaries from Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis of 1545 down to the various editions of the Biographie universelle and the Nouvelle biographie universelle contain this information. Biographies, wherever published, ordinarily contain bibliographies of the books written by the author in question. There are excellent indexes of these biographies. Antoine Teissier had added, in his Catalogus and Auctuarium, some two thousand biographies to Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum. E. M. Oettinger had just published two editions of the Bibliographie bibliographique universelle,[150] which is still a very convenient and full list of biographies. Any good edition of a classical text is almost certain to contain bibliographical information, and scarcely needs to be cited in a bibliography of bibliographies.[151] He could have written an entirely adequate bibliography of bibliographies of individuals in much less than a hundred and sixteen pages. He might, for example, have omitted the bibliography of R. Salomo b. Abraham b. Adereth (p. 166)—I cite the first name in his list—that is found in a biography of this worthy and the bibliography of Martial (p. 226) that is found in an edition of his works. Such omissions would not have impaired his book and would have substantially reduced its bulk.
This section devoted to bibliographies of individual authors exhibits some faults typical of Petzholdt's plan. A subdivision (pp. 156-166) without any heading begins the section and is terminated by three asterisks in the middle of the page. Although it is set off typographically, the lack of a heading makes it difficult to perceive that we have in it a list of the very important biobibliographical dictionaries of religious orders and learned academies. There is no indication of this category in the table of contents and the names of the religious orders and the academies do not appear in the index. I do not see how one can readily find a biobibliographical dictionary of the Dominicans or the Jesuits in this arrangement. Not all of us can bring to mind immediately the names Quétif and De Backer that are needed to find the references. In his list of individual bibliographies Petzholdt goes so far as to include books (not bibliographies, be it noticed) dealing with such artists as Jost Ammann, Rembrandt, and Velasquez. He could have found another place for books about famous publishers named Aldus and should probably have made a special place for dictionaries of homonyms.[152] He follows this section of individual bibliographies with a list of books containing portraits ("Ikonographische Literatur," pp. 273-279). Its pertinence to a bibliography of bibliographies seems debatable to me.
Petzholdt's execution of his plan leaves something to be desired. He provides the obviously necessary table of contents, but fails to include in it many subdivisions that he expresses by means of headings or typographical devices or only implies by the arrangement of titles. Experience teaches a reader that Petzholdt begins a section with general works, often a modern annual bibliography, proceeds through a chronological list, and concludes with specialized antiquarian catalogues. This is an altogether logical order. Subdivisions of a large category follow the general section. After the general bibliography of medicine, for example, Petzholdt continues with bibliographies of pathology and therapeutics (pp. 597-600). This arrangement makes necessary a full record of the subdivisions in an index, but Petzholdt's index is only an author index. There are occasional failures to include authors' names in the index. We must judge these flaws kindly, for all men are fallible, and bibliographers are no exception to the rule.