Writers of bibliographies of bibliographies have usually preferred a classification according to subjects to an alphabetical arrangement of titles with subject indexes. Joris Vorstius defends their preference eloquently and with good arguments.[153] There is, however, something to be said against it. Convenient as a classified bibliography is as first issued, it cannot be easily revised or enlarged.[154] When library cataloguers adopt new methods, when new categories are set up in science, theology, law, and literary history, a classified bibliography of bibliographies becomes difficult to use.
In the history of bibliographies of bibliographies we can look back to at least three occasions when men discarded the classified bibliographies made by their predecessors. Men of the seventeenth century seem to have made little use of Gesner's Pandectae, men of the eighteenth century found as little use for the difficult classification employed in Labbé's and Teissier's books, and few of us can use Petzholdt's categories easily. The lesson is that each age must create its own bibliography of bibliographies.
Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is a classified bibliography that shows signs of obsolescence. The organization of knowledge and the categories that seemed suitable to Julius Petzholdt in 1866 are often confusing rather than helpful today. Keenly interested as he was in the theory of classification, no one was more competent than he to select the right headings. But a modern scholar who consults the Bibliotheca bibliographica must put himself in the place of a man who lived almost a century ago. For example, he must remember that Hungary was associated politically with Austria and Austrian cataloguers and dealers listed and sold Hungarian books. Consequently, Petzholdt cites (pp. 320-321) bibliographies of Hungarian books along with bibliographies of German books and makes no entry in the table of contents for Hungarian bibliographies. I do not say that he was wrong, but I do say that a modern reader must remember the political situation of 1866 to use Petzholdt's book.
Petzholdt's adoption of a classified arrangement required him to be very careful in assigning books to categories and to provide abundant cross-references. As we have seen, his subdivisions of categories are not clearly marked and may escape the notice of an experienced user of bibliographies. For example, a bibliography of "Programme" (learned essays issued with the annual reports of German secondary schools) appears (p. 293) properly enough among the bibliographies of German and Swiss publications but few will find it. A few pages later (pp. 298-299) Petzholdt lists bibliographies of German and Swiss journals. Since these two categories are not named in the table of contents or the index, the information is almost completely buried. "Prognostica" or prophecies of future events—a genre of writings that was very popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance—gave Petzholdt trouble. Some of these are listed as pseudo-philosophy (see p. 467: Heuschling), and others are perhaps more appropriately found with almanacs ("Calenderliteratur," pp. 539-540). A bibliography of Swedish almanacs (p. 399) appears in the section for Swedish literature without a cross-reference to or from the bibliography of almanacs. "Loosbücher" or books telling how to interpret omens are in the section for psychology (p. 467), and this is a heading under "Philosophische Litteratur." Examples are wearisome, and I shall give no more.
A classified bibliography must have an exhaustive table of contents, a full index of authors, and an adequate alphabetical subject index. Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica is probably as carefully made as any such book can be made, but its table of contents is a scanty recapitulation of the very largest headings, its index of authors is incomplete, and a subject index is lacking. I have already expressed sincere admiration for the book and feel all the more keenly the presence of these defects.
Petzholdt's frequent disparaging remarks show that he did not esteem highly the bibliographical achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need not defend them here, but we must recognize that his low opinion of them explains many omissions of early bibliographies in his own work. His admirable survey of books that a scholar would find useful in 1866 gives no adequate account of the historical development of bibliography or of the wealth of bibliographical work before 1750. His very convenient chronological arrangement of titles in the various categories does often suggest the historical development and at times his choice of older books is generous.
Petzholdt has not compared his accounts of some fields with easily available bibliographies and therefore fails to include obviously important books. In the field of national bibliographies, Petzholdt chose to pass over many older bibliographies that seemed to him to be no longer useful. Both the Latin and the German editions of Heinrich Pantaleon's rare sixteenth-century German biobibliography could perhaps be dispensed with, and I shall not object to his omission of them.[155] I think he should not have passed over without mention Henning Witte's biobibliographical dictionaries, which are still useful sources of information about obscure seventeenth century writers. To be sure, Witte's Repertorium biblicum is cited (p. 286), but this is the least useful of Witte's books. Petzholdt's account of German regional biobibliographies (pp. 299-322) can only be called superficial. In Robert F. Arnold, Allgemeine Bücherkunde zur neueren deutschen Literaturgeschichte,[156] which I have compared only for the first page (the entries extending from Aargau through Bayern), I find twelve books published before 1866 that Petzholdt does not name. If we turn to works of larger scope, one cannot easily find a reason for omitting D'Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale. First published in 1697, improved and enlarged in later editions, and brought up to date by J. T. Zenker's continuation of 1846-1861, it remains the only general account of Oriental studies for its period. Petzholdt neglects to mention the seventeenth-century biobibliographies of Italian and French Orientalists compiled by Paul Colomies and deemed worthy of revision by no less a scholar than J. C. Wolf. With all its faults Namur's Bibliographie could have helped Petzholdt to fill such gaps.
Petzholdt lavishes labor and space on antiquarian catalogues. He cites them in closely printed pages in double columns at the end of every major subject division and obviously intends the reader to regard them as subject bibliographies. Some antiquarian catalogues are very valuable and others are worthless for this purpose. We have no adequate appraisal of them except these lists by Petzholdt and for this reason he deserves high praise. In fields where no good bibliography is available we are glad to use these catalogues, even though the books have been dispersed. When institutions have purchased the collections en bloc, the catalogues have a special importance because the books can still be found with little difficulty. Kuczynski and Knaake are such well-known guides to the poorly-recorded books of the Reformation that they are ordinarily cited simply by the authors' names.[157] The sale catalogues of the libraries of K. W. L. Heyse, K. H. G. Meusebach, and Viktor Manheimer are indispensable aids in the almost uncharted sea of German seventeenth-century literature.[158] Bibliographers and bibliophiles use antiquarian and sale catalogues in tracing the history of particular copies of famous rarities.[159] A student of the Dance of Death consults the Susan Minns catalogue,[160] and Mario Praz compiled a bibliography of emblem books almost exclusively from antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries.[161] Indispensable, then, as these catalogues often are, the compiler of a list should be alert to reject those of little value. Petzholdt should not have devoted seven pages (pp. 691-696) to antiquarian catalogues of classical Latin and Greek authors. Excellent bibliographies were available and a highly selective list of catalogues would have been sufficient. He could surely have omitted a catalogue (p. 696) of twenty pages issued by E. Weingart in 1864 that contains chiefly ordinary German books. The choice of catalogues for permanent record in a bibliography of bibliographies calls for the judgment and experience that Petzholdt had and did not use.
The list of catalogues (pp. 98-101) appended to the general bibliographies is perhaps the most unfortunate exhibit of Petzholdt's selections. His wide experience in this field should have told him the right catalogues to cite. He offers us a strange hodgepodge consisting of one early eighteenth-century catalogue (the Duboisiana), a handbook of bibliography, several nineteenth-century catalogues of private libraries, and a few dealers' catalogues. The Duboisiana, Michael Denis's Einleitung in die Bücherkunde, and Part II of the Libri catalogue (1861) are not hard to justify, but the remaining titles appear to be a random selection. Inasmuch as he devotes almost one quarter of the space to a full-length citation of a part of the Libri catalogue, he should have taken the trouble to find the other parts. Although Petzholdt's list of catalogues interesting to bibliographers has the merit of being more international in scope than most of his lists for special disciplines, he overlooked many large and admirable polymathic catalogues. He does not mention the Thott and Heber catalogues or the Firmiana, to name no others.
Petzholdt's abundant descriptive and critical comments ensure the Bibliotheca bibliographica of a permanent place on every bibliographer's desk. He expresses an extensive analysis and usually accurate opinion about almost every book that he cites. It did not occur to him to tell the reader the number of titles in these books, but bibliographers have been slow to realize the value of this detail.
There are, however, some qualifications of any praise of Petzholdt's comments. His unsympathetic feeling for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bibliographers leads him to dismiss (p. 7) Teissier's bibliographies of bibliographies with "Virtually worthless today (Gegenwärtig so gut wie werthlos)." His condemnation of Raffaelle Soprani's Genoese biobibliography (pp. 360-361) and Leo Allacci's Apes Urbanae (p. 362) for listing authors by their first names can be properly called naive. In describing Agostino Oldoini's similar book for Perugia (p. 363), he says that this was the usual procedure in the seventeenth century and involved only the inconvenience of consulting an index of last names. These Renaissance bibliographers had inherited this procedure from medieval scholars who knew men by their Christian names and used other designations only when a differentiation of individuals was necessary. Even today a bibliography arranged in this fashion can prove to be a useful tool. The medieval mathematician Richard Suisset, whose last name occurs in various spellings, can be easily tracked down by use of his Christian name. He is not easy to find in a modern book unless one remembers the particular spelling of his name that the author prefers.
Petzholdt passes some very severe judgments on some books that were once highly esteemed and on some that are unique surveys of a particular field. Whatever defects such books may have, they should not be damned hastily and completely. For example, Petzholdt's rejection (p. 160) of Johannes Tritheim's catalogue of Carmelite writers as "bibliographically completely worthless (Bibliographisch ganz ohne Werth)" is far too harsh. In 1576, after it had circulated in manuscript for almost a century, the Carmelites believed it deserved to be printed. Three more editions (1596, 1624, and 1643), all of which Petzholdt cites, came out during the next seventy years. Men obviously found it useful, and it is the basis of the modern Carmelite bibliography. The remark "Of altogether inferior bibliographical value (Bibliographisch von ganz untergeordnetem Werthe)" is even more unjust to Theodore Petreius's Carthusian bibliography (p. 161). However bad it may be, Petzholdt knew no other Carthusian bibliography. The only bibliography of a field may be incomplete, inaccurate, or badly arranged and it may even have all these defects, but it cannot be altogether worthless. Paul Lehmann, a competent authority in medieval bibliography and literary history, mentions Petreius and some other early writers of biobibliographies of religious orders and says that scarcely one of these writers has been superseded, although details in their work may need correction.[162]
Petzholdt's critical remarks on bibliographies written in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century are very full and informative. Rarely does he err as badly as he does in a comment on Emil Weller's Annalen. This partial revision of G. W. Panzer, Annalen der deutschen National-Literatur (1792-1805) is, like the original work, still valuable for German publications between 1500 and 1525. Weller's notes on books that he had seen contain no great number of serious mistakes. Nevertheless, Petzholdt says (p. 708): "A book that deserves very much to be noticed, although it by no means lacks bibliographical defects and [shows] hastiness and carelessness. It owes its great value to the wealth of the collections that the compiler was able to use." Weller was as difficult in his manners as Magliabecchi, Fontanini, and other bibliographers have been on occasion and had spoken unkindly of Petzholdt, but he did not deserve such a patronizing slur.
Petzholdt's self-assurance carries him to the length of condemning books that he has not seen. Of a Catalogo di commedie italiane published in 1776 he says: "It is said to be an extremely rare pamphlet that contains all the Italian comedies arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors' names. The rarity of the pamphlet seems to be greater than its bibliographical value."[163] As he indicates by an asterisk, he has not seen the Catalogo. Any complete or relatively complete account of Italian comedies is obviously a useful book.
All that I have said in qualification of Petzholdt's merits does not diminish my admiration for him and his book. The Bibliotheca bibliographica deserves a close and critical reading and only a great book survives such study. It is a masterpiece of modern bibliography.
I turn now to a smaller book by another famous bibliographer. It is one of his minor efforts and will not detain us long. Joseph Sabin (1821-1881), a bibliographer of Americana, found John Power's little Handy-Book about Books (London, 1870) very unsatisfactory. Although Power intended only to offer a brief selective list of books useful to a bibliographer or bibliophile, Sabin rejected it and wrote a much larger list. He entitled it Bibliography of Bibliography, or a handy book about books which relate to books, being an alphabetical catalogue of the most important works descriptive of the literature of Great Britain and America, and more than a few relative to France and Germany (1877). It names perhaps twelve hundred titles and includes a few bibliographies printed as parts of non-bibliographical works and a few journal articles. The word "literature" in the title means publications in any field of learning and not merely belles lettres. Since Sabin provides neither a table of contents (his strictly alphabetical arrangement did not call for one) nor a subject index, one must read his book from cover to cover to find what it contains or to discover a particular subject bibliography. His occasional brief critical comments are often drawn from Petzholdt. As his subtitle indicates, he has included many books that are not bibliographies. Some he has carried over from Power's list that he has included in its entirety, although with misgivings, and some he has added on his own responsibility. Beloe's Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books contains much bibliographical information, but can hardly be called a bibliography. Bonnardot's treatises on repairing bindings, Botford's and Clarke's books about libraries, and Constantin's treatise on library economy are books about books in the modern sense of the term. Like most writers of a bibliography of bibliographies, Sabin includes works dealing with the history of printing.
In his title Sabin announces an intention of naming chiefly bibliographies written by British and American scholars or dealing with British and American subjects. Since he was an agent and bookdealer specializing in Americana and the author of a bibliography in that field, his account of bibliographies of Americana is naturally adequate. It begins with Bishop White Kennett's Bibliothecae Americanae Primordia (1713) and extends through later standard works down to the antiquarian catalogues of such dealers as Frederik Muller, Otto Rich, and Henry Stevens in Sabin's own day. His selection of strictly British bibliographies is more cursory. Although he had Petzholdt's description before him, he reports John Bale's sixteenth century biobibliographies inaccurately. He passes over John Pits's Renaissance account of British authors without mention. Thomas Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, which was still a very valuable reference work when Sabin was writing, either was so rare that it escaped his notice or seemed, although wrongly, to have been replaced. Sabin is obviously not much interested in British biobibliographies. His account of bibliographies in special fields is fairly satisfactory. He gives many useful references to British and American catalogues of private libraries, and his comments on them are often helpful. His arrangement of these titles is extremely clumsy. I cite the catchwords under which Sabin lists a few of these catalogues: Askew, Bibliotheca Heberiana (he neglects to mention the thirteenth part), Bibliotheca Smithiana, Catalogue of Books ... in the Collection of Colonel Joseph Aspinwall, and Crevenna. These are references now to the collector's name and now to the first word in the title. The Catalogue of the Valuable Library of Stanesby Alchorne, Esq. is under the compiler's name, T. F. Dibdin. There are no cross-references and the arrangement is confusing. Sabin's interest in T. F. Dibdin led him to cite an autobiography, a book that cannot be called a bibliography.
Sabin promises to give "more than a few" bibliographies relative to France and Germany, but does not make clear how he chooses them. He passes over Johannes Tritheim and Conrad Gesner without mention and seems to know little about other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bibliographies. His wide acquaintance with Americana leads him to mention Antonio León Pinelo's Epitome of 1620, perhaps the first important bibliography of Americana. On the whole, his choice of eighteenth century bibliographies is judicious. He cites the encyclopedic Georgi and such standard catalogues of rare books as Clement and Freytag, although he does not know the last and largest edition of Johannes Vogt, Catalogus librorum rariorum. He makes a good selection of eighteenth-century subject bibliographies, which were for the most part still valuable reference works in the 1870's. History is sufficiently represented by Lenglet du Fresnoy and Meusel's edition of Struve. Cave, Du Pin, and Walch are the right books to recommend to a theologian. As far as he goes, Sabin is generally successful in naming histories, which are virtually bibliographies, of national literatures, but J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca mediae et infimae latinitatis and J. C. Wolf, Bibliotheca hebraea are lacking. He mentions only a few regional biobibliographies and seems to have had no plan in selecting them. I have examined only his references to Italian examples of this genre, but these are well-known and easily found. In other fields than history and literature he has usually chosen wisely. He knows Pritzel's botanical bibliography and Van der Linden's medical bibliography. He has a blind eye for bibliographies of the religious orders. As we might expect, De Backer's Jesuit bibliography is present, but it is surprising to see no mention of Wadding's account of the Franciscans, who had a large share in the cultural development of the Spanish colonies in America, or Quétif and Echard's biobibliographical dictionary of the Dominicans. In brief, Sabin's book is probably as good a book as can be written in one hundred and fifty pages. A classified and an alphabetical index of subjects would have vastly increased its usefulness. Had he made them, he would have perceived and filled the gaps.
Sabin's purpose in writing A Bibliography of Bibliographies remains somewhat mysterious. I cannot understand how he failed to see the necessity of making indexes. How, for example, is the user to discover the bibliographies of precocious children, mnemonics, and chess in F. Cancellieri, Dissertazione intorno agli uomini dotati ad [read ed] a quelli divenuti smemorati, colle biblioteche degli scrittori sopra gli eruditi precoci, la memoria artificiale ed il giuoco degli scacchi (pp. xxviii-xxix) without a subject index? We can commend Sabin for enlarging Power's dilettante list into a reference work. We can commend his care in citing books and his industry and judgment in choosing them, but accuracy, industry, and learning are not the only virtues required of a bibliographer. A bibliographer must be a practical man who sees how his book will be used.
Sabin's book has remained almost unknown, but the next book to be discussed has an unenviable reputation. No one has a kind word for Léon Vallée, Bibliographie des bibliographies (1883-1887), but in damning it few have effectively supported their opinions. It is not a good book, but it has perhaps been judged too severely. As an example of a sweeping and unsupported condemnation I cite what A. G. S. Josephson wrote in 1901:
This work is of comparatively slight value in spite of the vast material that it contains. It is very uncritical and gives in most cases no hint as to the whereabouts of bibliographical materials in the books referred to. The alphabetical arrangement by authors, even with the subject index, makes the work difficult to consult. [It may] be a useful basis for a more scholarly work.[164]
This is not only Josephson's judgment but also the judgment that bibliographers have generally passed on Vallée. Reviewers contemporary with Vallée are perhaps somewhat more favorable in their estimates, but make their dissatisfaction altogether plain. In an article suggested by Josephson's bibliography in which this criticism appears, Vilhelm Grundtvig expressed an equally condemnatory opinion about Vallée's book.[165] He declares that only Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica and Henri Stein's Manuel (which is yet to be mentioned) deserve mention among bibliographies of bibliographies. This means passing over Labbé, Teissier, and Peignot, who were very respectable workers indeed. He goes on to say that Vallée's book does not even deserve review and is altogether unworthy of a member of the staff of the greatest library in the world. Theodore Besterman's judgment (I, p. x) is equally severe:
It is difficult to say much in praise of this compilation, which has, indeed, been universally condemned. Its general plan is basically wrong, and it contains far too many irrelevancies, mistakes, omissions, and second-hand descriptions. To indicate the general standard of accuracy maintained by Vallée, it is perhaps enough to say that, although a large part of his volume was taken bodily from Petzholdt, that scholar's name is spelt incorrectly throughout the entries under his name.
Vallée's book is unsatisfactory, but I cannot listen to this chorus without examining the criticisms briefly. Josephson's damning notice signifies very little. As far as such rough tests as I have used can show, Vallée does not include an unreasonable proportion of unsuitable titles. I have examined the first entry on page 25, and each succeeding twenty-fifth page without finding an instance of a non-bibliographical title. If Josephson means that Vallée gives many unnecessary references, I should agree with him. Vallée should not choose to cite Thomas Stapleton's biography of Sir Thomas More (p. 519, No. 6048) because it contains bibliographical information or to give hundreds of similar references. I cannot however agree with Josephson's remark that Vallée fails to indicate where this bibliographical information appears in the books cited. It seems altogether unnecessary to cite a bibliography found in a biography, an edition of a classical Latin or Greek author, or a general treatise on some subject, but when Vallée cites it, as he does in imitation of Petzholdt with distressing frequency, he ordinarily gives reference to pages. I cannot see that an alphabetical arrangement according to authors with a subject index is very much more difficult to use than an alphabetical or classified arrangement according to subjects with an author index, but in this opinion I stand alone against general bibliographical practice and shall say no more here. In any event, Vallée's choice of arrangement seems a comparatively minor fault, when compared with Petzholdt's and Stein's choice of a classified arrangement with altogether unsatisfactory subject indexes and hastily-made author indexes. I speak in Vallée's behalf partly because of Josephson's arrangement of a bibliography to be mentioned at the end of this essay. Josephson chose to arrange the titles in chronological order without providing either an author or a subject index. No one has ever recommended such an arrangement.
I shall let Vallée's book speak for itself. Like the bibliographers who immediately preceded and followed him, Vallée struck out for himself and gave little heed to earlier work. This appears even in his references to bibliographers of bibliographies. In an "Avertissement" he recognizes only three predecessors: Tonnelli in 1782, Petzholdt in 1866, and Sabin in 1872 [the date is wrong]. This is a bad start. Francesco Tonnelli's book[166] is a worthless mixture of a biobibliographical dictionary and a bibliographical handbook. The biobibliographical information is a disorderly collection of notes, referring chiefly, but by no means exclusively, to men whose names begin with the first letters of the alphabet. The bibliographical information is a miscellany of facts about libraries. Tonnelli, who has occasionally buried bibliographies in this rubbish heap, had no intention of writing a bibliography of bibliographies. I cannot guess what use Vallée made of Tonnelli's queer book. If he actually consulted it, he should have objected to its disorderliness and its lack of materials for his needs. Petzholdt's book is, as Vallée says, a classified bibliography of bibliographies made by a competent scholar. It is regrettable that he did not fully accept it as his model. He gives the wrong date for Sabin's book, which began to appear serially in 1875 and was published in 1877. He does not make it clear that he has seen and used it.
If we turn to Vallée's references to the works mentioned in this essay, we find nothing to encourage us. He puts Peignot's Répertoire, Teissier's edition of Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum, and Labbé's first edition in the Novae bibliothecae specimen[167] of 1653 in a section entitled "Bibliographies générales." In other words, he does not consider them to be bibliographies of bibliographies. I cannot see that he cites Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum at all. Namur's Bibliographie is in a section entitled "Bibliologie" (p. 621) with a mistake in its title. All this indicates, I am afraid, that Vallée did not recognize a bibliography of bibliographies when he saw it. This grievous fault is all the more grievous because he emphasizes in his preface the importance of careful classification.
Vallée is guilty of many more faults. He includes titles that do not belong in a bibliography of bibliographies.[168] As I have already said, their number does not seem to me to be very large and many of them lie on the fringes of bibliography. His descriptions and entries are incomplete and inaccurate.[169] He cites bibliographies that can be easily found and scarcely need mention.[170] He fails to analyze the long subject entries in his index.[171] He makes serious errors in names, dates, titles, and places of publications and is careless about editions and the continuations of works that spread over several years. In his supplement of 1887, he fails to repair the faults that reviewers had pointed out. More serious than anything in this long list of faults is, in my opinion, his rash attempt to survey all bibliographies anew with little or no regard for his predecessors.
Two things must be said in reduction of this severe judgment on Vallée. He is the first compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies to base his work on the books in a particular library and to indicate, although incompletely and inaccurately, what he has seen there. He has included many references to bibliographical sections in non-bibliographical books. Although these and other references of slight value are numerous, he has accumulated a very large number of bibliographies. Almost everyone will find something useful in Vallée's book. The first volume contains 6894 titles, and the supplement raises the total to 10,246. In a savage criticism[172] Henri Stein declared that perhaps 2500 titles should have been omitted and 3000 should be added. This amounts to saying that Vallée collected about three-quarters of the bibliographies he should have found. I cannot vouch for the correctness of these estimates but they may suggest what the book is worth. It is regrettable that Henri Stein, to whom we now turn, did not give the additional titles as a supplement instead of writing a new bibliography of bibliographies.
In the Manuel de bibliographie générale (1897) Henri Stein (b. 1862), a member of the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale, offered the world a new bibliography of bibliographies. He calls it nothing less than a summary of all bibliographies published before 1897,[173] but seems at times to be content to supplement Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. He falls far short of completeness and does not make his intention entirely clear. Although the task that he undertook is beyond any man's strength, his treatment of his colleague Vallée does not awaken sympathy for him.
Stein yields to the same temptation to which his predecessors had succumbed. He includes material of little pertinence to a bibliography of bibliographies. For example, he could have omitted a long list (pp. 555-636) of places where books were printed before 1800 and the names of the printers. This information is very useful to a historian of printing, but has no proper place in Stein's book. His list of indexes to journals is useful but is also not altogether pertinent.[174] His long list of printed catalogues of public libraries, a list which is limited almost exclusively to rather recent publications, is something of a luxury.[175] Neither logic nor custom justifies an objection to the inclusion of bibliographies of individual authors, but Stein could have reduced their number without loss.[176]
Stein based his classification on Petzholdt's book but introduced modifications of his own. As Vilhelm Grundtvig correctly says, the classification is "at times nothing less than amazing, for example, hippology is under 'sciences pédagogiques' [and] dentistry under 'medicine interne.'"[177] Although he provides a table of contents and an alphabetical subject index, he has not made his book easy to use. There is no index of authors' names.
The Manuel does not contain all the available bibliographies or even a satisfactory collection of the best ones. Stein's surveys of universal and national bibliographies are inadequate and so, too, are the sections dealing with philosophy, chemistry, education, sport, and linguistics.[178] He shows very little interest in bibliographies printed before 1800. He does not carry out systematically or successfully an announced intention of expressing critical judgments.[179] Finally, he is inaccurate in details.[180]
This recital seems to leave little to be said in Stein's favor, but no bibliographer who has made a serious effort to write a useful book has ever failed to be helpful. Any list of 5500 bibliographies—the figure is Besterman's—will contain titles and information worth noting and remembering. He calls attention to books that other men have not seen or have neglected to cite. For example, I have not seen "Ahm. Zeki-Bey, Elmevsonat (Boulak, 1904)," which he describes (p. 264) as a bibliography of Arabic encyclopedias, mentioned elsewhere. We owe to him the interesting and important fact that the unpublished manuscript of Mazzuchelli's enormous work, Gli scrittori d'Italia, is in the Vatican Library.[181] He adds many titles to those cited by Petzholdt and Vallée. I lay aside the Manuel with the regret that Stein's zeal has given us a less useful book than we might have hoped for. Had he named, as I have suggested, the three thousand bibliographies lacking in Vallée and had he continued the collection from Vallée's supplement of 1887 to his own publication in 1897, he would have given us an invaluable book. What we have is one more demonstration of the unwillingness of bibliographers in his century to join hands with their predecessors and contemporaries.
In the historical development of bibliographies of bibliographies two aspects become especially prominent after 1900. Periodical surveys become a characteristic form of publication and cooperation in the making of bibliographies becomes more frequent or is at least more frequently called for. I shall speak only briefly about periodical publications because they aim at completeness, if they make such an effort at all, only for annual or other limited periods of time. Julius Petzholdt published lists of bibliographies that came to his attention around the middle of the nineteenth century in the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswissenschaft. Editors of other journals for bibliography, library science, the book trade, and related fields have published similar lists and have in some instances endeavored more or less successfully to convert them into surveys of current bibliographies of current bibliographical publications. A rapid growth of periodical bibliographies of special fields is characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. At the end of the century bibliographers advanced to the stage of compiling annual bibliographies of bibliographies. Such periodical surveys had long been established in fields like theology and classical literature and were now somewhat tardily created for bibliography itself.
The first annual survey of current bibliographical publications seems to be the Bibliographia bibliographica, which appeared in six volumes between 1898 and 1903. Librarians inspired and guided this cooperative enterprise. The list, which includes bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works, is arranged according to the decimal system of classification and was no doubt handicapped by this fact. Since the editors offer a brief outline of the decimal classification in place of a table of contents and provide no alphabetical index of subjects, the Bibliographia bibliographica is not easy to use. The lack of an author index was remedied by the publication of an index for the first two volumes that appeared at the end of the second volume. The Bibliographia bibliographica aroused very little interest among librarians and bibliographers. I have found no reviews of it in the contemporary journals for bibliography and library science. Harvard University Library purchased only the first two issues and these were so little used that, after the lapse of fifty years, they are still unbound.
A second annual survey of the current output of bibliographies is the Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens, edited by Adalbert Hortzschansky from 1905 to 1925 with an interruption of eight years from 1913 to 1921. This supplement to the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen had a longer and more successful life than its predecessor. It surveyed all publications that fell within the field of the journal and therefore included much more than the bibliography of bibliographies. In 1926 it became an independent publication with a slightly different title but with no change in the subjects reported upon. This Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens continued to be issued down to the outbreak of war in 1939. An enterprise of somewhat similar scope, the Literarisches Beiblatt der Zeitschrift (later: zum Jahrbuch) des deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schrifttum began to appear in 1924 and continued to 1939. Since these annual surveys include more than the bibliography of bibliographies, I shall not discuss them further.
Three reviews of contemporary bibliographical work have appeared during the last twenty-five years. One of them is limited to bibliographies of a particular kind, and the other two are more or less complete periodical surveys of bibliographical writings. I mention them here as the last examples of the development of periodical bibliographies of bibliographies and as a means by which one can estimate the task of any modern compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies. The first of these, the Index bibliographicus, which first appeared in 1925, offers an interesting example of specialization within the field of bibliographies of bibliographies. The Index bibliographicus is general in scope but cites only bibliographies of bibliographies that appear as current serial publications. In the six years between its first appearance in 1925 and its republication in enlarged and improved form in 1931 the number of currently appearing serial bibliographies rose from 1025 to 1900. Some of these had been overlooked in 1925, but many of the additions concerned bibliographies of bibliographies that had been established during the six years between the two editions. The Index bibliographicus, which was compiled with the assistance of the League of Nations, assumed a more definitely international and cooperative aspect when Joris Vorstius joined Marcel Godet as editor.[182] A third edition of the Index made by Theodore Besterman in 1952 is still larger than either of its predecessors.
The Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie, which flourished from 1930 to 1940 under the editorship of Joris Vorstius, enables us to survey quickly the current annual production of bibliographies. Critical comments attached to the titles make it one of the most readable bibliographies of bibliographies. Like caviar, the genre is digestible only by those who have acquired a taste for it. The organization of the Internationaler Jahresbericht is skillful, and the comments are judicious and instructive. Since Vorstius was editor of the previously mentioned Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens as well as the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, he saw a very large number of bibliographies. He was compelled to hold very carefully to the definitions of his closely related and very similar tasks. The Internationaler Jahresbericht of course lists only bibliographies.
The H. W. Wilson Co. has published the most comprehensive of all periodical surveys of bibliography. Starting in 1938, the quarterly issues are cumulated in annual volumes and these are, in turn, cumulated in volumes for periods of variable length. A cumulation of the bibliographies published in the years between 1937 and 1942 appeared in 1945, and a second cumulation for the years 1943-1946 appeared in 1948. This is the first virtually complete account of current bibliographical production, and the picture is amazing. Between 1937 and 1942 some fifty thousand bibliographies were published. The editors of the Bibliographic Index have classified them in almost ten thousand categories.
The foregoing discussion of these annual or otherwise chronologically limited surveys of bibliography is incidental to the main historical purpose of this essay. Such surveys illustrate very effectively an emphasis which has become characteristic of much modern bibliographical work, and especially of bibliographies of bibliographies, since Gabriel Peignot's book of 1812. Being concerned solely with the current production of bibliographies, they have obviously had no occasion to deal historically with bibliographies or to cite bibliographies published before the limits that they set for themselves. This emphasis on currently useful bibliographical tools goes hand in hand with the cooperative aspect of making bibliographies that I shall stress in this chapter. Already in his Répertoire of 1812 Gabriel Peignot had reviewed eighteenth-century bibliography with occasional citations of earlier works that had not been superseded. In 1866 Julius Petzholdt had dealt somewhat more generously than Peignot with Renaissance and seventeenth-century bibliographies, but had scarcely included enough of them to give a picture satisfactory to a historian. Like these predecessors, Joseph Sabin, Léon Vallée, and Henri Stein had shown a marked preference for contemporary works. The uses which bibliographies of bibliographies ordinarily serve explain this preference and make it a reasonable one.
The history of mass-production methods in the making of bibliographies has not yet been written. I conjecture that it begins with bibliographies produced more than a century ago by the German publisher Wilhelm Engelmann. His firm continued and revised some bibliographies established by Johann Samuel Ersch (1766-1828), whose scholarly and bibliographical activity began in the eighteenth century. It is not entirely clear whether Ersch himself had already adopted something like mass-production methods. However this may be, the titles and the nature of many bibliographies produced by T. C. F. Enslin (1787-1851) and Wilhelm Engelmann (1808-1878), who made new editions of some of Enslin's bibliographies as well as many of his own, virtually imply such methods. Information about the making of these bibliographies and those of F. A. Wilhelm Müldener (1830-1900), who seems to have worked in the same way, is difficult to obtain.[183] The compilation and publication of bibliographies by printers and publishers rather than scholars has been continued by such American firms as the Library Bureau (now no longer in existence), R. R. Bowker & Co., and H. W. Wilson Co. These firms have actively supported the making of bibliographies in this country for more than two generations.[184]
An admirable essay, Some Aspects of Bibliography (1900), by John Ferguson (d. 1916) suggests the cooperative aspect that is characteristic of bibliographical studies in the last two generations. Although it is not a full-length bibliography of bibliographies, it reviews the kinds of bibliographies that have been made and appeals to scholars to compile the bibliographies necessary to satisfy the most obvious needs. Ferguson's modest list of some four hundred bibliographies is intended to serve two purposes. It is an effort to show the great variety of bibliographies that have been made and it offers a supplement to Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. Ferguson's clear and very instructive classification of bibliographies is as follows: bibliographies according to (1) date; (2) place; (3) printer; (4) material;[185] (5) type;[186] (6) size;[187] (7) illustrations; (8) language; (9) subject; (10) groups of authors;[188] (11) individuals; (12) single books;[189] (13) anonymous books;[190] (14) suppressed books;[191] (15) rare books; (16) general bibliographies.
Some categories of bibliographies might be added to this list. For example, he probably includes bibliographies of private presses in (3). He has no good place for bibliographies of translations, which do not fit easily in the ninth category of bibliographies according to subjects. Nor is there a convenient place for bibliographies of belles lettres according to genres like the novel, the essay, or the book review.
The first bibliography of bibliographies published in the twentieth century is A Register of National Bibliography with a selection of the chief bibliographical books and articles printed in other countries (3 v., 1905-1912) by W. P. Courtney (1845-1913). It is also the first effort of this sort to be made by an Englishman. Like the American Sabin, Courtney limits the bibliographies published in languages other than English to a selection. In the course of twenty years Courtney had accumulated a great many references and four years of work in preparation of the Register greatly increased the number. He acknowledges the assistance of G. L. Apperson, who later published a useful collection of English proverbs, and Robert A. Peddie, who wrote a very large subject bibliography. He has taken references from Henri Stein's Manuel, especially references in the Slavic languages.
He found that the vast number of bibliographies in print made necessary some limitations on the scope of his work. He excludes sale catalogues (although a few are cited), catalogues of manuscripts, and lists of maps and charts. Probably few will quarrel with his decision. He also omits many headings in the bibliography of geology, India, and other unspecified large fields. Here it would be helpful to know more accurately what these omissions were.
Courtney's Register lists some 30,000 titles in a main and two supplementary alphabets. The rapid growth of the material as he proceeded with his work explains this inconvenient division. The very numerous citations of bibliographies in non-bibliographical works contribute to this large figure. I cannot estimate closely the number of small headings, which run into the thousands. The bulk of the Register and the ease with which it can be used make it valuable. As examples of the wealth of information in it, I cite his references to thirteen bibliographies of bacteriology, seventeen bibliographies of hymns, nine bibliographies of insanity, and three bibliographies of swimming. One will rarely leave the Register empty-handed.
Courtney could have greatly reduced the size of his book without a sacrifice of convenience or the loss of significant references. His alphabetical arrangement makes it unnecessary to repeat the headings in the index. He could have profitably used the space saved to add a descriptive word that would differentiate the various works by one author. The dozen references to J. C. Pilling, who wrote bibliographies of American Indian languages, might, for example, have been identified by appropriate adjectives. Courtney could have reduced the size of his book substantially and without loss by omitting bibliographies printed in obvious places, to which one needs no reference. For example, he could have spared references to bibliographies in four editions of Beowulf. The poorly-organized longer articles in the Register are often burdened with miscellaneous or unnecessary information. The article "Bibliography" includes, for example, the universal bibliographies by Georg Draud and Theophil Georgi, (but not Conrad Gesner); Olphar Hamst, Aggravating Ladies, which is a list of pseudonymous books written by "A Lady";[192] the bibliographical journal La Bibliofilia;[193] and a bibliography of church history. This is not a display of good workmanship. The article "Libraries" is a similar farrago of Namur's bibliography of bibliographies, Wheatley's book on how to make a library, Edward Edwards' book on libraries and their founders, Meusel's biographical dictionary of German artists, and other books of as little pertinence. There is very useful information to be gleaned from Courtney's Register and one can easily find it in the chaff.
We are still too close to the latest bibliographies of bibliographies to see them in a true perspective.[194] Efforts to make a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies continue and a new development that was foreshadowed in Sabin's restriction of his work to a single language with "more than a few" titles added to fill it out is apparent in some less extensive but very excellent bibliographies of bibliographies.
The death of Vilhelm Grundtvig (1866-1950) and the destruction of his collectanea during the war make it certain that the bibliography of bibliographies that he and Joris Vorstius planned will never appear. He had called for help in the enterprise in an article[195] published in 1926 and had obtained approval of it at the international meeting of librarians at Madrid in 1935. During the course of his work he succeeded in gaining the assistance of Joris Vorstius, whom we have learned to know as the editor of annual surveys of current bibliographies. He wrote in 1940 in a review of Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, that his collectanea were arranged according to countries for submission to various workers who might criticize and supplement them.[196] The loss of this compilation is greatly to be regretted because the experience and good judgment of the two editors make it certain that the book would have been comprehensive, well-planned, and satisfactorily executed.
On several occasions Grundtvig stated briefly the task of making a bibliography of bibliographies. His ability to see clearly its difficulties, his wide reading, and his recognition of the many types of bibliographical works that must be considered make these preliminary statements valuable. A long article of 1903 entitled "Gedanken über Bibliographie"[197] was suggested by A. G. S. Josephson's pamphlet, which will be mentioned later. Here Grundtvig points out the varieties of existing bibliographies and their defects and gives examples of unfamiliar or neglected varieties. For example, he comments (pp. 415-417) on the lists of antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries. Although we now have more information about these catalogues than Grundtvig found in 1903, we still have no critical bibliographies of them. He points out (p. 418) the unsatisfactory quality of bibliographies of ephemeral publications (chapbooks and the like) and surveys the available lists. He has, to be sure, overlooked one of the earliest of such lists—Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli, Della biblioteca volante (Padua, 1677-1716; 2d ed., 1734-1747. ICN [2d ed.])—but it is rare and virtually unknown. He comments incisively on the lists of collective biographies (pp. 420, 441) and suggests the need for a more critical survey of them.[198] Although Grundtvig's article is not easy reading, it is a very stimulating survey of bibliographies. Any writer of a bibliography of bibliographies should read it attentively.
Grundtvig's pamphlet of 1919, entitled Om Bibliografi og Bibliografier, is much more conveniently arranged than the article of 1903. It is a review of the bibliographical chapter in Svend Dahl, Haandbog i Bibliotekskundskab. He finds it very unsatisfactory and shows how it might have been written. He gives a brief survey of bibliographies in general (pp. 8-10), comments on the making of collectanea and their arrangement (pp. 10-13) and the varieties of bibliographies including those in non-bibliographical works (pp. 14-19), and surveys bibliographies of bibliographies (pp. 19-23), international bibliographies (pp. 23-25), and national bibliographies (pp. 25-29). In keeping with his purpose, he names only the most obvious works.
We come now to the largest of all bibliographies of bibliographies: Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies (1939-1940; 2d ed., 1947-1949). Since the two editions do not differ essentially in character, I have found it convenient and probably more helpful to the reader to cite illustrations of Besterman's method from the second edition and to conclude my remarks with brief comment on the changes and improvements made in this edition. The plan of Besterman's book is novel in many details. It is, like Peignot's Répertoire of 1812, an alphabetical list of many small headings. Courtney had adopted the same plan in his Register (1905-1912), but few others have seen the great merits of this arrangement. In giving bibliographical details Besterman goes far beyond anything that had been previously attempted. He gives more complete collations than any of his predecessors except Petzholdt had given, and in several regards surpasses Petzholdt. He describes carefully such long sets as the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Surgeon Generals Office (cols. 1866-1867), the many national bibliographies made by booksellers or librarians, and the annual bibliographies of special fields like The Record of Zoological Literature and its continuation (cols. 3187-3189). He goes beyond Petzholdt and most other bibliographers by estimating the number of titles cited in the books that he lists. He ranges farther afield than any of his predecessors. He includes lists of maps and printed music, registers of documents and charters, and indexes of laws and patents. He includes catalogues of manuscripts and specialized catalogues of books in institutional libraries but not general catalogues of books owned by the same libraries. He includes a generous selection of specialized catalogues of private libraries. He brings more Finnish, Hungarian, and Slavic titles than anyone before him and regrets his inability to include books in Oriental languages. In the first edition he intended to cite all bibliographies printed as books that had appeared before 1936 and succeeded in picking up a large number of those printed between 1936 and 1939. He says that he has cited three times as many bibliographies printed before 1860 as Petzholdt had found. This comparison gives an idea of the amazing extent of Besterman's work.
Besterman sees clearly the difficulties inherent in his choice of an alphabetical arrangement of many small headings and finds perhaps the only answer. It is to offer an abundance of cross-references. Although these headings can be found in special dictionaries that cite synonyms and related words, it remains to be seen how well they will stand the test of time. A suggestion of what may happen is perhaps already to be found in the general unfamiliarity of scholars with these dictionaries. Librarians know and use them, but scholars do not. The time may come when only a specialist and indeed only a specialist acquainted with the history of his discipline will know the meaning of many headings. The headings used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are obsolete. As we have seen, Petzholdt did not recognize the meaning of philosophy that was accepted in the early seventeenth century. I have remarked upon the unfamiliarity of modern students of theology with Peignot's term théologie positive. Can we expect future scholars to perceive readily the difference between psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Unless they do, they will not find it easy to use a bibliography of bibliographies arranged as an alphabetical dictionary of many small headings. There is, as a matter of fact, no better illustration of these difficulties than the word "bibliography" itself. This very interesting word needs a historical and lexicographical investigation that will continue Pierre Frieden's article, "Bibliographie. Etymologie et histoire du mot," Revue de synthèse, VII (1934), 45-52. During this century "bibliography" has been used more and more often to refer to either a study of a book as a physical object or to a list of titles having some common quality. In such titles as Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, and Norman E. Binns, An Introduction to Historical Bibliography (London, 1953), the word has two quite different meanings.
Besterman's enormous compilation does not include all the available bibliographies. Vilhelm Grundtvig found some four hundred titles that had escaped Besterman in the first edition and came regretfully to the conclusion that the hope for a wholly satisfactory international bibliography of bibliographies was now unlikely to be realized.[199] His judgment is severe and the second edition has no doubt gone a long way toward removing these defects. A third edition of the World Bibliography (1955) is now in process, with the first volume already off the press. It will contain some 80,000 titles, an increase of one-third over the second edition.
A few difficulties in Besterman's bibliography concern what have been called "linked" books. These are works having their own title pages but issued in conjunction with another book.[200] Unless they have been catalogued as separate works, they are virtually impossible to identify. We have already seen what annoyance a title of this sort can cause in the case of Labbé's bibliography of bibliographies published in 1653.
I cannot reach a decision altogether satisfactory to myself regarding Besterman's inclusion of "abridgments of patent specifications" (I, p. xv). These contain bibliographical information not readily obtainable from any other source, and my disposition is inclined toward generosity. By including them Besterman offers a much more adequate representation of scientific and technological bibliography than would otherwise have been possible. As he correctly says (I, p. xvii), an interest in the fields of humane studies has been predominant in earlier bibliographies of bibliographies. On the other hand, Besterman seems, in including these abridgments, to have stretched to the breaking point his rule for the exclusion of bibliographies contained in non-bibliographical works. If these abridgments are to be included, then one is tempted to call attention to the fact that many German doctoral dissertations offer good bibliographies of small subjects and can be very useful on occasion.[201]
Any definition of a bibliography is difficult to formulate and even more difficult to adhere to. I cite only one more illustration of the problems that arise. Besterman cites (col. 1040) Antti Aarne's catalogue of printed and manuscript versions of Finnish tales. This is clearly within his definition of a bibliography. Perhaps a score of similar catalogues for the tales of countries from Iceland to Rumania are in existence and might equally well have been cited. Although it is not made according to Aarne's pattern, the Typen türkischer Volksmärchen (Wiesbaden, 1953) by Wolfram Eberhard and P. N. Boratav is a similar catalogue of tales. How far shall one go in seeking out such extremely technical reference aids as these? The specialist will know them, and few others can use them with any comfort. Students of folklore have done a great deal of indexing and cataloguing and have produced works that can only be separated from bibliographies with difficulty. What shall one say of John Meier, Kunstlieder im Volksmunde (Halle, 1906)? This is a catalogue of German songs that have been heard in oral tradition but can be traced back to known authors. Meier gives full references to the sources in both the printed works of the authors and the collections of folksongs. To return to tales once more, I mention two books of an apparently wholly bibliographical nature that Besterman does not mention. A. C. Lee, The Decameron. Its Sources and Analogues (London, 1909) is, as its title indicates, a compilation of tales related to those in the Decameron. The Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (5 v.; Leipzig, 1913-1932) by Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka is a bibliography of parallels to the Household Tales.
Some details in Besterman's work call for comment or correction, but their number is negligible in view of the vast number of titles with which he deals. There are instances in which I should disagree with him in the classification of titles. For example, the Augsburg library catalogue of 1600 (col. 626) is not a bibliography of classical literature but a general catalogue of books and manuscripts in the Augsburg municipal library. Furthermore, its inclusion contradicts the principle stated in the Introduction (I, p. xiv) according to which general catalogues of institutional libraries are omitted. J. B. Mencken's Gelehrten-Lexicon with the second and third editions by C. G. Jöcher is cited (col. 331) as a universal bibliography, but Jöcher's later and much larger revision with its continuations is cited (col. 343) in a different category as a select universal bibliography. Errors in names, place names, and dates appear to be very few. I note that Thomas Cremius (col. 340) should be Thomas Crenius. Such details scarcely call for comment, and their lack of importance is itself a characterization of Besterman's skill. I could wish that the Preface to volume III had explained at greater length the alphabetization of anonymous titles beginning with such words as "Catalogue" or "Index." For example, I cannot find the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature in the Index, although Section N for Zoology is cited in col. 3188. Nor is the International Catalogue in the article "Science" (cols. 2725-2749), where a List of Journals connected with it is cited (col. 2727).
Besterman's bibliography deserves special praise for the fact that it rests on a personal inspection of virtually all the works cited. It needs scarcely to be said that he could have executed this task only at the British Museum or in a few other very great libraries. We can probably infer that Conrad Gesner handled the bibliographies that he cited in 1548, but few later workers have been equally successful in seeing all the books that they name. In this regard Gabriel Peignot made a long step in advance in the Répertoire of 1812. The character of his comments makes it clear that he had a firsthand knowledge of the books that he cites. In 1838 his successor Pie Namur yielded countless times to the temptation to cite books from secondary sources, which moreover he does not name. In 1866 Julius Petzholdt established the standards of bibliographical accuracy that ought to be observed and indicated the books that he had not consulted, but his successors have not in general approached these standards. It is therefore altogether gratifying to praise Besterman's attention to such bibliographical details as collations, the citation of editions, and the identification of pseudonyms. In addition to these merits the correctness of the Index calls for particular mention. The bibliographies named in this essay have not always required an index, but those which do contain one have usually served their readers poorly. Philippe Labbé was the first but by no means the last of our bibliographers to offer his reader an unsatisfactory index. Even Julius Petzholdt left much to be desired in this regard. The index to Henri Stein's Manuel is conspicuous for its faults. In comparison with his predecessors Besterman's success in the making of an index is all the more meritorious.
In a second edition published between 1947 and 1949, Besterman revised his bibliography to include books printed as late as 1944 and 1945. Since I have referred to this and not to the first edition in my comments, it is sufficient to quote Besterman's statement of the differences between the two editions. The improvements and changes are important to every user of the book but do not affect its nature in any fundamental way.
Large parts of the field have been surveyed anew, the text has been minutely revised throughout, and improvements made. The number of cross-references has been multiplied. Most important, however, are the new entries, which make this edition over 55 per centum bigger than the first. The number of volumes recorded and separately collated is now about 65,000. Nearly all intermediate editions [between the first and last] have now been deleted; they have only been retained, in fact, for bibliographies first published before 1800, and for those of special interest or importance.[202]
And now, five years after the completion of the second edition, Besterman has begun to print a third edition, which he declares to be a "final" edition. As he writes in a letter of July 27, 1954, the new edition will show "the normal increase in size due to the passage of time." A systematic check of Library of Congress holdings has enabled him to strengthen considerably the coverage of American bibliographical publication, north and south. He has also made renewed efforts to improve the representation of scientific and Slavic books. The first volume, which is now in proof, will appear early in 1955 and three more volumes will follow. One lays A World Bibliography of Bibliographies aside with astonishment that one man had the courage to conceive the task and the strength to complete it. In its conception of universality and its success in approaching completeness Besterman's book is a climax in this history of bibliographies of bibliographies.
An emphasis on the current usefulness of the works cited is characteristic of the last four bibliographies of bibliographies that I shall name. These compilations by Bohatta, Funke, and Hodes; by Collison; by Malclès; and by Totok and Weitzel are intentionally selective in nature and will therefore require only brief comment. Incidentally, they do not owe their origin to Besterman's suggestion: "it will no doubt eventually become necessary to publish a general bibliography of best bibliographies" (I, p. xvii), although they serve this purpose more or less adequately. The practical emphasis in these four bibliographies betrays the training of their authors in librarianship.