Chapter IV

The Bibliography of Bibliographies Begins Anew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bibliographical portion (pp. 403-758) of Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862), _An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography_ (1814) is mentioned here only because Pie Namur, the author of a bibliography of bibliographies next to be discussed, names it along with A. F. Delandine's "Bibliographie spéciale" and Peignot's _Répertoire_ as a predecessor. Like other writers of handbooks of bibliography, Horne cites bibliographies without aiming at completeness. Horne's Part III, "A Notice of the Principal Works, Extant on Literary History in General, and on Bibliography in Particular," gives the information that it promises but contains no subject bibliographies and therefore cannot be called a general bibliography of bibliographies. It contains a brief account of "Dictionaries of Literary History" or works that we would call universal biobibliographies (pp. 403-408). The interesting survey of "Treatises, &c. on Literary History" (pp. 408-418) includes G. M. König, _Bibliotheca vetus et nova_ (1678) and J. P. Niceron, _Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres_ (43 v.; 1726-1745) that should have appeared in the preceding section and two histories of philosophy for which his plan had no place. "Writers on British Literary History" (pp. 419-431) and "Writers on Foreign Literary History" (pp. 431-447) are accounts of national biobibliographies, histories, and bibliographies of literature, and of specialized biobibliographical writings. One finds in them occasional titles of infrequent occurrence like Christopher Wordsworth, _Ecclesiastical Biography, or Lives of eminent men connected with the history of religion in England, from the commencement of the Reformation to the Revolution_ (6 v.; London, 1810) or Giovanni Agostini, _Notizie istorico-scritiche intorno la vita e le opere degli scrittori Vineziani_ (2 v.; Venice, 1752). His rather full account of British works has some value but his incomplete foreign list is noteworthy chiefly for such curiosities as Matthias Bellus, _Exercitatio de vetere litteratura Hunno-Scythica_ (pp. 433-434) or Giambattista Toderini, _Della letteratura turchesa_ (p. 447). Horne devotes the following sections to writers on the materials used in writing and printing (pp. 448-450), writers on the origin of languages, letters, and writing (pp. 451-469), and writers on the history and the art of printing (pp. 469-513). A strictly bibliographical "