After 1705 no bibliography of bibliographies appeared for more than a century. The fragmentary tradition of listing books entitled _bibliotheca_, i.e. bibliography or catalogue, that might have led to one produced only withered shoots and ended in 1758 with Durey de Noinville's wretched compilation. During the eighteenth century the bibliography of bibliographies is, at best, only a chapter in surveys of learning. No doubt the great encyclopedias of the time satisfied scholarly demands so well that men did not perceive the place that a bibliography of bibliographies might fill. Conrad Gesner, whom I regard as the first modern writer of a bibliography of bibliographies, aimed at comprehensiveness and included works of all ages as far as they came to his knowledge. He named Amphicrates and his contemporary Jakob Rueff in the same list without making a distinction between them. Almost immediately the bibliography of bibliographies became a guide to currently useful reference works and it has retained that function. Writing in the early years of the seventeenth century, Paul Bolduan and Francis Sweerts took a step away from comprehensiveness. They included no classical Greek and Latin authorities and very few medieval ones. This exclusion of classical writers runs parallel to the similar treatment of classical writers of history. In a list of classical historians we no longer cite Xenophon and Caesar along with Grote and Gibbon. No one thinks of naming a bibliographer like Cicero, Suetonius, or St. Jerome in the company of Petzholdt and Brunet. Although this rejection of ancient bibliographers began in the early seventeenth century, neither Labbé in 1664 nor Teissier in 1705 fully accepted it.