A History of Bibliographies of BibliographiesTaylor, Archer
History
A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies
Taylor, Archer
Bibliography of bibliographies -- History
These names illustrate the variety of bibliographies known to Gesner
and his clear conception of what a bibliography of bibliographies
should be. He has admitted only pertinent books and has arranged
their titles carefully in alphabetical order according to first
names. He has given sources for citations that he has not verified
and for books that he knows to be in manuscript or probably lost.
He has commented occasionally on the quality of a book or has told
how it was arranged. For example, he says that Rueff's astrological
bibliography contains pictures of men and instruments and comments in
German verse. He does not give the dates and places of publication,
but bibliographers have been slow to learn the importance of citing
these details. No doubt he expected his readers to consult his
biobibliographical dictionary, the _Bibliotheca universalis_ of 1545,
for that information. A sixteenth-century scholar, who was accustomed
to find books arranged according to format, might have complained
that Gesner did not indicate the size of the books. In his procedure
he goes beyond St. Jerome, who was content to cite only names. Gesner
cites titles.
In Pars viii, "De mirabilibus," the last subdivision of Titulus
XIII, Gesner gives a hasty account of books about marvels and
noteworthy things. Although he cites several lost classical works on
the subject and Alessandro Alessandri, _Geniales dies_, which had
appeared in print a generation before the _Pandectae_, he makes no
great effort to deal bibliographically with the subject. He obviously
regards such works as collections of odds and ends and therefore
akin to miscellanies. He says, for example, that geographers tell
strange tales about the shapes and manners of men and the nature
of countries, skies, and seas. He could, he says, have given here
references to ancient statues and inscriptions, but has preferred
to classify them under history. Poetry and invented tales might
also be mentioned and riddles, he thinks, are not to be neglected.
The remaining tituli of the first book deal with matters akin to
grammar in its usual modern sense but include several specialized
bibliographies that we need not examine closely.[41] Gesner's
bibliography of bibliographies represents an auspicious beginning of
a very difficult variety of bibliography.
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