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."