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 "Chapter IV. Books" (pp. 513-550) contains books on bibliomania, handbooks of bibliography, catalogues of rare books and incunabula, dictionaries of anonyma and pseudonyma, and lists of burned, suppressed, or censured books. The most valuable part of Horne's Introduction is the fifth chapter, on bibliographical systems and catalogues. The account of bibliographical systems (pp. 551-563) is not very important, but the review of British and foreign public and private library catalogues (pp. 564-733) has not been entirely superseded. Although far from complete, it contains information not easily found elsewhere. It resembles Peignot's similar review, on which Horne has drawn heavily. He concludes with a brief survey of publishers' catalogues (pp. 733-741), references (pp. 741-742) to two of Peignot's bibliographies that he believes to be adequate guides to subject bibliography, and addenda (pp. 743-758). Horne did not intend his Introduction to be a bibliography of bibliographies and we need say no more about it.