A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

by Archer Taylor

Petzholdt lavishes labor and space on antiquarian catalogues. He cites them in closely printed pages in double columns at the end of every major subject division and obviously intends the reader to regard them as subject bibliographies. Some antiquarian catalogues are very valuable and others are worthless for this purpose. We have no adequate appraisal of them except these lists by Petzholdt and for this reason he deserves high praise. In fields where no good bibliography is available we are glad to use these catalogues, even though the books have been dispersed. When institutions have purchased the collections en bloc, the catalogues have a special importance because the books can still be found with little difficulty. Kuczynski and Knaake are such well-known guides to the poorly-recorded books of the Reformation that they are ordinarily cited simply by the authors' names.[157] The sale catalogues of the libraries of K. W. L. Heyse, K. H. G. Meusebach, and Viktor Manheimer are indispensable aids in the almost uncharted sea of German seventeenth-century literature.[158] Bibliographers and bibliophiles use antiquarian and sale catalogues in tracing the history of particular copies of famous rarities.[159] A student of the Dance of Death consults the Susan Minns catalogue,[160] and Mario Praz compiled a bibliography of emblem books almost exclusively from antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries.[161] Indispensable, then, as these catalogues often are, the compiler of a list should be alert to reject those of little value. Petzholdt should not have devoted seven pages (pp. 691-696) to antiquarian catalogues of classical Latin and Greek authors. Excellent bibliographies were available and a highly selective list of catalogues would have been sufficient. He could surely have omitted a catalogue (p. 696) of twenty pages issued by E. Weingart in 1864 that contains chiefly ordinary German books. The choice of catalogues for permanent record in a bibliography of bibliographies calls for the judgment and experience that Petzholdt had and did not use.

The list of catalogues (pp. 98-101) appended to the general bibliographies is perhaps the most unfortunate exhibit of Petzholdt's selections. His wide experience in this field should have told him the right catalogues to cite. He offers us a strange hodgepodge consisting of one early eighteenth-century catalogue (the Duboisiana), a handbook of bibliography, several nineteenth-century catalogues of private libraries, and a few dealers' catalogues. The Duboisiana, Michael Denis's Einleitung in die Bücherkunde, and Part II of the Libri catalogue (1861) are not hard to justify, but the remaining titles appear to be a random selection. Inasmuch as he devotes almost one quarter of the space to a full-length citation of a part of the Libri catalogue, he should have taken the trouble to find the other parts. Although Petzholdt's list of catalogues interesting to bibliographers has the merit of being more international in scope than most of his lists for special disciplines, he overlooked many large and admirable polymathic catalogues. He does not mention the Thott and Heber catalogues or the Firmiana, to name no others.

Petzholdt's abundant descriptive and critical comments ensure the Bibliotheca bibliographica of a permanent place on every bibliographer's desk. He expresses an extensive analysis and usually accurate opinion about almost every book that he cites. It did not occur to him to tell the reader the number of titles in these books, but bibliographers have been slow to realize the value of this detail.

There are, however, some qualifications of any praise of Petzholdt's comments. His unsympathetic feeling for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bibliographers leads him to dismiss (p. 7) Teissier's bibliographies of bibliographies with "Virtually worthless today (Gegenwärtig so gut wie werthlos)." His condemnation of Raffaelle Soprani's Genoese biobibliography (pp. 360-361) and Leo Allacci's Apes Urbanae (p. 362) for listing authors by their first names can be properly called naive. In describing Agostino Oldoini's similar book for Perugia (p. 363), he says that this was the usual procedure in the seventeenth century and involved only the inconvenience of consulting an index of last names. These Renaissance bibliographers had inherited this procedure from medieval scholars who knew men by their Christian names and used other designations only when a differentiation of individuals was necessary. Even today a bibliography arranged in this fashion can prove to be a useful tool. The medieval mathematician Richard Suisset, whose last name occurs in various spellings, can be easily tracked down by use of his Christian name. He is not easy to find in a modern book unless one remembers the particular spelling of his name that the author prefers.

Petzholdt passes some very severe judgments on some books that were once highly esteemed and on some that are unique surveys of a particular field. Whatever defects such books may have, they should not be damned hastily and completely. For example, Petzholdt's rejection (p. 160) of Johannes Tritheim's catalogue of Carmelite writers as "bibliographically completely worthless (Bibliographisch ganz ohne Werth)" is far too harsh. In 1576, after it had circulated in manuscript for almost a century, the Carmelites believed it deserved to be printed. Three more editions (1596, 1624, and 1643), all of which Petzholdt cites, came out during the next seventy years. Men obviously found it useful, and it is the basis of the modern Carmelite bibliography. The remark "Of altogether inferior bibliographical value (Bibliographisch von ganz untergeordnetem Werthe)" is even more unjust to Theodore Petreius's Carthusian bibliography (p. 161). However bad it may be, Petzholdt knew no other Carthusian bibliography. The only bibliography of a field may be incomplete, inaccurate, or badly arranged and it may even have all these defects, but it cannot be altogether worthless. Paul Lehmann, a competent authority in medieval bibliography and literary history, mentions Petreius and some other early writers of biobibliographies of religious orders and says that scarcely one of these writers has been superseded, although details in their work may need correction.[162]

Petzholdt's critical remarks on bibliographies written in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century are very full and informative. Rarely does he err as badly as he does in a comment on Emil Weller's Annalen. This partial revision of G. W. Panzer, Annalen der deutschen National-Literatur (1792-1805) is, like the original work, still valuable for German publications between 1500 and 1525. Weller's notes on books that he had seen contain no great number of serious mistakes. Nevertheless, Petzholdt says (p. 708): "A book that deserves very much to be noticed, although it by no means lacks bibliographical defects and [shows] hastiness and carelessness. It owes its great value to the wealth of the collections that the compiler was able to use." Weller was as difficult in his manners as Magliabecchi, Fontanini, and other bibliographers have been on occasion and had spoken unkindly of Petzholdt, but he did not deserve such a patronizing slur.

Petzholdt's self-assurance carries him to the length of condemning books that he has not seen. Of a Catalogo di commedie italiane published in 1776 he says: "It is said to be an extremely rare pamphlet that contains all the Italian comedies arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors' names. The rarity of the pamphlet seems to be greater than its bibliographical value."[163] As he indicates by an asterisk, he has not seen the Catalogo. Any complete or relatively complete account of Italian comedies is obviously a useful book.

All that I have said in qualification of Petzholdt's merits does not diminish my admiration for him and his book. The Bibliotheca bibliographica deserves a close and critical reading and only a great book survives such study. It is a masterpiece of modern bibliography.

I turn now to a smaller book by another famous bibliographer. It is one of his minor efforts and will not detain us long. Joseph Sabin (1821-1881), a bibliographer of Americana, found John Power's little Handy-Book about Books (London, 1870) very unsatisfactory. Although Power intended only to offer a brief selective list of books useful to a bibliographer or bibliophile, Sabin rejected it and wrote a much larger list. He entitled it Bibliography of Bibliography, or a handy book about books which relate to books, being an alphabetical catalogue of the most important works descriptive of the literature of Great Britain and America, and more than a few relative to France and Germany (1877). It names perhaps twelve hundred titles and includes a few bibliographies printed as parts of non-bibliographical works and a few journal articles. The word "literature" in the title means publications in any field of learning and not merely belles lettres. Since Sabin provides neither a table of contents (his strictly alphabetical arrangement did not call for one) nor a subject index, one must read his book from cover to cover to find what it contains or to discover a particular subject bibliography. His occasional brief critical comments are often drawn from Petzholdt. As his subtitle indicates, he has included many books that are not bibliographies. Some he has carried over from Power's list that he has included in its entirety, although with misgivings, and some he has added on his own responsibility. Beloe's Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books contains much bibliographical information, but can hardly be called a bibliography. Bonnardot's treatises on repairing bindings, Botford's and Clarke's books about libraries, and Constantin's treatise on library economy are books about books in the modern sense of the term. Like most writers of a bibliography of bibliographies, Sabin includes works dealing with the history of printing.

In his title Sabin announces an intention of naming chiefly bibliographies written by British and American scholars or dealing with British and American subjects. Since he was an agent and bookdealer specializing in Americana and the author of a bibliography in that field, his account of bibliographies of Americana is naturally adequate. It begins with Bishop White Kennett's Bibliothecae Americanae Primordia (1713) and extends through later standard works down to the antiquarian catalogues of such dealers as Frederik Muller, Otto Rich, and Henry Stevens in Sabin's own day. His selection of strictly British bibliographies is more cursory. Although he had Petzholdt's description before him, he reports John Bale's sixteenth century biobibliographies inaccurately. He passes over John Pits's Renaissance account of British authors without mention. Thomas Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, which was still a very valuable reference work when Sabin was writing, either was so rare that it escaped his notice or seemed, although wrongly, to have been replaced. Sabin is obviously not much interested in British biobibliographies. His account of bibliographies in special fields is fairly satisfactory. He gives many useful references to British and American catalogues of private libraries, and his comments on them are often helpful. His arrangement of these titles is extremely clumsy. I cite the catchwords under which Sabin lists a few of these catalogues: Askew, Bibliotheca Heberiana (he neglects to mention the thirteenth part), Bibliotheca Smithiana, Catalogue of Books ... in the Collection of Colonel Joseph Aspinwall, and Crevenna. These are references now to the collector's name and now to the first word in the title. The Catalogue of the Valuable Library of Stanesby Alchorne, Esq. is under the compiler's name, T. F. Dibdin. There are no cross-references and the arrangement is confusing. Sabin's interest in T. F. Dibdin led him to cite an autobiography, a book that cannot be called a bibliography.