Two things must be said in reduction of this severe judgment on Vallée. He is the first compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies to base his work on the books in a particular library and to indicate, although incompletely and inaccurately, what he has seen there. He has included many references to bibliographical sections in non-bibliographical books. Although these and other references of slight value are numerous, he has accumulated a very large number of bibliographies. Almost everyone will find something useful in Vallée's book. The first volume contains 6894 titles, and the supplement raises the total to 10,246. In a savage criticism[172] Henri Stein declared that perhaps 2500 titles should have been omitted and 3000 should be added. This amounts to saying that Vallée collected about three-quarters of the bibliographies he should have found. I cannot vouch for the correctness of these estimates but they may suggest what the book is worth. It is regrettable that Henri Stein, to whom we now turn, did not give the additional titles as a supplement instead of writing a new bibliography of bibliographies.
In the Manuel de bibliographie générale (1897) Henri Stein (b. 1862), a member of the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale, offered the world a new bibliography of bibliographies. He calls it nothing less than a summary of all bibliographies published before 1897,[173] but seems at times to be content to supplement Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. He falls far short of completeness and does not make his intention entirely clear. Although the task that he undertook is beyond any man's strength, his treatment of his colleague Vallée does not awaken sympathy for him.
Stein yields to the same temptation to which his predecessors had succumbed. He includes material of little pertinence to a bibliography of bibliographies. For example, he could have omitted a long list (pp. 555-636) of places where books were printed before 1800 and the names of the printers. This information is very useful to a historian of printing, but has no proper place in Stein's book. His list of indexes to journals is useful but is also not altogether pertinent.[174] His long list of printed catalogues of public libraries, a list which is limited almost exclusively to rather recent publications, is something of a luxury.[175] Neither logic nor custom justifies an objection to the inclusion of bibliographies of individual authors, but Stein could have reduced their number without loss.[176]
Stein based his classification on Petzholdt's book but introduced modifications of his own. As Vilhelm Grundtvig correctly says, the classification is "at times nothing less than amazing, for example, hippology is under 'sciences pédagogiques' [and] dentistry under 'medicine interne.'"[177] Although he provides a table of contents and an alphabetical subject index, he has not made his book easy to use. There is no index of authors' names.
The Manuel does not contain all the available bibliographies or even a satisfactory collection of the best ones. Stein's surveys of universal and national bibliographies are inadequate and so, too, are the sections dealing with philosophy, chemistry, education, sport, and linguistics.[178] He shows very little interest in bibliographies printed before 1800. He does not carry out systematically or successfully an announced intention of expressing critical judgments.[179] Finally, he is inaccurate in details.[180]
This recital seems to leave little to be said in Stein's favor, but no bibliographer who has made a serious effort to write a useful book has ever failed to be helpful. Any list of 5500 bibliographies—the figure is Besterman's—will contain titles and information worth noting and remembering. He calls attention to books that other men have not seen or have neglected to cite. For example, I have not seen "Ahm. Zeki-Bey, Elmevsonat (Boulak, 1904)," which he describes (p. 264) as a bibliography of Arabic encyclopedias, mentioned elsewhere. We owe to him the interesting and important fact that the unpublished manuscript of Mazzuchelli's enormous work, Gli scrittori d'Italia, is in the Vatican Library.[181] He adds many titles to those cited by Petzholdt and Vallée. I lay aside the Manuel with the regret that Stein's zeal has given us a less useful book than we might have hoped for. Had he named, as I have suggested, the three thousand bibliographies lacking in Vallée and had he continued the collection from Vallée's supplement of 1887 to his own publication in 1897, he would have given us an invaluable book. What we have is one more demonstration of the unwillingness of bibliographers in his century to join hands with their predecessors and contemporaries.