In the historical development of bibliographies of bibliographies two aspects become especially prominent after 1900. Periodical surveys become a characteristic form of publication and cooperation in the making of bibliographies becomes more frequent or is at least more frequently called for. I shall speak only briefly about periodical publications because they aim at completeness, if they make such an effort at all, only for annual or other limited periods of time. Julius Petzholdt published lists of bibliographies that came to his attention around the middle of the nineteenth century in the Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie und Bibliothekswissenschaft. Editors of other journals for bibliography, library science, the book trade, and related fields have published similar lists and have in some instances endeavored more or less successfully to convert them into surveys of current bibliographies of current bibliographical publications. A rapid growth of periodical bibliographies of special fields is characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. At the end of the century bibliographers advanced to the stage of compiling annual bibliographies of bibliographies. Such periodical surveys had long been established in fields like theology and classical literature and were now somewhat tardily created for bibliography itself.
The first annual survey of current bibliographical publications seems to be the Bibliographia bibliographica, which appeared in six volumes between 1898 and 1903. Librarians inspired and guided this cooperative enterprise. The list, which includes bibliographies published in non-bibliographical works, is arranged according to the decimal system of classification and was no doubt handicapped by this fact. Since the editors offer a brief outline of the decimal classification in place of a table of contents and provide no alphabetical index of subjects, the Bibliographia bibliographica is not easy to use. The lack of an author index was remedied by the publication of an index for the first two volumes that appeared at the end of the second volume. The Bibliographia bibliographica aroused very little interest among librarians and bibliographers. I have found no reviews of it in the contemporary journals for bibliography and library science. Harvard University Library purchased only the first two issues and these were so little used that, after the lapse of fifty years, they are still unbound.
A second annual survey of the current output of bibliographies is the Bibliographie des Bibliotheks- und Buchwesens, edited by Adalbert Hortzschansky from 1905 to 1925 with an interruption of eight years from 1913 to 1921. This supplement to the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen had a longer and more successful life than its predecessor. It surveyed all publications that fell within the field of the journal and therefore included much more than the bibliography of bibliographies. In 1926 it became an independent publication with a slightly different title but with no change in the subjects reported upon. This Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens continued to be issued down to the outbreak of war in 1939. An enterprise of somewhat similar scope, the Literarisches Beiblatt der Zeitschrift (later: zum Jahrbuch) des deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schrifttum began to appear in 1924 and continued to 1939. Since these annual surveys include more than the bibliography of bibliographies, I shall not discuss them further.
Three reviews of contemporary bibliographical work have appeared during the last twenty-five years. One of them is limited to bibliographies of a particular kind, and the other two are more or less complete periodical surveys of bibliographical writings. I mention them here as the last examples of the development of periodical bibliographies of bibliographies and as a means by which one can estimate the task of any modern compiler of a bibliography of bibliographies. The first of these, the Index bibliographicus, which first appeared in 1925, offers an interesting example of specialization within the field of bibliographies of bibliographies. The Index bibliographicus is general in scope but cites only bibliographies of bibliographies that appear as current serial publications. In the six years between its first appearance in 1925 and its republication in enlarged and improved form in 1931 the number of currently appearing serial bibliographies rose from 1025 to 1900. Some of these had been overlooked in 1925, but many of the additions concerned bibliographies of bibliographies that had been established during the six years between the two editions. The Index bibliographicus, which was compiled with the assistance of the League of Nations, assumed a more definitely international and cooperative aspect when Joris Vorstius joined Marcel Godet as editor.[182] A third edition of the Index made by Theodore Besterman in 1952 is still larger than either of its predecessors.
The Internationaler Jahresbericht der Bibliographie, which flourished from 1930 to 1940 under the editorship of Joris Vorstius, enables us to survey quickly the current annual production of bibliographies. Critical comments attached to the titles make it one of the most readable bibliographies of bibliographies. Like caviar, the genre is digestible only by those who have acquired a taste for it. The organization of the Internationaler Jahresbericht is skillful, and the comments are judicious and instructive. Since Vorstius was editor of the previously mentioned Internationale Bibliographie des Buch- und Bibliothekswesens as well as the Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, he saw a very large number of bibliographies. He was compelled to hold very carefully to the definitions of his closely related and very similar tasks. The Internationaler Jahresbericht of course lists only bibliographies.
The H. W. Wilson Co. has published the most comprehensive of all periodical surveys of bibliography. Starting in 1938, the quarterly issues are cumulated in annual volumes and these are, in turn, cumulated in volumes for periods of variable length. A cumulation of the bibliographies published in the years between 1937 and 1942 appeared in 1945, and a second cumulation for the years 1943-1946 appeared in 1948. This is the first virtually complete account of current bibliographical production, and the picture is amazing. Between 1937 and 1942 some fifty thousand bibliographies were published. The editors of the Bibliographic Index have classified them in almost ten thousand categories.
The foregoing discussion of these annual or otherwise chronologically limited surveys of bibliography is incidental to the main historical purpose of this essay. Such surveys illustrate very effectively an emphasis which has become characteristic of much modern bibliographical work, and especially of bibliographies of bibliographies, since Gabriel Peignot's book of 1812. Being concerned solely with the current production of bibliographies, they have obviously had no occasion to deal historically with bibliographies or to cite bibliographies published before the limits that they set for themselves. This emphasis on currently useful bibliographical tools goes hand in hand with the cooperative aspect of making bibliographies that I shall stress in this chapter. Already in his Répertoire of 1812 Gabriel Peignot had reviewed eighteenth-century bibliography with occasional citations of earlier works that had not been superseded. In 1866 Julius Petzholdt had dealt somewhat more generously than Peignot with Renaissance and seventeenth-century bibliographies, but had scarcely included enough of them to give a picture satisfactory to a historian. Like these predecessors, Joseph Sabin, Léon Vallée, and Henri Stein had shown a marked preference for contemporary works. The uses which bibliographies of bibliographies ordinarily serve explain this preference and make it a reasonable one.
The history of mass-production methods in the making of bibliographies has not yet been written. I conjecture that it begins with bibliographies produced more than a century ago by the German publisher Wilhelm Engelmann. His firm continued and revised some bibliographies established by Johann Samuel Ersch (1766-1828), whose scholarly and bibliographical activity began in the eighteenth century. It is not entirely clear whether Ersch himself had already adopted something like mass-production methods. However this may be, the titles and the nature of many bibliographies produced by T. C. F. Enslin (1787-1851) and Wilhelm Engelmann (1808-1878), who made new editions of some of Enslin's bibliographies as well as many of his own, virtually imply such methods. Information about the making of these bibliographies and those of F. A. Wilhelm Müldener (1830-1900), who seems to have worked in the same way, is difficult to obtain.[183] The compilation and publication of bibliographies by printers and publishers rather than scholars has been continued by such American firms as the Library Bureau (now no longer in existence), R. R. Bowker & Co., and H. W. Wilson Co. These firms have actively supported the making of bibliographies in this country for more than two generations.[184]
An admirable essay, Some Aspects of Bibliography (1900), by John Ferguson (d. 1916) suggests the cooperative aspect that is characteristic of bibliographical studies in the last two generations. Although it is not a full-length bibliography of bibliographies, it reviews the kinds of bibliographies that have been made and appeals to scholars to compile the bibliographies necessary to satisfy the most obvious needs. Ferguson's modest list of some four hundred bibliographies is intended to serve two purposes. It is an effort to show the great variety of bibliographies that have been made and it offers a supplement to Petzholdt's Bibliotheca bibliographica. Ferguson's clear and very instructive classification of bibliographies is as follows: bibliographies according to (1) date; (2) place; (3) printer; (4) material;[185] (5) type;[186] (6) size;[187] (7) illustrations; (8) language; (9) subject; (10) groups of authors;[188] (11) individuals; (12) single books;[189] (13) anonymous books;[190] (14) suppressed books;[191] (15) rare books; (16) general bibliographies.
Some categories of bibliographies might be added to this list. For example, he probably includes bibliographies of private presses in (3). He has no good place for bibliographies of translations, which do not fit easily in the ninth category of bibliographies according to subjects. Nor is there a convenient place for bibliographies of belles lettres according to genres like the novel, the essay, or the book review.