The first bibliography of bibliographies published in the twentieth century is A Register of National Bibliography with a selection of the chief bibliographical books and articles printed in other countries (3 v., 1905-1912) by W. P. Courtney (1845-1913). It is also the first effort of this sort to be made by an Englishman. Like the American Sabin, Courtney limits the bibliographies published in languages other than English to a selection. In the course of twenty years Courtney had accumulated a great many references and four years of work in preparation of the Register greatly increased the number. He acknowledges the assistance of G. L. Apperson, who later published a useful collection of English proverbs, and Robert A. Peddie, who wrote a very large subject bibliography. He has taken references from Henri Stein's Manuel, especially references in the Slavic languages.
He found that the vast number of bibliographies in print made necessary some limitations on the scope of his work. He excludes sale catalogues (although a few are cited), catalogues of manuscripts, and lists of maps and charts. Probably few will quarrel with his decision. He also omits many headings in the bibliography of geology, India, and other unspecified large fields. Here it would be helpful to know more accurately what these omissions were.
Courtney's Register lists some 30,000 titles in a main and two supplementary alphabets. The rapid growth of the material as he proceeded with his work explains this inconvenient division. The very numerous citations of bibliographies in non-bibliographical works contribute to this large figure. I cannot estimate closely the number of small headings, which run into the thousands. The bulk of the Register and the ease with which it can be used make it valuable. As examples of the wealth of information in it, I cite his references to thirteen bibliographies of bacteriology, seventeen bibliographies of hymns, nine bibliographies of insanity, and three bibliographies of swimming. One will rarely leave the Register empty-handed.
Courtney could have greatly reduced the size of his book without a sacrifice of convenience or the loss of significant references. His alphabetical arrangement makes it unnecessary to repeat the headings in the index. He could have profitably used the space saved to add a descriptive word that would differentiate the various works by one author. The dozen references to J. C. Pilling, who wrote bibliographies of American Indian languages, might, for example, have been identified by appropriate adjectives. Courtney could have reduced the size of his book substantially and without loss by omitting bibliographies printed in obvious places, to which one needs no reference. For example, he could have spared references to bibliographies in four editions of Beowulf. The poorly-organized longer articles in the Register are often burdened with miscellaneous or unnecessary information. The article "Bibliography" includes, for example, the universal bibliographies by Georg Draud and Theophil Georgi, (but not Conrad Gesner); Olphar Hamst, Aggravating Ladies, which is a list of pseudonymous books written by "A Lady";[192] the bibliographical journal La Bibliofilia;[193] and a bibliography of church history. This is not a display of good workmanship. The article "Libraries" is a similar farrago of Namur's bibliography of bibliographies, Wheatley's book on how to make a library, Edward Edwards' book on libraries and their founders, Meusel's biographical dictionary of German artists, and other books of as little pertinence. There is very useful information to be gleaned from Courtney's Register and one can easily find it in the chaff.
We are still too close to the latest bibliographies of bibliographies to see them in a true perspective.[194] Efforts to make a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies continue and a new development that was foreshadowed in Sabin's restriction of his work to a single language with "more than a few" titles added to fill it out is apparent in some less extensive but very excellent bibliographies of bibliographies.
The death of Vilhelm Grundtvig (1866-1950) and the destruction of his collectanea during the war make it certain that the bibliography of bibliographies that he and Joris Vorstius planned will never appear. He had called for help in the enterprise in an article[195] published in 1926 and had obtained approval of it at the international meeting of librarians at Madrid in 1935. During the course of his work he succeeded in gaining the assistance of Joris Vorstius, whom we have learned to know as the editor of annual surveys of current bibliographies. He wrote in 1940 in a review of Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, that his collectanea were arranged according to countries for submission to various workers who might criticize and supplement them.[196] The loss of this compilation is greatly to be regretted because the experience and good judgment of the two editors make it certain that the book would have been comprehensive, well-planned, and satisfactorily executed.
On several occasions Grundtvig stated briefly the task of making a bibliography of bibliographies. His ability to see clearly its difficulties, his wide reading, and his recognition of the many types of bibliographical works that must be considered make these preliminary statements valuable. A long article of 1903 entitled "Gedanken über Bibliographie"[197] was suggested by A. G. S. Josephson's pamphlet, which will be mentioned later. Here Grundtvig points out the varieties of existing bibliographies and their defects and gives examples of unfamiliar or neglected varieties. For example, he comments (pp. 415-417) on the lists of antiquarian catalogues and catalogues of private libraries. Although we now have more information about these catalogues than Grundtvig found in 1903, we still have no critical bibliographies of them. He points out (p. 418) the unsatisfactory quality of bibliographies of ephemeral publications (chapbooks and the like) and surveys the available lists. He has, to be sure, overlooked one of the earliest of such lists—Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli, Della biblioteca volante (Padua, 1677-1716; 2d ed., 1734-1747. ICN [2d ed.])—but it is rare and virtually unknown. He comments incisively on the lists of collective biographies (pp. 420, 441) and suggests the need for a more critical survey of them.[198] Although Grundtvig's article is not easy reading, it is a very stimulating survey of bibliographies. Any writer of a bibliography of bibliographies should read it attentively.
Grundtvig's pamphlet of 1919, entitled Om Bibliografi og Bibliografier, is much more conveniently arranged than the article of 1903. It is a review of the bibliographical chapter in Svend Dahl, Haandbog i Bibliotekskundskab. He finds it very unsatisfactory and shows how it might have been written. He gives a brief survey of bibliographies in general (pp. 8-10), comments on the making of collectanea and their arrangement (pp. 10-13) and the varieties of bibliographies including those in non-bibliographical works (pp. 14-19), and surveys bibliographies of bibliographies (pp. 19-23), international bibliographies (pp. 23-25), and national bibliographies (pp. 25-29). In keeping with his purpose, he names only the most obvious works.
We come now to the largest of all bibliographies of bibliographies: Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies (1939-1940; 2d ed., 1947-1949). Since the two editions do not differ essentially in character, I have found it convenient and probably more helpful to the reader to cite illustrations of Besterman's method from the second edition and to conclude my remarks with brief comment on the changes and improvements made in this edition. The plan of Besterman's book is novel in many details. It is, like Peignot's Répertoire of 1812, an alphabetical list of many small headings. Courtney had adopted the same plan in his Register (1905-1912), but few others have seen the great merits of this arrangement. In giving bibliographical details Besterman goes far beyond anything that had been previously attempted. He gives more complete collations than any of his predecessors except Petzholdt had given, and in several regards surpasses Petzholdt. He describes carefully such long sets as the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Surgeon Generals Office (cols. 1866-1867), the many national bibliographies made by booksellers or librarians, and the annual bibliographies of special fields like The Record of Zoological Literature and its continuation (cols. 3187-3189). He goes beyond Petzholdt and most other bibliographers by estimating the number of titles cited in the books that he lists. He ranges farther afield than any of his predecessors. He includes lists of maps and printed music, registers of documents and charters, and indexes of laws and patents. He includes catalogues of manuscripts and specialized catalogues of books in institutional libraries but not general catalogues of books owned by the same libraries. He includes a generous selection of specialized catalogues of private libraries. He brings more Finnish, Hungarian, and Slavic titles than anyone before him and regrets his inability to include books in Oriental languages. In the first edition he intended to cite all bibliographies printed as books that had appeared before 1936 and succeeded in picking up a large number of those printed between 1936 and 1939. He says that he has cited three times as many bibliographies printed before 1860 as Petzholdt had found. This comparison gives an idea of the amazing extent of Besterman's work.
Besterman sees clearly the difficulties inherent in his choice of an alphabetical arrangement of many small headings and finds perhaps the only answer. It is to offer an abundance of cross-references. Although these headings can be found in special dictionaries that cite synonyms and related words, it remains to be seen how well they will stand the test of time. A suggestion of what may happen is perhaps already to be found in the general unfamiliarity of scholars with these dictionaries. Librarians know and use them, but scholars do not. The time may come when only a specialist and indeed only a specialist acquainted with the history of his discipline will know the meaning of many headings. The headings used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are obsolete. As we have seen, Petzholdt did not recognize the meaning of philosophy that was accepted in the early seventeenth century. I have remarked upon the unfamiliarity of modern students of theology with Peignot's term théologie positive. Can we expect future scholars to perceive readily the difference between psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Unless they do, they will not find it easy to use a bibliography of bibliographies arranged as an alphabetical dictionary of many small headings. There is, as a matter of fact, no better illustration of these difficulties than the word "bibliography" itself. This very interesting word needs a historical and lexicographical investigation that will continue Pierre Frieden's article, "Bibliographie. Etymologie et histoire du mot," Revue de synthèse, VII (1934), 45-52. During this century "bibliography" has been used more and more often to refer to either a study of a book as a physical object or to a list of titles having some common quality. In such titles as Theodore Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies, and Norman E. Binns, An Introduction to Historical Bibliography (London, 1953), the word has two quite different meanings.