Title
A title may be either the book’s name (as “&c.”) or its description (as “A collection of occasional sermons”), or it may state its subject (as “Synonyms of the New {15} Testament”), or it may be any two or all three of these combined (as description and subject, “Brief account of a journey through Europe;” name and description, “Happy thoughts;” name and subject, “Men’s wives;” all three, “Index of dates”).
Bibliographers have established a cult of the title-page; its slightest peculiarities are noted; it is followed religiously, with dots for omissions, brackets for insertions, and uprights to mark the end of lines; it is even imitated by the fac-simile type or photographic copying. These things may concern the cataloguer of the Lenox Library or the Prince collection. The ordinary librarian has in general nothing to do with them; but it does not follow that even he is to lose all respect for the title. It is the book’s name and should not be changed but by act of legislature. Our necessities oblige us to abbreviate it, but nothing obliges us to make additions to it or to change it without giving notice to the reader that we have done so. Moreover, it must influence the entry of a book more or less; it determines the title-entry entirely; it affects the author-entry (see § [3]) and the subject-entry (see § [104]). But to let it have more power than this is to pay it a superstitious veneration.
Volume,
This is the bibliographic use of the word, sanctioned by the British Museum rules. That is, it is in this sense only that it applies to all the copies of an edition as it comes from the printer. But there is also a bibliopegic and bibliopolic use, to denote a number of pages bound together, which pages may be several volumes in the other sense, or a part of a volume or parts of several volumes. To avoid confusion I use “volume” in the present treatise as defined in the Rules of the British Museum catalogue, and I recommend this as the sole use in library catalogues, except in such phrases as 2 v. bd. in 1. which means 2 volumes in the bibliographical sense united by binding so as to form one piece of matter.
In the present treatise I am regarding the dictionary catalogue as consisting of an author-catalogue, a subject-catalogue, a more or less complete title-catalogue, and a more or less complete form-catalogue, all interwoven in one alphabetical order. The greater part, however, of the rules here given would apply equally to these catalogues when kept separate.
These rules are written primarily for a printed catalogue; almost all of them would apply equally to a card catalogue.