This part, containing Latin books also, begins at page 1298, and ends with page 1654, which is followed by an index of all the authors mentioned. A smaller volume of 302 pages, without an index, has for title, Bibliotheca Exotica, sive Catalogus officinalis librorum peregrinis linguis usualibus scriptorum; and a fourth part, forming 759 pages besides an index of the authors, is called, Bibliotheca Librorum Germanicorum Classica; that is, A Catalogue of all the books printed in the German language till the year 1625. By the indices, and the proper arrangement of the matter, the use of this work is much facilitated. I must however observe that the oldest catalogues had the same faults as those of the present time, and that these have been copied by Draudius. Many books are mentioned which were never printed, and many titles, names and dates, are given incorrectly; but Draudius, nevertheless, is well worth the attention of any one who may be inclined to employ his time and ingenuity on the history of literature.
[Towards the end of the seventeenth and especially during the eighteenth century, book-catalogues of every description multiplied rapidly. Their progress is copiously treated of in Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, vol. iii. pp. 608–693, to which the reader is referred. Perhaps the most remarkable bookseller’s-catalogue ever printed is Mr. Henry Bohn’s so-called Guinea Catalogue, which is upwards of six inches thick, and contains, in about 2000 pages, merely the details of his own stock.]
FOOTNOTES
[1282] Several of them were editors, printers, and proprietors of the books which they sold.
[1283] Their lamentable petition of the year 1472 has been inserted by Fabricius in his Bibliotheca Latina. Hamburghi, 1772, 8vo, iii. p. 898. See also Pütter von Büchernachdruck, p. 29.
[1284] Von Stetten, Kunst-geschichte von Augsburg, p. 43.
[1285] Le Mire, a Catholic clergyman, who was born in 1598, and died in 1640, wrote a work De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis Sæculi xvi., which is printed in Fabricii Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica, Hamburgi 1718, fol. The passage to which I allude may be found p. 232; but perhaps 1564 has been given in Fabricius instead of 1554 by an error of the press.
[1286] Labbe Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, Lips. 1682, 12mo, p. 112.
[1287] Hist. Lit. i. p. 203.
[1288] Conspectus Reip. Litter, c. vi. § 2, p. 316.