Abstract
THIS beautifully printed and illustrated work forms the third of a series known as the Oxford Books on Bibliography. In Part 1, Mr. Besterman traces the development of systematic bibliography from its earliest beginnings to the end of the seventeenth century. Bibliographies of very limited scope are shown to have existed before the invention of printing. In the second century, for example, Galen composed a classified list of his own very numerous writings, which was afterwards printed (1525). The greatest of early bibliographers was Conrad Gesner, but Mr. Besterman deprives him of the title of ‘father of bibliography’. This honour, previously accorded to him by some authors, he awards to Johann Tritheim, who published at Basle in 1494 a bibliography listing some 7,000 works, mainly ecclesiastical. To Gesner still belongs the credit of being the first universal bibliographer, and a chapter is devoted to a description of this author's bibliographical works. It is interesting to note that in his “Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium” (Zurich, 1548), in which the books listed are classified by subjects, works of scientific interest have been separated under headings such as geometry and optics, astronomy, natural philosophy, etc. Gesner's bibliographies were restricted to works in the learned languages, Greek, Latin and Hebrew.
The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography
By Theodore Besterman. Pp. xi + 81 + 12 plates. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935.) 21s. net.
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The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography. Nature 137, 1015 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1371015b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1371015b0