bibliography

—bibliographic /bib'lee euh graf"ik/, bibliographical, adj. —bibliographically, adv.

/bib'lee og"reuh fee/, n., pl. bibliographies.

1. a complete or selective list of works compiled upon some common principle, as authorship, subject, place of publication, or printer.

2. a list of source materials that are used or consulted in the preparation of a work or that are referred to in the text.

3. a branch of library science dealing with the history, physical description, comparison, and classification of books and other works.

[1670-80; < Gk bibliographía. See BIBLIO-, -GRAPHY]

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Broadly, the systematic study and description of books.

The word can refer to the listing of books according to some system (called descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography), to the study of books as tangible objects (called critical, or analytical, bibliography), or to the product of those activities. The purpose of bibliography is to organize information about materials on a given subject so that students of the subject may have access to it. A descriptive bibliography may take the form of information about a particular author's works or about works on a given subject or on a particular nation or period. Critical bibliography, which emerged in the early 20th century, involves meticulous descriptions of the physical features of books, including the paper, binding, printing, typography, and production processes used, to help establish such facts as printing dates and authenticity.

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Introduction

      the systematic cataloging, study, and description of written and printed works, especially books.

      Bibliography is either (1) the listing of works according to some system (descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography) or (2) the study of works as tangible objects (critical, or analytical, bibliography). The word bibliography is also used to describe the product of those activities: bibliographies may take the form of organized information about a particular author's works, about all (or selected) works on a given subject, or about a particular country or period. A bibliography may also consist of meticulous descriptions of the physical features of a number of books, including the paper, binding, printing, typography, and production processes used. These bibliographies are then used by students and scholars to gain access to information about material for study in a given area and to help establish such facts about a book or other printed work as its date of publication, its authenticity, and its value for textual study.

Descriptive bibliography

      The primary purpose of descriptive bibliography is to organize detailed information culled from a mass of materials in a systematic way so that others can have access to useful information. In the earliest bibliographies, the organizing principle was simply that of compiling all the works of a given writer into a list created either by the works' author (autobibliography) or by an author's biographer. The Greek physician Galen (Galen Of Pergamum) (2nd century) and St. Bede the Venerable (Bede the Venerable, Saint) (8th century) were among the earliest Western compilers of autobibliographies. One of the first biographers to include bibliographies in his lives of church writers was St. Jerome (Jerome, Saint) in his 4th-century De viris illustribus (“Concerning Famous Men”).

      Bibliography was manageable when books were still manuscripts copied out in the scriptoria of medieval European monasteries. After the invention of printing in the 15th century, however, books proliferated, and organizing information about them became both more necessary and more practical. As early as 1545 the idea of a universal bibliography that would include all past and present writers roused the Swiss writer Conrad Gesner (Gesner, Conrad) to compile his Bibliotheca universalis (1545; Universal Bibliography). Three years later he published a second volume, Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XXI (“Twenty-one Books of Encyclopaedias or Universal Divisions [of Knowledge]”), in which the entries, arranged alphabetically in the earlier volume, were rearranged under 21 subject headings. Gesner's attempts at both universality and classification earned him the title “the father of bibliography.”

      The vast numbers of books published in the 20th century required elaborate methods of classification, with the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Classification (based on its collection), and the Universal Decimal Classification becoming the most widely used. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the widespread use of computers in processing this systematized information revived the possibility of creating a universal bibliography.

Critical bibliography

      Critical, or analytical, bibliography began early in the 20th century when scholars developed techniques to study the physical features of books. They were first successful at dating, identifying, and authenticating the earliest printed books, known as incunabula, which date from the second half of the 15th century. Methods pioneered at the British Museum and the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library were accurate in assigning early hand-printed books not only to countries and towns but to specific printers. Such methods were later extended to the study of the physical features of machine-printed books. The application of the techniques of critical bibliography to rare editions, questionable chronologies, and false editions has had important results for textual criticism.

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