a bibliography is Jacob Rueff's book on astrology. Bolduan names no title that cannot be called a bibliography in some sense. In both extent and accuracy he surpasses Spach. As comparison with Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography,[55] shows, this competent workman gives a good account of the bibliographies available in 1616.

A dozen years later, in 1628, Franciscus Sweertius (Francis Sweerts, 1567-1629) printed a bibliography of bibliographies about as large as that by Bolduan. He does not cite his predecessors and probably did not know them. This learned Antwerp merchant and author of several scholarly works printed his bibliography of bibliographies in his Athenae Belgicae.[56] It has no organic relation to Sweerts's purpose of writing a Belgian biobibliographical dictionary. In this compilation, which has a slightly stronger theological tinge than its predecessors, Sweerts lists seventy-eight bibliographies in twenty paragraphs according to subjects. This is, therefore, the first classified bibliography of bibliographies. Except in five instances with such headings as "De Bibliothecis" and "De Vitis & Scriptoribus Ord. S. Dominici," the subjects are to be inferred from the typographical arrangement. Although he has not completely worked out a scheme of organization, he progresses from general works on libraries and books to special bibliographies of theology, law, and medicine. He is less careful than Spach and Bolduan about the bibliographical details of place and date of publication, but the need for this information was just beginning to be recognized at the time when he wrote. He adheres closely to the idea of listing bibliographies and admits only one perhaps pardonable interloper, a compilation of the Church Fathers. It is curious that he cites the Bibliotheca theologica by Johannes Molanus (Jean van der Meulen), which was published in 1618, as being still in manuscript. Later bibliographers have picked up all the titles cited by Sweerts and his selection does not differ sufficiently from that made by Spach and Bolduan to need characterization by quoting titles. Sweerts wrote the first independent or almost independent bibliography of bibliographies and at the same time the first classified bibliography of bibliographies.

The four bibliographies of bibliographies published in the eighty years between Gesner's Pandectae (1548) and Sweert's Athenae Belgicae (1628) are, as their authors intended them to be, relatively complete. In The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, Theodore Besterman adds only a few rather unimportant titles and these may indeed not have seemed to be bibliographies or to have deserved mention in the eyes of Gesner and his successors. Instructive technical developments are evident in these first four compilations. Gesner cites both classical Greek and Latin works and contemporary bibliographies. Spach, Bolduan, and Sweerts adopt the modern practice of preferring to list bibliographies of contemporary usefulness. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan do not separate their work from the larger task of writing a general subject index. Sweerts sees that the bibliography of bibliographies can be an independent enterprise. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan offer alphabetical lists. Sweerts adopts the modern plan of a classified list. Although the bibliography of bibliographies has continued to be a necessary part of a general subject index, I shall limit myself in the following discussion to bibliographies of bibliographies that have been published as separate works.

Chapter II
The Bibliography of Bibliographies Comes of Age

In the seventeenth century several bibliographies of bibliographies were undertaken as independent enterprises. One of them was actually completed and published and after several editions had the good fortune to be revised and to receive a supplement. A century after Gesner had published his bibliographies of authors and subjects, in the decade between 1643 and 1653, Jodocus a Dudinck, who did not fulfill his promise, and Philip Labbé, sought to survey all scholarship and hit upon the idea of a bibliography of bibliographies as a means to this end. Like Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis of 1545-1555 (which was a list of all writers and their works), Philip Labbé's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1653 (which was a bibliography of bibliographies) enjoyed a successful career for a little more than a generation and then disappeared from view. After the first revisions and supplements no one chose to continue either Gesner or Labbé. This analogy between the century that began with the invention of printing and ended with Gesner's survey of 1545-1555 and the following century that ended with Labbé's survey of 1653 is perhaps more curious than important. It does nevertheless emphasize a twice-repeated interruption in the historical development of bibliographies. In the two generations between 1643 and 1705 men in various countries compiled or promised to compile bibliographies of bibliographies and with the beginning of the eighteenth century they ceased to do so.

The first separately published bibliography of bibliographies is, if it actually exists, Jodocus a Dudinck, Bibliothecariographia (Cologne, apud Jodocum Kalcoven, 1643.) No one has ever seen it and many have searched for it during the last three centuries. Back in the seventeenth century the Lutheran theologian Caspar Sagittarius (1643-1694) sought it in vain. A little later Johann Andreas Schmidt or Schmid (1652-1726), who was both a theologian and a writer on library science, was similarly defeated in an effort to find the book. Probably Hieronymus Augustinus Groschufius was right when he said in one of the earliest treatises on rare books (1709-1716) that the Bibliothecariographia was never printed.[57] The first reference to the book is found, as far as I know, in a Belgian biobibliographical dictionary of 1643 and all our information about the book and its author goes back to this source.[58] The announcement is not particularly suspicious because the publisher Jodocus Kalcoven of Cologne seems to have been an agent or a limited partner of the famous firm of Willem Blaeu (later Jan Blaeu) of Amsterdam.[59] This firm used Kalcoven's name on various scholarly books.[59] Little as we know about Dudinck's book, its title indicates that he clearly understood the nature of a bibliography of bibliographies. He called it "A Bibliography of Bibliographies. A list of all authors and works that have appeared under the title of bibliography, catalogue, index, list, athenae,