particular Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies.

Gesner begins the seventh pars with miscellaneous notes on pertinent books and on libraries. He carefully separates these notes from the following bibliography of bibliographies. This is an alphabetical list of thirty-one names, beginning with

Alberti Magni de antiquis authorib. astronomiae liber[39] Amphicrates de viris illustrib. scripsit, Athenaeo teste Apollodorus Athenien. Bibliothecae pars etiamnun extat.

In this list Gesner includes both general and special bibliographies. He cites St. Jerome's De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (a variant title of the De viris illustribus) and the continuations by Bede, Gennadius of Marseilles, Honorius Augustodunensis, Isidore of Seville, and Sigebert of Gembloux; Johannes Tritheim, who compiled the original work of St. Jerome and the continuations into a single volume; and Sophronius, who translated it into Greek. He cites contemporary legal bibliographies, one by Bernardinus Rutilius (Bernardino Rutilio, 1504-1538), who dealt with men of his own time, and another by Johannes Fichardus (Johann Fichard, 1512-1581), the often published Juris consultorum vitae veterum quidem, which surveyed older authorities.[40] He has seen or heard of Jacob Rueff's survey of astrologers, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi's literary history, Otto Brunfels's bibliography of medicine in classical times, and Philip Ribot's biobibliographical dictionary of the Carmelite order. The last he has not seen but believes to have been utilized by Johannes Tritheim.

These names illustrate the variety of bibliographies known to Gesner and his clear conception of what a bibliography of bibliographies should be. He has admitted only pertinent books and has arranged their titles carefully in alphabetical order according to first names. He has given sources for citations that he has not verified and for books that he knows to be in manuscript or probably lost. He has commented occasionally on the quality of a book or has told how it was arranged. For example, he says that Rueff's astrological bibliography contains pictures of men and instruments and comments in German verse. He does not give the dates and places of publication, but bibliographers have been slow to learn the importance of citing these details. No doubt he expected his readers to consult his biobibliographical dictionary, the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, for that information. A sixteenth-century scholar, who was accustomed to find books arranged according to format, might have complained that Gesner did not indicate the size of the books. In his procedure he goes beyond St. Jerome, who was content to cite only names. Gesner cites titles.

In Pars viii, "De mirabilibus," the last subdivision of Titulus XIII, Gesner gives a hasty account of books about marvels and noteworthy things. Although he cites several lost classical works on the subject and Alessandro Alessandri, Geniales dies, which had appeared in print a generation before the Pandectae, he makes no great effort to deal bibliographically with the subject. He obviously regards such works as collections of odds and ends and therefore akin to miscellanies. He says, for example, that geographers tell strange tales about the shapes and manners of men and the nature of countries, skies, and seas. He could, he says, have given here references to ancient statues and inscriptions, but has preferred to classify them under history. Poetry and invented tales might also be mentioned and riddles, he thinks, are not to be neglected. The remaining tituli of the first book deal with matters akin to grammar in its usual modern sense but include several specialized bibliographies that we need not examine closely.[41] Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies represents an auspicious beginning of a very difficult variety of bibliography.

The foregoing details about the first book in Gesner's Pandectae make clear Gesner's skill in organization and classification as well as the place that the bibliography of bibliographies had in his scheme. They give some notion of sixteenth-century scholarship and explain why Gesner's Pandectae failed to be continued or revised and, more especially, why his bibliography of bibliographies has not been noticed. Even A. G. S. Josephson, who had a very sharp eye for bibliographies of bibliographies concealed as chapters in subject indexes, did not come upon Gesner's work. Josephson's study will be mentioned in its proper place at the end of this essay. Gesner's subject bibliography was not appreciated fully because it contained many references to classical sources and did not give a comprehensive account of contemporary writings. Although Gesner's classification was logical and although he adhered with remarkable care to the categories that he set up, no one but Gesner himself could make additions to the book or revise it.

It remains to say a word about the relation of the Pandectae to the book of which it forms a part. Gesner published four volumes—the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, the Pandectae of 1548, the Partitiones of 1549, and the Appendix of 1555—that are ordinarily regarded as a single work. The Bibliotheca and the Appendix constitute a biobibliographical dictionary. The Pandectae and the Partitiones are a subject index that lacks a promised section on medicine. The dictionary and the index have no close relations to each other, except to the degree that the dictionary gives additional information about books cited by authors' names in the index. In Gesner's situation a modern scholar would have distributed according to subjects the slips that he had made for his biobibliographical dictionary and would thus have obtained a subject index almost immediately. Gesner did not proceed in this way, but undertook and completed the subject index as a virtually independent work.

The next man to write a bibliography of bibliographies gives no evidence of having read Gesner's work or, more specifically, of having come upon Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies. He is Israel Spach (1560-1610), who wrote a general subject index at the end of the sixteenth century. In the bibliographical section, "Writers of Bibliographies (Bibliothecarum scriptores)," of his Nomenclator philosophorum et philologicorum, (1598), Spach names twenty-nine books. Of these only two medical and two legal bibliographies were known to Gesner, and one of these legal bibliographies is cited in a better edition that appeared long after the publication of the Pandectae. Spach's emphasis lies on contemporary works. Although he mentions the medieval continuators of St. Jerome, he does not mention St. Jerome himself. Inasmuch as these continuators were brought together in Johannes Tritheim, De viris illustribus, which he cites,[42] he could have dispensed with them. He begins with Antoine du Verdier's supplement (1585) to Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis and then mentions Apollodorus, whose Bibliotheca was