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After a brief digression St. Jerome refers to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, which he has found very useful, and then concludes with an allusion to Cicero, whom few would now think of as a bibliographer. In this passage he makes it clear that bibliography was not highly esteemed even in A.D. 392:

And so I pray to the Lord Jesus Christ that, since your master Cicero, who stood at the pinnacle of Roman eloquence, has not disdained to compile a list of orators in the Latin language in his Brutus, I may execute such a task worthily, pursuant to your request, by listing the writers of His church.

St. Jerome's list is an altogether acceptable bibliography of bibliographies. It includes Antigonus Carystius and Satyrus who wrote general biobibliographies, and Aristoxenus who listed the pupils of Isocrates or the writers of tragedy. We can infer that St. Jerome saw a common element in the works of all these men. This common element is the idea of a list or bibliography. Had he cited only writers of general biobibliographies, we might imagine that he thought of them as historians or chroniclers. In the context of an introduction to his own bibliography of Christian writers he must have thought of them as bibliographers. He neglected to mention many other early bibliographers with whom he was probably familiar.

Almost thirteen centuries later Philip Labbé, whom we shall learn to know as the first author of a bibliography of bibliographies to be published as a separate work, found St. Jerome's list and after making some additions, put it in alphabetical order. He could not find a proper place for it in his own bibliography of bibliographies, the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1664, and buried it without any apparent reason immediately after a reference to a book by Constantinus Felicius that dealt with Cicero's exile and glorious return. I suspect that the slip containing this information had been misplaced in his manuscript. Labbé wrote as follows:

Besides Damastes Sigiaeus,[9] many have written on the lives of scholars, for example, Agatharcides of Cnidus,[10] Amphicrates,[11] Antigonus Carystius, Aristoxenus, Artemon of Magnesia,[12] the Carthaginian Charon,[13] Clearchus of Soli,[14] Hermippus of Smyrna, Satyrus, Timagenes of Miletus,[15] and others, and among Latin writers, Varro, Santra, Nepos, [and] Hyginus, whom St. Jerome cites along with Suetonius on p. 62.[16]

Labbé's careless treatment of this information suggests that he had not finished preparing it for publication. The text itself is not entirely intelligible. He did not put it, as St. Jerome had done, in the introduction and failed to find any other logical place for it. St. Jerome's list obviously interested Labbé, for he quoted it again in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus." When Antoine Teissier revised and enlarged the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum in 1686, he came upon this duplication and retained only the passage in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus."

Except the long-forgotten Labbé, subsequent bibliographers know nothing of St. Jerome's brief list. It did not set anyone to writing bibliographies of bibliographies, and no example has been reported in the almost uncharted area of bibliographical history that lies between St. Jerome and the Renaissance.

Modern bibliographies of bibliographies begin as sections in general subject indexes. In any such index bibliography is, as a matter of course, represented. Conrad Gesner's Pandectae, 1548,[16a] which is the first subject index to be printed, begins with bibliography. The first book (liber) of the Pandectae is entitled "De grammatica" and deals with the classification and organization of knowledge.[17] Chapter (titulus) XIII, with which we are especially concerned, is a treatise on general bibliography.[18] Its eight sections (partes) deal with books of general usefulness and some related matters. Pars i, "Greek and Latin Writers of Miscellanies and of Books Containing Critical Comments on More than One Author," is well described by its title. Gesner divides it into two parts: "Greek Miscellanies," including such works as Aelian, Varia historia;[19] Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae;[20] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata;[21] and Johannes Tzetzes, Historia varia.[22] Books of this sort were reference works consulted for information on almost any subject. To this alphabetical list Gesner adds three titles: the accounts of marvels found in various works by Aristotle; Julius Pollux, Onomasticon; and Plutarch, Symposium.[23] For a bibliography of books of table talk similar to Plutarch's work Gesner refers the reader to Liber Politica, Titulus Convivia.