You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Others got a little further. Oxford’s Bodleian Library holds tantalizing evidence of a dictionary from around 1570, which, had it been completed, would have been the first monolingual English dictionary, coming decades before Cawdrey’s.3 Franz Fügner began a Lexicon Livianum but called it quits after the letter B because he could not raise enough money.4 In 1793, the Portuguese Academy published the first volume of the Diccionario da lingoa portugueza. This promised to put the Portuguese language on the same academic foundation as French, Italian, and Spanish, but it was abandoned after A. The Portuguese would have to wait until 2001 for a serious academic dictionary. Elsewhere on the Iberian peninsula, Rufino José Cuervo worked on a Diccionario de construcción y régimen de la lengua castellana, more comprehensive than any other Spanish dictionary—the preposition a alone fills twenty-seven pages. But the project died after 2,270 pages took Cuervo only as far as the letter D.5 A French Dictionnaire historique released volume 1 (a–actualité) in 1865 and started on volume 2 in 1878; at that rate they would have finished in 2,990 years. Perhaps it is just as well that they gave up in 1894, having completed only A.6

  Some efforts got pretty far along before something caused them to fall apart. The seventeenth-century French encyclopedist Jean Magnon worked on La Science universelle, an encyclopedia in verse—around ten thousand lines, roughly the length of Paradise Lost—but he never finished it. Perhaps we need not agonize over the loss; one nineteenth-century source calls him “Jean Magnon, poëte français très-médiocre,” a description unlikely to need translation.7 Vincenzo Coronelli, a Venetian monk and cartographer at the beginning of the eighteenth century, planned a Biblioteca universale sacro-profana, antico-moderna in forty or forty-five folio volumes. Had it been completed, it would have been among the first major encyclopedias arranged entirely in alphabetical order—but funds dried up when Coronelli’s manuscript had reached M. Just the first seven volumes—covering A, B, and part of C—appeared in print between 1701 and 1706; the remainder has never been published.

  One of the grandest of the abandoned wrecks is the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, or Universal Encyclopedia of the Sciences and the Arts. It was begun in 1818 and would have been one of the greatest encyclopedic projects of all time. It took most of the century: in 1889, seventy-one years after publication began, volume 167 appeared. And yet this was still less than half of its projected size. The team that devoted seven decades to the project managed to finish only the entries for A through Ligatur, and then O through Phyxios—the rest of the alphabet was untouched.8

  A few dictionaries were actually finished, or nearly so, but never saw the light of day. Fernando del Rosal completed his Origen y etymologia de todos los vocablos originales de la lengua Castellana in 1601. But it was never printed, and the handwritten copy remains in the archives of Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional. Matthias Moth did virtually all the work on an imposing Danish dictionary between 1680 and 1717, producing more than sixty folio volumes in manuscript, but could not push it across the finish line; the work has never been published.9 Ilyn Fedorovich Kopievskii compiled a more or less complete Nomenclator in lingua latina, germanica et russica—a trilingual dictionary of Latin, German, and Russian—in 1700, but he left it unpublished at the time of his death.

  Shake-ups in the publishing economy, coming from both the rise of electronic publication and the collapse of library budgets, have caused some projects to sputter to a halt. Literary scholars depend on the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature or CBEL, which first appeared between 1940 and 1957, followed by a New edition—known as the NCBEL—between 1969 and 1977. At the end of the twentieth century a third edition was planned: thousands of contributors were lined up and thousands of contracts signed. (I was tapped for Boswell, James and Johnson, Samuel.) The volumes were worked on independently, and volume 4, covering the nineteenth century, appeared in 1999, to mostly good reviews. But between the issuing of the contracts and the delivery of the finished typescripts, the bottom fell out of print reference publishing. Cambridge University Press realized it could not sell enough hard-copy volumes, and it saw no way to recover its costs on an online version. All the contributors were released from their contracts, the project was scrapped, and volume 4 remains orphaned in the world’s libraries, doomed never to sit between volumes 3 and 5.

  Politics can also kill a reference work. The Brockhaus-Efron entsiklopedicheskii Slovar came out in Russia between 1890 and 1907, after which a revised Novyi entsiklopedicheskii Slovar was planned. That project got under way in 1912, but this revolutionary decade was not a good time for reference publishing, especially for an old-fashioned reflection of the czarist world. Five years after the first volume appeared, the encyclopedia had reached twenty-nine volumes and the letter O. But the October Revolution of 1917 meant the end of the Novyi entsiklopedicheskii.10

  A few abandoned projects are especially tantalizing because they might have been works of genius. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the towering intellects of the early nineteenth century, provided the introductory treatise to what was going to be a trailblazing Encyclopædia Metropolitana in 1817, but it was just another of the utopian dreams that Coleridge entertained over the course of his career, and he withdrew.11 Just as lamentable is the loss of W. E. B. Du Bois’s proposed Encyclopædia Africana, a “comprehensive compendium of ‘scientific’ knowledge about the history, cultures, and social institutions of people of African descent: of Africans in the Old World, African Americans in the New World, and persons of African descent who had risen to prominence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.” The project occupied Du Bois’s mind for nearly half a century.12 He wrote to dozens of experts, hoping to establish a pair of editorial boards—“One Hundred Negro Americans, African and West Indian Scholars,” along with a second panel of white advisers—though “the real work,” he told a friend, “I want done by Negroes.”13 Nearly everyone he asked said yes, and progress was expected to be rapid. Printed stationery promised the first volume in 1913, “the Jubilee of Emancipation in America and the Tercentenary of the Landing of the Negro,” with four more volumes coming out over the next four years. But the funding never materialized. Du Bois tried again during the Great Depression, but progress was even harder then.14 A one-volume project on this plan—Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates—finally appeared in 1999, but for all its value, it’s hard not to lament the lost Africana by a father of African studies.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE FOUNDATION STONE

  Library Catalogs

  Anthony Panizzi

  General Catalogue of Printed Books

  1881–1900

  The National Union Catalog

  Pre-1956 Imprints

  1968–81

  When a library holds just a few dozen books, life is simple. Need a book? The librarian can locate it for you off the top of his or her head. But books have a habit of piling up, and when those piles become too big, someone is charged with coming up with a useful list of what is where. And so was born the library catalog.

  The royal library of Ashurbanipal in seventh-century-B.C.E. Assyria had some sort of catalog, though we know nothing of its form. Better evidence survives from the Library of Alexandria, founded in the late fourth or early third century B.C.E. The library had a vigorous acquisitions policy. When ships arrived in Alexandria, all their books would be seized and copied. When they were ready to depart, they were given the copies instead of the originals, which stayed at the library. Techniques like this turned the Library of Alexandria into what was, by ancient standards, a prodigiously large collection, far too large for any librarian to know by heart.1 And so in the late third century Callimachus wrote the Pinakes (Tables or Tablets), the most thorough list of books in the ancient world. Callimachus divided literature into categories, including philosophy, oratory, history, law, medicine, lyric poetry, tragic poetry, and miscellaneous, and w
ithin each category he listed the authors’ names in alphabetical order—a rare classical example of alphabetical order in a reference book. The list occupied 120 “books,” or scrolls.2 Only bits survive today, but those fragments provide a guide to other Greek literature that is now lost, presumably forever.

  Callimachus had Greek and Roman successors, but after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, few impressive libraries existed in Europe. A medieval European library with five hundred books would have been exceptional. The oldest intact library in the Western world is a small room in Cesena, Italy, near Rimini, a building dating from the middle of the fifteenth century—as traditionally dated, the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance. There the original collection of books remains in situ: a grand total of fifty-eight volumes.3 Most European libraries, like this one, numbered their books in the tens or hundreds of titles. The great libraries of China and the Islamic world, on the other hand, numbered theirs in the tens or hundreds of thousands, and that is where the interesting works on library cataloging are found in this period. Abu Tahir Tayfur, a ninth-century bookseller from Baghdad, followed Callimachus in giving short biographies and alphabetical lists of works of major authors. In 987, Ibn al-Nadim cataloged as many Arabic-language books as he could identify, and the resulting book, the Fihrist, is the most thorough collection of medieval Arabic knowledge known today.4 And the Chinese scholar Zheng Qiao (1103–62) wrote Jiao zhou luo (Theory of Library Science and Bibliography), which gave a rationale guiding the purchase of new acquisitions.5

  The number of books and readers in the West was far lower than in the Arabic and Chinese worlds, and so the number of libraries remained lower. Early in the sixteenth century, though, movable type caused libraries to develop at an unprecedented rate. Now even the most capacious memory could not hope to recall the location of every book. And as the great libraries grew, and opened their collections not merely to the nobles who owned them but to the scholars who visited them, the need for catalogs became even greater.

  Most of the impressive libraries in early modern Europe were royal collections, or the personal collections of wealthy aristocrats, and they were cataloged only sporadically. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library was first cataloged in 1605, with a four-part index covering the arts, theology, law, and medicine, with a separate index of authors.6 When Edward Harley—the son of the bibliophile Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer—died in 1741, his father’s collection of more than 7,000 manuscripts, 50,000 rare books, and 350,000 pamphlets was purchased by the British government, and one of the young scholars hired to produce a catalog was Samuel Johnson, who spent several years in his early thirties describing the collection.

  One of the world’s greatest feats of cataloging came in the late nineteenth century, when Britain’s national library was a division of the British Museum in London. The person who made it possible was an Italian revolutionary who became the most English of establishment Englishmen. Antonio Panizzi, born in Reggio Emilia, resented Austrian rule over Italy and involved himself in revolutionary causes. According to his biographer, the political struggles were “to determine radically the course of his whole life and to influence his conduct, even into old age.”7 Several friends were arrested for their radical politics, and eventually the inevitable happened: a warrant for Panizzi’s arrest was issued. Rather than defend himself he decided to flee. After saying goodbye to his family and close friends in 1822, he slipped across the border, using a small boat he had hidden among the reeds, and made his way through Europe with virtually no resources and no support. After arriving in England he taught himself English, gained the friendship of some powerful Whig politicians, and in 1831 landed a job at the British Museum Library, the largest in England. As he worked through the ranks at the library, he was given the task of cataloging the collection of nearly a quarter million printed books.

  There had been earlier attempts. The two-volume Librorum impressorum qui in Museo Britannico, adservantur catalogus (Catalog of the Printed Books Kept in the British Museum, 1787) was followed by a seven-volume version (1813–19). Neither was very good. Plans for a more comprehensive edition resulted in the Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum—but only the first volume, covering A, saw the light of day, in 1841, before the project was abandoned.

  It was Panizzi’s job to make a proper catalog. He first set his staff to work identifying exactly what they had—a more difficult task than it seems. For one reader, anything called King Lear on the title page is good enough. For another, only the edition that says M. William Shakspeare: His True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters. With the Vnfortunate Life of Edgar, Sonne and Heire to the Earle of Gloster, and His Sullen and Assumed Humor of Tom of Bedlam, published by Nathaniel Butter in 1608, will do. And only a serious specialist, well versed in early modern bibliography, will know that this is not the same book as the one that says on the title page that it was published by Nathaniel Butter in 1608 but was actually published by William Jaggard in 1619. Panizzi’s impatient superiors thought a printed catalog could be completed in just a few years, and they fretted when Panizzi spoke of “years of unremitting and heavy labour.” But he insisted the work had to be done right.8

  TITLE: Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum

  COMPILER: Anthony Panizzi (1797–1879)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical by author

  PUBLISHED: London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1881–1900; supplement, 1901–5

  VOLUMES: 393 parts in 95 volumes + 44 parts in 13 vols. supplement

  PAGES: 59,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 45 million

  SIZE: 13¾″ × 10¼″ (35 × 26 cm)

  AREA: 57,800 ft2 (5,370 m2)

  PRICE: £76 10s. for subscribers; free to public libraries in the UK

  LATEST EDITION: The last printed version was The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975 (360 vols., London, 1979–87) with supplements (6 vols., London, 1987–88); the current catalog is now online at catalogue.bl.uk

  Panizzi’s real contribution was a system for organizing the records in the catalog. Most works were to be listed alphabetically by author; when that was impossible, they were to appear alphabetically under predictable headings. To this end he compiled a set of ninety-one rules, issued in 1841. Even many librarians disparaged them. But as another librarian admitted in 1869, “The ninety-one rules, … so foolishly ridiculed for their number, have probably been increased to twice as many by the subsequent experience of that vast establishment.”9

  We assume that alphabetical order is easy, but real-world examples quickly become difficult. What to do with names in foreign alphabets? Where to alphabetize a book “By a Lady” or “By Publicus”? Should Tom Sawyer go under “Twain, Mark” or “Clemens, Samuel Langhorne”? “Sand, George” or “Dupin, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore”? What about authors using the names of real authors as their pseudonyms? What about nobles: alphabetize under “Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester” or “Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of”? What about a book published by the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien? Euclid, Book V: Proved Algebraically So Far as It Relates to Commensurable Magnitudes was published by Charles L. Dodgson, M.A., and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, even though they are the same person.

  A few rules give a taste of Panizzi’s system:

  I. Titles to be written on slips, uniform in size … .

  Titles to be arranged alphabetically, according to the English alphabet only (whatever be the order of the alphabet in which a foreign name might have to be entered in its original language) under the surname of the author, whenever it appears printed in the title, or in any other part of the book. If the name be supplied in MS. the work must nevertheless be considered anonymous or pseudonymous … .

  V. Works of Jewish Rabbis, as well as works of Oriental writers in general, to be entered under their first name … .

  XI
. Works of authors who change their name or add to it a second, after having begun to publish under the first, to be entered under the first name, noticing any alteration which may have subsequently taken place.10

  The brilliance of Panizzi’s system lies in the way it provided consistent ways of dealing with all the complications that inevitably arise once you begin cataloging real books. Alphabetize by author: easy enough. But what about a book published, by, say, “W.S.”? Rule XXII: “Works published under initials, to be entered under the last of them; and should the librarian be able to fill up the blanks left, or complete the words which such initials are intended to represent, this is to be done in the body of the title, and all the supplied parts to be included between brackets.”11 Rule XVIII governed long titles: “The title of the book next to be written, and that expressed in as few words and those only of the author, as may be necessary to exhibit to the reader all that the author meant to convey in the titular description of his work; the original orthography to be preserved.”12 Rule LIV—“No work ever to be entered twice at full length. Whenever requisite, cross-references to be introduced”13—was especially prescient; it ensured that when changes were necessary, they would be made in just one place, not all over the catalog.

  The wars between Panizzi and the trustees of the Museum dragged on, and they sometimes got ugly and personal. As the decades passed, though, Panizzi won most of his battles, and his efforts made his library one of the greatest in the world. He worked first to pass, then to enforce a new Copyright Act, ensuring that the British Museum would be a legal deposit library. Panizzi also drew up the initial plans for the legendary round Reading Room, which opened in 1857 and hosted generations of scholars—those in the know could identify the desks used by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Mahatma Gandhi. (Since the British Library moved into its own quarters in 1997, the Reading Room has mostly been used for exhibitions, though discussions are ongoing about how best to use the space.) For this work he received a long series of honors, culminating in a knighthood in 1869. No longer Antonio Panizzi, he was now Sir Anthony, and seemingly worlds away from the radical firebrand who slipped out of his native Italy.