233 



LIBRARIES. 



LIBRARIES. 



231 



Take, for instance, the following a specimen of one of the Museum 

 " title-slips," or written " billets," describing a book : 



593 i. Lingard (John). 



History of England. 9 vola. 



London, 1819-40. 4to. 



The mysterious " 598 L " to the left is what is called the " press-mark," 

 that is, the indication of the locality in which the book stands : which, 

 in this instance, is in the press or book-case marked 598, and in the 

 ninth shelf from the top of that press, the successive shelves being 

 marked ^by the letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, &o., in regular order. 

 The use for which this title-slip was originally written was that it 

 might be placed in the alphabetical order of the author's name, 

 " Lingard," and thus form a component part of the great alphabetical 

 catalogue of the authors' names. But in addition to such a catalogue as 

 this, the interior management of a large library imperatively requires 

 another, which is generally termed a hand-catalogue, but might 

 more appropriately be called a shelf-catalogue a list which in- 

 dicates all the books of the library in the order in which they stand 

 on the shelves, so that if a volume be missing there may be the 

 means of ascertaining what it is. In most cases this hand-catalogue is 

 made up qiu'te separately, and to make it is a serious business. At 

 the Museum, where four identical copies of every title-slip are now 

 produced simultaneously by writing with a sort of stylus on prepared 

 paper, it was proposed by one of the officers that one of these copies 

 should be arranged in the order, not of the author's name, but of the 

 press-marks, by which, ipio facto, a shelf-catalogue would at once be 

 produced with the minimum of trouble. Directions were given to do 

 so, and a hand-catalogue was and is produced accordingly without 

 the application of a particle of skilled labour more than is requisite 

 to read the letters and figures. In the recent part of the Museum 

 building, a shelf -catalogue presents another advantage of some moment. 

 As, by an arrangement which will be described a little further on, 

 the books are classed on the shelves, those who consult the shelf- 

 catalogue of the presses which are assigned to the history of Spain, 

 the topography of Switzerland, the science of pneumatics, or any 

 other subject, find assembled the titles of all the books on that 

 subject of recent acquisition which the Museum possesses, they find, 

 in fact, in the shelf-catalogue, a sort of rough classed catalogue. The 

 success of the new arrangement led the officer who proposed it, 

 Mr. Watts, to suggest, in 1855, a further extension of the principle. 

 The name of a book is often remembered without remembering the 

 name of the author. This is so often the case with regard to plays and 

 novels, that in the catalogues of circulating libraries intended for practical 

 use the name of the book is generally taken by preference. To meet 

 this want, Mr. Watts proposed to arrange a copy of the title-slips in the 

 alphabetical order of the words which immediately follow the author's 

 name. Thus, the ' Rejected Addresses ' of Horace and James Smith 

 would be found in one catalogue in the order of the word "Rejected," 

 \\-\d\-, in the other they would figure under the name of the Smiths. 

 To search for anything in the present Museum catalogue arnid the 

 names of the multitudinous Smiths,- is in itself so tedious a task that 

 the book would certainly be in general looked out with much more 

 ease under it* own title ; and it may be added that as some of the 

 editions were published with the authors' names and some without, 

 the proposed catalogue would have the advantage of assembling them 

 all under ' Rejected Addresses,' an advantage which would be extended 

 to all books in the same semi-anonymous predicament. All ' Histories 

 of England,' all ' Strangers in London,' &c., would be brought together, 

 whatever might be the names of the authors. 



A fourth copy of the title might be used to make a fourth catalogue, 

 of a kind analogous to that of early books in Panzer's ' Initia Typo- 

 graphica.' In this catalogue the title-slips would be arranged in the 

 alphabetical order of the places of printing, and those of the same 

 place of printing would be arranged chronologically. To local anti- 

 quaries, or to local inquirers of any sort, this would be a material 



nice. It might be seen at once without difficulty what books the 

 Museum contained printed at Norwich, or St. Alban's, or Aberdeen, or 



i. ; or, to take a wider range, at the Cape of Good Hope, or 

 Madras, or Melbourne. By looking at Pesth, or Lisbon, and a few other 

 sub-divisions, it might be ascertained with ease what were the latest 



ii>ns in Hungarian or Portuguese literature. With Paris and 



.11, under which the entries would be excessively numerous, the 

 pi in 'would be great. A re"ader might trace the gradual progress of 

 printing in London from Wynkyn de Worde onwards ; might look up 



! looks were issued in the first year of the Reformation, in that in 

 which Shakgpere came to London, in those of the protectorate of 

 Ci'iimvfll, in that of the Revolution! Macaulay would have found 

 in a body all the plays, and the ballads, and the nonjuring divinity, 

 and the political pamphlets, that were poured forth in town in 1688 ; 

 ami then, turning to the volume of Dublin, all the products of that 

 (rtormy year in Ireland. There is hardly a literary man who would 

 n it have some desire of this kind to gratify, and to many it would 



1 1, ready to their hand a mass of materials on various historical 

 Ktilijcctn, which they would otherwise scarcely think of looking for. 

 Thi.< kind of information is at present inaccessible, except at the 

 expense of tedious research. That valuable but very imperfect book, 



Cotton's ' Typographical Gazetteer,' might be at once corrected with 

 ease in a hundred passages. Such would, it is supposed, be the 

 benefits of this new method of making use of the duplicate title-slips 

 of the Museum. If, instead of four copies of the title-slips, there were 

 twenty (which might be cheaply produced by the aid of printing or 

 lithography), other catalogues might be evolved. There might be lists 

 of all the accessions to the Museum, in the order of their arrival. 

 There might also be catalogues of books arranged according to the 

 languages in which they were written, so that those who only sought 

 English books need not turn over page after page of Latin or French 

 titles, and those who sought for German or Russian might at once 

 find what they sought. There might also be special catalogues of 

 particular classes : of English plays, or English novels, or books on 

 vellum, or books with autographs. In short, without any additional 

 trouble as to cataloguing, the mere " shuffling of the cards," or title- 

 slips, the mere different arrangement of them by ordinary hands, might 

 produce a variety of catalogues which would secure to every reader a 

 number of different ways of looking for any particular book or class of 

 books he was in search of. 



Were the title-slips thus put in print, kept standing in type, and a 

 catalogue occasionally issued of, for instance, the books added to the 

 Museum which were printed in the years from 1851 to 1860 inclusive, 

 the list thus formed would be of much value. It would be the most 

 copious list of English, Scotch, and Irish books of the period embraced. 

 In the so-called London catalogues much is passed over that is issued 

 in London, plays and Quakers' books, and Roman Catholic and Sweden- 

 borgian and Mormonite literature, reports of charities and societies, 

 catalogues of exhibitions, and numerous other kinds of publications, 

 including of course privately printed books, many of which come to the 

 Museum as presents. In addition to this, there would be a select list 

 of all the principal publications of Europe, from Lisbon to St. Peters- 

 burg, and of America, from Montreal to Buenos Ayres. Such a list 

 of about 100,000 volumes published within ten years, would not only 

 be an interesting memorial of the progress of the Museum, but a 

 useful handbook to the lover of bibliography. 



The classification of books in a catalogue or in a library is a subject 

 that has often been discussed. To classify in a catalogue is of course 

 an easier task than to classify on shelves ; the titles are all of one size, 

 and may be shifted or shuffled at will, but the volumes are sometimes 

 heavy materials, and hard to move, and are of all sizes, from the 

 ' Bijou Almanack,' to the great ' Dutch Atlas ' in the British Museum, 

 nearly six feet high. When the "learned Lambecius, in the 17th 

 century, arranged the books in the Vienna library according to their 

 subjects, irrespective of size, so that a diminutive duodecimo some- 

 times stood side by side with an atlas folio, the appearance was so 

 strange, and the quantity of space that was lost was so immense, that 

 the first thing done by his successor Nesselius, was to re-arrange the 

 books according to their sizes. It is often the case in the history of 

 libraries that we find a new librarian carefully reversing all that his 

 predecessor has done, but it does not follow that in all such cases the 

 alteration is an improvement, as it seems to have been in this. The 

 plans; for the classification of catalogues have multiplied to such an 

 extent, that at last a classification of the systems is almost necessary. 

 M. Achard in his ' Bibliographie ' gives an account of several ; the Rev. 

 Mr. Home in his ' Introduction to Bibliography ' follows him, and 

 increases the list ; and Mr. Edwards in his ' Memoirs on Libraries," not 

 only pursues the subject to a still greater exteut, but gives a tabular 

 view of thirty-two of the contending systems. Many of these differ 

 only in trifles, and some of them are utterly worthless and beneath 

 discussion. The system which has in its main features been more 

 followed than all the others together, is that which is called the system 

 of the Paris booksellers. On this plan all literature is divided into five 

 sections Theology, Jurisprudence, Philosophy or the Arts and Sciences, 

 Polite Literature, and History. The division Arts and Sciences is a 

 sort of general receptacle for all which could not find a place in the 

 others : the limits of the remaining four are tolerably well defined, 

 and any great collection of books must always be divisible into them. 

 Many of the other systems aim at changing the order of precedence of 

 these divisions, but it obviously matters little if Theology be placed 

 before or after History, Literature before or after Jurisprudence. It 

 matters little also if the books on the history of France be placed before 

 or after the books on the history of Spain, provided that in a large 

 library the division of books on these two subjects is consistently 

 made, and the books on each are carefully kept together. The really 

 important differences are in apparently minor matters, on the question 

 for instance which divides Francke in his catalogue of the Biinau 

 library from most of his compeers. In a large library there will be 

 numerous histories of the cholera in particular places, in Exeter, in 

 Bologna, in Lisbon, in Linkoping, in Moscow. According to Francke's 

 system, all books of history in which a locality is specified, belong to 

 the history of that locality, and thus a narrative of the cholera at 

 Bologna will be put in the same subdivision with a history of painting 

 at Bologna. According to most other arrangements, all histories of the 

 cholera will form part of the division, "Medicine," in itself a sub- 

 division of Arts and Sciences in the system of the Parisian booksellers, 

 and all histories of painting will be classed under the " Fine Arts," 

 another subdivision of Arts and Sciences. The question in a knotty 

 one to resolve in the arrangement of a library on the shelves : in 



