There is such confusion in the use of terms in the various prefaces
to catalogues—a confusion that at once springs from and leads to
confusion of thought and practice—that it is worth while to propose a
systematic nomenclature.
_Analysis._ See _Reference, Analytical_. {9}
_Anonymous_, published without the author’s name.
Strictly a book is not anonymous if the author’s name appears anywhere
in it, but it is safest to treat it as anonymous if the author’s name
does not appear in the title.
Note that the words are “in the title,” not “on the title-page.”
Sometimes in Government publications the author’s name and the title
of his work do not appear on the title-page but on a page immediately
following. Such works are not anonymous.
_Asyndetic_, without cross-references. See _Syndetic_.
_Author_, in the narrower sense, is the person who writes a book; in
a wider sense it may be applied to him who is the cause of the book’s
existence by putting together the writings of several authors (usually
called _the editor_, more properly to be called _the collector_).
Bodies of men (societies, cities, legislative bodies, countries) are
to be considered the authors of their memoirs, transactions, journals,
debates, reports, etc.
_Class_, a collection of objects having characteristics in common.
Books are classified by bringing together those which have the same
characteristics.[6] Of course any characteristics might be taken,
as size, or binding, or publisher. But as nobody wants to know what
books there are in the library in folio, or what quartos, or what
books bound in russia or calf, or what published by John Smith, or by
Brown, Jones, and Robinson, these bases of classification are left
to the booksellers and auctioneers and trade sales. Still, in case
of certain unusual or noted bindings, as human skin or Grolier’s, or
early or famous publishers, as Aldus and Elzevir, a partial class-list
is sometimes very properly made. But books are most commonly brought
together in catalogues because they have the same authors, or the
same subjects, or the same literary form, or are written in the same
language, or were given by the same donor, or are designed for the
same class of readers. When brought together because they are by the
same author, they are not usually thought of as classified; they form
the author-catalogue, and need no further mention here except in
regard to arrangement. The classes, _i. e._, in this case the authors,
might of course be further classified according to their nations, or
their professions (as the subjects are in national or professional
biographies), or by any other set of common characteristics, but for
library purposes an alphabetical arrangement according to the spelling
of their names is universally acknowledged to be the best.
The classification by language is not generally used in full. There
are catalogues in which all the English books are separated from all
the foreign; in others there are separate lists of French books or
German books. The needs of each library must determine whether it is
worth while to prepare such lists. It is undeniably useful in almost
any library to make lists of the belles lettres in the different
languages; which, though nominally a classification by language, is
really a classification by literary form, the object being to bring
together all the works with a certain national flavor—the French
flavor, the German flavor, or it may be a classing by readers, the
German books being catalogued together for a German population, the
French for the French, and so on. Again, it is useful to give lists
not of the belles lettres alone, but of all the works in the rarer
languages, as the Bodleian and the British Museum have published
separate lists of their Hebrew books. Here too the circumstances of
each library must determine where it shall draw the line between those
literatures which it will put by themselves and those which it will
include and hide in the mass of its general catalogue. Note, however,
that some of the difficulties of transliterating {10} names of modern
Greek, Russian authors, etc., are removed by putting their original
works in a separate catalogue, though translations still remain to
puzzle us.
The catalogue by donors or original owners is usually partial (as
those of the Dowse, Barton, Prince, and Ticknor libraries). The
catalogues by classes of readers are also partial, hardly extending
beyond «Juvenile literature» and «Sunday-school books». Of course many
subject classes amount to the same thing, the class «Medicine» being
especially useful to medical men, «Theology» to the theologians, and
so on.
Classification by subject and classification by form are the most
common. An example will best show the distinction between them.
«Theology», which is itself a subject, is also a class, that is, it
is extensive enough to have its parts, its chapters, so to speak (as
«Future Life», «Holy Spirit», «Regeneration», «Sin», «Trinity»),
treated separately, each when so treated (whether in books or only
in thought) being itself a subject; all these together, inasmuch as
they possess this in common, that they have to do with some part of
the relations of God to man, form the class of subjects «Theology».
Class, however, is applied to «Poetry» in a different sense. It then
signifies not a collection of similar subjects, but a collection
of books resembling one another in being composed in that form and
with that spirit, whatever it is, which is called poetical. In the
subject-catalogue class it is used in the first sense—collection of
similar subjects; in the form-catalogue it is used in the second—list
of similar books.
Most systems of classification are mixed, as the following analysis of
one in actual use in a small library will show:
Art, science, and natural history. _Subj._
History and biography. _Subj._
Poetry. _Form_ (literary).
Encyclopædias and books of reference. _Form_ (practical).
Travels and adventures. _Subj._ (Has some similarity to a
Form-class.)
Railroads. _Subj._
Fiction. _Form._ (_Novels_, a subdivision
of _Fiction_, is properly
a Form-class; but the
differentia of the more
extensive class _Fiction_
is not its form, but its
untruth; imaginary voyages
and the like of course
imitate the form of the
works which they parody.)
Relating to the rebellion. _Subj._
Magazines. _Form_ (practical).
General literature, essays, and
religious works. A mixture: 1. Hardly a class;
that is to say, it probably
is a collection of books
having only this in common,
that they will not fit into
any of the other classes; 2.
_Form_; 3. _Subj._
Confining ourselves now to classification by subjects, the word can be
used in three senses:
1. Bringing books together which treat of the same subject
specifically.
That is, books which each treat of the whole of the subject and
not of a part only.