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“Bibliography is a dry occupation,—a caput mortuum,—it
is a borrowed production, which brings very little
grist to the mill; and so difficult and tedious is the
object, of laying before our eyes all the real or
reported copies or editions of the works enumerated,
that almost every line of our reports may be suspected
of falsehood.”—James Atkinson, Medical Bibliography,
1834, 8o [he stopped with letter B].
It is probable that every great national library
contains more works without authors’ names than with
them. Of these anonymous books, a considerable
proportion will, doubtless, belong to authors whose
names are either known to, or conjectured, more or
less plausibly, by the learned bibliographer. But if
conjecture be allowed to govern the _place_ of a book
in a catalogue, all reliability on it ceases.—Edward
Edwards, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, eighth
edition, 1857, Art. Libraries, p. 378.
1. An account of the celebration of the jubilee, on the 25th oct. 1809,
being the 49th anniversary of the reign of Geo. III. ... collected and
published by a lady. Birmingham [1809], 4o.
I should observe that I have not, out of regard to space, put in the
pagination, price, &c., and that nearly all the places of
publication are abbreviated. I have seen every book which I here
describe, mostly in the Library of the British Museum.