III - Bibliographies

Summary

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it”.

Dr Johnson.

Primary and Secondary Sources.

‘The material of historical bibliography comprises primary and secondary sources of book information. Primary sources constitute the bulk of contemporary historical bibliography, while Secondary sources constitute the great body of antiquarian book knowledge. The primary sources are to be found in the private and public documents of the persons and institutions concerned in the production of books. They comprise journals and correspondence of authors and their friends, and subsequently the correspondence and documents exchanged between authors and publishers. Then follow, if the book is published, advertisements and announcements, including those carried by the book itself and such as appear elsewhere. These are finally supplemented by reviews and news items in the journals of the day. If the book continues to live in the minds of the people for any length of time, contemporary records of the book are apt to multiply indefinitely, and bibliographical lore is correspondingly increased. The aggregate of the foregoing constitute the storehouse from which succeeding ages must derive their bibliographical information, and without which antiquarian bibliography would be an impossibility’.

‘”Primary” bibliographies are those which are the original record of the whole or part of their contents, “secondary” those in which material elsewhere registered is rearranged for the convenience of research… primary, that is they are either in whole or in part the original, and it may be the contemporary, record of books… secondary bibliographies…in which works already recorded in primary bibliographies are selected, recombined, analysed, in a manner which will make them throw light on each other, either by subject-matter, or authorship, or period, or typography… Bibliographies of bibliographies are, of course, secondary…’

‘In the bibliography of an historical subject there should…be a clear division…between primary material, such as contemporary documents, letters, diaries, reports of commissions, minute books, archives, etc. on the one aide, and secondary material on the-other’.