Bibliography

Bibliography. The term (which means description of books) was originally applied in France to that branch of knowledge which deals with the decipherment and peculiarities of ancient MSS., now called Palaeography: but is now confined to the classification and description of books. In its widest sense it will cover cataloguing and indexing - both, especially the latter, highly developed and specialised arts: but it is also applied more especially to the knowledge of books as such - taking no account of their contents except as a rough basis of classification, but dealing with their date and place of publication, typographical peculiarities, binding, differences of special editions or copies, etc. In this narrower sense it is an auxiliary to Bibliomania (q.v.).