Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: recommended an inventorial catalogue of unabridged titles arranged in no order, but numbered, and an alphabetical index to the numbers of this inventory. The index thus formed was somewhat similar to the Dictionary Catalogue (United States Special Report, p. 535). Mr. Brad- shaw held very strongly the view that an alphabetical catalogue was an index, and that a full shelf catalogue was the real catalogue; and few things he enjoyed more than to read through a list of the books as they stood on the shelves.1 In a letter to me, dated September gth, 1879, he wrote:— " It is a cardinal point with me that an alphabetical catalogue of a library is really an index, or should be so, to any other kind of catalogue you choose to make; while if you once lose sight of this fact you are quite sure to cumber the catalogue up with bibliographical details which are entirely out of place." 1 I remember very vividly a pleasant day spent in the Pepysian Library with Mr. Brad- shaw, under the kindly guardianship of Professor Newton. Mr. Bradshaw was specially delighted with Pepys's own MS. catalogues. Scientific cataloguing is of modern invention, and to the British Museum it is that we owe the origination of a code of rules—rules which form the groundwork of all modern cataloguing. Good catalogues were made before rules were enunciated, but this is accounted for by the fact that bibliographers, like poets, are more often born than made. Carefulness must be one of the chief characteristics of the cataloguer, for he will frequently find himself beset with difficulties. Mr. W. F. Poole, the author of that most useful work the Index to Periodical Literature, states this very forcibly when he writes :— "The inexperienced librarian will find the cataloguing of his books the most difficult pa... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.