Bibliotheca Universalis - History

History

The Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner started to compile this extensive work on Bibliotheca universalis at the age of 25. He first visited as many of the Italian and German libraries as he could find. He published the work in 1545, after some four years of research. It included his own bio-bibliography. His first edition of the Bibliotheca universalis listed about ten thousand titles. Bibliotheca universalis was the first modern bibliography of importance; through it, Gesner became known as the "father of bibliography."

The work included approximately eighteen hundred authors. The authors’ forenames were listed with a reverse index of their surnames. It was intended as an index by subject of all known authors. Gesner listed the writers alphabetically with the titles of their works. He added his own annotations, comments, and evaluations of the nature and merit of every entry.

Gesner followed Johannes Trithemius’s work of placing works in systems of cataloging. Gesner admired Trithemius’s systems and used them as guidelines and templates; however Gesner carried the idea of cataloging and systems a step further. Theodore Besterman, in The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, suggests that Gerner’s work to organize knowledge was the forerunner of Francis Bacon’s works and other encyclopedias that followed.