Bibliothecae.it (Dec 2018)
Periodici e Bibliografia. Uno sguardo dalle biblioteche private
Abstract
From their origins, scholarly journals have presented a strong bibliographic connotation, as is clear from the well-known preface of the Journal des Sçavans. Contemporary bibliographic literature has adopted this perspective and codified it, especially through the cataloguing of private libraries. In particular, the Parisian booksellers’ system described periodicals as ‘bibliographi periodici’ and this definition has passed into the bibliophile bibliography through De Bure to arrive at the third edition of Brunet’s Manuel du libraire. Starting from these considerations, the topic of the relationship between Periodicals and Bibliography is analyzed through the lens of private libraries, particularly through the selection of philosophical library catalogs that can be consulted in the “Biblioteche filosofiche private in età moderna e contemporanea” database http://picus.unica.it. Examination of these catalogs shows that the Parisian booksellers’ solution, after a first phase in which it was adopted without special reservations, has been abandoned since the early 1800s, mainly due to the increase in disciplinary journals which have found a more suitable placement in the various branches of the systematic table. As a result of the separation from the Bibliography, literary and scholarly periodicals have been included in the Historia Litteraria category, or in a special class outside the disciplinary scheme and characterized in a formal sense. Only few titles remain within the Bibliography entry, whose content is strictly bibliographic and has itself a disciplinary connotation.
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