Bibliothèque nationale de France. Catalogue des incunables (CIBN), Tome 1, Fasc. 3: C–D (review)

Incunabulists everywhere will welcome the third fascicule of the first volume of the Bibliothèque nationale de France's catalogue, an authoritative guide to one of the three great collections of fifteenth-century printed books. It is not the end of the beginning but the beginning of the end, since the authorities in Paris began with their Tome II, the first fascicule, covering the letters H–L, appearing in 1981. The sensible reason for starting with H[aedus, Petrus] was that Marie Pellechet's Catalogue général des incunables des bibliothèques publiques de France (3 vols, Paris, 1897–1909, the last two edited after Pellechet's death by M.-L. Polain) expired in print at the entry Gregorius. Pellechet and her editor did a pretty good job —of the first hundred entries here I found only four missing in the Catalogue général that should on the face of it have been there —but there are many other discrepancies in numbers of copies, notes of imperfection, and even press-marks. And of course Pellechet set out to cover the whole of the hexagon, and had no space or time to devote to copy particulars, in which lies one of the great strengths of the BnF collection and of this catalogue.

Like the STC, then, CIBN Tome I will be more up to date than Tome II. But the goalposts have also moved within the catalogue as it has progressed, and there is a good deal more information in the later fascicules than in the earlier ones, especially in discussion of printer attributions and in provenance matters: H–L recorded 1, 148 editions in 198 pages while C–D records 1, 015 editions in 247, still in the same ultra-compact format. This intensification in the detail of the catalogue —and doubtless in its accuracy —has had its cost. Whereas the four fascicules that made up Tome II tumbled out in the space of five years, the three so far published of Tome I have taken fifteen, and the previous fascicule came out in 1996. The elastication of the fascicules has other reasons too. The usual notice of the compilers has for some reason not been printed on the inside front cover, which should have named Ursula Baurmeister, Denise Hillard, and Nicolas Petit. The first two have been à la retraite for some years now, and both have been otherwise engaged in good works on behalf of the BnF in the meantime (see, for example, my review in The Library, VII, 5 (2004), 206–08, on the bibles in Paris). The compilers of Tome I have had the further advantage of the groundwork laid by the first ten volumes of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, then entirely, and still largely, wanting for the letters covered in Tome II, not to mention (they don't) the silent services of the ISTC. With the completion in the interval of the cataloguing of the British Library and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek incunables, the two other very large collections, there is also more to refer to —and more to correct or amplify or dissent from, something CIBN is by no means shy about.

After the aridities of Aristotle and Albertus Magnus and the industrial-strength bibliography of Bartolus, Bernard, the Bible, and Bonaventure, we have now breasted the hill and enter the sunlit uplands inhabited by Cicero and Dante. From here it should be downhill all the way, from Eaux artificielles to that prolific and troublesome author Guillermus Parisiensis. Cicero shows to great advantage here, his 150 editions representing about half of all that survive, and outstripping his holdings at the British Library (146), the Bodleian (140), and the BSB in Munich (135). A good proportion of these are in multiple copies and many of those copies bear witness to the energy of the French in dipping imperial hands into rich collections...