The Heritage of Boleslas Iwinski

In 1911, in support of Paul Otlet’s plan for a universal bibliography, Boleslas Iwinski, a Polish-born economist and labor organizer, estimated the total number of book titles that had been printed since Gutenberg’s day. His totals have been largely forgotten (except by a few scholars like W. Boyd Rayward), but his goals and methods have been accepted and modified over the past century, and are still provocative.