18
these five editions are in English so that much of the value of de Balzac’s
writing, the style and vocabulary rather than the subject- matter is lost.
This is a vast collection, despite the omissions, and an attempt to
catalogue the books under modern classifications requires sections for
Theology, the Sciences
and
Mathematics, Law, Economics (or Political
Science), Geography, Classical Languages
and
Literature, Medicine
and
Pharmacy.
Prose fiction did not exist as a developed literary form but
there has to be a section for quasi-fictional fables and fantasies and
others (though small) for
Drama
and
Poetry.
These major classifications require many sub-sections, often
well-stocked, as with
History,
where books on
Modern Political History
c. 1500-1700
include works on most European states;
Biography
includes most major English sovereigns from Alfred the Great to James
II and many European statesmen; Texts and Diplomatic has collections
of Statutes, reports on debates in Parliament, the main treaties between
European Powers of the 16th and 17th centuries, editions of medieval
chronicles and the Rules and Acts of monastic orders. Similarly
well-stocked for their time are
Warfare, Byzantine, Turkish
and other
Islamic History,
the
Protestant Churches
and the
Counter-Reformation.
The comprehensiveness of such sub-classes is illustrated by the list of
titles on
Tithes
in the Notes below [40-58].
That this huge collection in fact never has been classified is an
interesting feature, as will appear later. First it has to be looked at
complete but with its titles rearranged not in Classes but in chronological
order of publication. When they are placed in cumulative totals—that is,
when Total A is all the books of 1471-1480, Total B is all the books of
1471-1480
plus those of 1481-1490, Total C is 1471-1490 plus
1491-1500
and so on (to 1704)—then a picture is produced of the
distribution by age of the Library’s final accumulated stock.
The result, as shown in Figure 6, is thought-provoking. Even though
the cumulative totals are those of a provisional count [28] and the exact
number of titles which came to Maldon in 1705 will not be known with
certainty until further work on the Catalogue has been completed, the
weight of numbers is already so clearly distributed across the years that it
must be an acceptable