A fourth copy of the title might be used to make a fourth catalogue, of a kind analogous to that of early books in Panzer's Initia Typo graphies.: In this catalogue the title-slips would be arranged in the alphabetical order of the places of printing, and those of the same place of printing would be arranged chronologically. To local anti quaries, or to local inquirers of any sort, this would be a material assistance. It might be seen at once without difficulty what books the Museum contained printed at Norwich, or St. Alban's, or Aberdeen, or Belfast ; or, to take a wider range, at the Cape of Good Hope, or Madras, or Melbourne. By looking at Pesth, or Lisbon, and a few other subdivisions, it might be ascertained with ease what were the latest accessions in Hungarian or Portuguese literature. With Paris and London, under which tho entries would be excessively numerous, the gain would be great. A reader might trace the gradual progress of printing in London from Wynkyn de Worde onwards; might look up what books were issued in the first year of the Reformation, iu that in which Shakspere camp to London, in those of the protectorate of Cromwell, in that of the Revolution ! Macaulay would have found iu a body all the plays, and the ballads, and the nenjuring divinity, and the political pamphlets, that were poured forth in town in 1688 ; and then, turning to the volume of Dublin, all the products of that stormy year in Ireland. There is hardly a literary man who would not have some desire of this kind to gratify, and to many it would present ready to their hand a mass of materials on various historical subjects, which they would otherwise scarcely think of looking for. This kind of information is at present inaccessible, except at the expense of tedious research. That valuable but very imperfect book, Cotton's Typographical Gazetteer,' might be at once corrected with ease in a hundred passages. Such would, it is supposed, be the benefits of this new method of making use of the duplicate title-slips of the Museum. If, instead of four copies of the title-slips, there were twenty (which might be cheaply produced by the aid of printing or lithography), other catalogues might be evolved. There might be lists of all the accessions to the Museum, in the order of their arrival. There might also be catalogues of books arranged according to the languages in which they were written, so that those who only sought English hooks need not turn over page after page of Latin or French titles, and those who sought for German or Russian might at once find what they sought. There might also be special catalogues of particular classes : of English plays, or English novels, or books on vellum, or books with autographs. In short, without any additional trouble as to cataloguing, the mere "shuffling of the cards," or title slips, the mere different arrangement of them by ordinary hands, might produce a variety of catalogues which would secure to every reader a number of different ways of looking for any particular book or class of books lie was in search of.
Were the title-slips thus put in print, kept standing in type, and a catalogue occasionally issued of, for instance, the books added to the Museum which were printed in the years from 1351 to 1860 inclusive, the list thus formed would be of much value. It would be the most copious list of English, Scotch, and Irish books of the period embraced. In the so-called London catalogues much is passed over that is issued in London,—plays and Quakers' books, and Roman Catholic and Sweden borgian and Mormonite literature, reports of charities and societies, catalogues of exhibitions, and numerous other kinds of publications, including of course privately printed books, many of which come to the Museum as presents. In addition to this, there would be a select list of all the principal publications of Europe, from Lisbon to St. Peters burg, and of America, from Montreal to Buenos Ayres. Such a list of about 100,000 volumes published within ten years, would not only be an interesting memorial of the progress of the Museum, but a useful handbook to the lover of bibliography.
The classification of books in a catalogue or in a library is a subject that has often been discussed. To classify in a catalogue is of course an easier task than to classify on shelves ; the titles are all of one size, and may be shifted or shuffled at will, but the volumes are sometimes heavy materials, and hard to move, and are of all sizes, from the 'Bijou Almanack,' to the great Dutch Atlas' in the British Museum, nearly six feet high. When the learned Lambecius, in the 17th century, arranged the books in the Vienna library according to their subjects, irrespective of size, so that a diminutive duodecimo some times stood side by side with an atlas folio, the appearance was so strange, and the quantity of space that was lost was so immense, that the first thing done by his successor Nesselius, was to re-arrange the books according to their sizes. It is often the case in the history of libraries that we find a new librarian carefully reversing all that his predecessor has done, but it does not follow that in all such cases the alteration is an improvement, as it seems to have been in this. The plans; for the classification of catalogues have multiplied to such an extent, that at last a classification of the systems is almost necessary. M. Achard in his Bibliographic' gives an account of several ; the Rev. Mr. Horne in his Introduction to Bibliography' follows him, and increases the list ; and Mr. Edwards in his Memoirs on Libraries,' not only pursues the subject to a still greater extent, but gives a tabular view of thirty-two of the contending systems. Many of these differ only in trifles, and some of them are utterly worthless and beneath discussion. The system which has in its main features been more followed than all the others together, is that which is called the system of the Paris booksellers. On this plan all literature is divided into five sections—Theology, Jurisprudence, Philosophy or the Arts and Sciences, Polite Literature, and History. The division Arts and Sciences is a sort of general receptacle for all which could not find a place in the others : the limits of the remaining four are tolerably well defined, and any'great collection of books must always be divisible into them. Many of the other systems aim at changing the order of precedence of these divisions, but it obviously matters little if Theology be placed before or after History, Literature before or after Jurisprudence. It matters little also if the books on the history of France be placed before or after the books on the history of Spain, provided that in a large library the division of books on these two subjects is consistently made, and the books on each are carefully kept together. The really important differences are in apparently minor matters, on the question for instance which divides Franeke in his catalogue of the Biinau library from most of his compeers. In a large library there will be numerous histories of the ilholera in particular places, in Exeter, in Bologna, in Lisbon, in Linkoping, in Moscow. According to Francke's system, all books of history in which a locality is specified, belong to the history of that locality, and thus a narrative of the cholera at Bologna will be put in the same subdivision with a history of painting at Bologna. According to most other arrangements, all histories of the cholera will form part of the division, " Medicine," in itself a sub division of Arts and Sciences in the system of the Parisian booksellers, and all histories of painting will be classed under the "Fine Arts," another subdivision of Arts and Sciences. The question is a knotty ono to resolve in the arrangement of a library on the shelves : in the arrangement of the entries of a catalogue, it is easiest answered by placing copies of them under several divisions.